December NonRequired Reading List
Contemplify / NRR #85
“He does not always remain bent over his pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
As the Shakers saying goes, “If you want to master a craft, you have to apprentice for free.” Mastery is a outcome of practice. Reading is a pleasure deepened by practice. Combine the two and you get gobbledygook. A ‘master reader’ is an ill-fitting suit for the tongue. A ‘friend of reading’ is suitable. Reading is a relationship that forms and masters you. A paradoxical shaping; an expansion via a whittling away of useless friction.
You begin as strangers, books and you. With any luck you become acquaintances and a friendship blossoms. True friendships hold a mysterious quality, like the smell of incense on worn wood or the color of cheetos adhered to fingers. Not always attractive. The difference between friendships of depth versus standard course acquaintances, is found in the capacity to waste time. Friends that can waste time together slowly exfoliate all the way down to the soul. Acquaintances can not quite wriggle out of their turtle-neck personas and shed down to their bare souls.
Most books remain acquaintances. They come and go. They burn bright for a season and then drift to the backshelf of circumstances and diverted interests. The magnanimous reader thins their library of acquaintances and slips them into little free libraries. They know that one man’s leaky vessel is another’s dreamboat.
When books become friends, they change your story. When a book and I become tight, I invite them to move in. My wife rolls her eyes as I make room for another found, new, or tattered friend. I welcome them home. Books I love, books in waiting, books I reference…I make a space for all of these friends. New favorites are placed next to old ones, and then I let them converse binding to binding. See what mischief they get up to or maybe just let them rest their weary spines. Friends like these talk back, absorb coffee stains, inky notes, old photos, and faded letters. Some of these papery friends are lent to fleshy friends who never return them. So it goes. Who am I to say where a friend should rest their cover page?
I don’t give a good rat damn if people read the books I like. But it is fun to chop it up on why that is and what books they would rather read. You can’t befriend every book, but you can respect their existence. I am still working on that. When I first slapped “NonRequired” onto this reading list I chuckled because all reading on this list is nonrequired, but reading the nonrequired is where harebrained hootenannies of the heart start.
I raise a glass to all who read the NonRequired Reading List and to those who read the nonrequired in their life. Skål!
Contemplify is a basecamp of contemplatives with a one-man shoveling shop behind it. It is both. A basecamp of wily contemplatives seeking to kindle the examined life, and, the work of running a contemplative shop of podcast episodes, practices, and readings born of passion, allurement, and disciplined poking about. I cannot help myself but keep pouring my little life into Contemplify. Check out the ways to support Contemplify by caressing the button above. Becoming a paid subscriber is a kindness and show of support. It both humbles me and keeps the lights on. Some folks want to support just for the sake of supporting Contemplify (raising my glass at the thought of that), but paid subscribers are also automatically invited to the weekly Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Session on Wednesday mornings. Good, clean, unglamorous contemplative fun.
December NonRequired Reading List
Here is the annual list of Contemplify books that stirred me most in 2023. They are in order by which they first appeared in the monthly Contemplify NonRequired Reading Lists this year. (See past lists here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016)
The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life by Douglas E. Christie (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / JANUARY 2023
There are few living authors like Douglas Christie. Christie is one of those leading the charge of what it means to be a mystical scholar. Christie and the like drop their big, fat academic brains into their mystical hearts, responding with eyes of their hearts to the glares of injustice. They write from an embodied flow to reach an audience of readers seeking the same. I savored The Insurmountable Darkness of Love for months. One page was enough to open the past, present, and future of engaged mystical writing. It would become the point vierge, or access point of divine infusion into raggedy daily life.
Read the full review here. Listen to my two conversations with Christie here and here.
The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation by James Finley (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / APRIL 2023
I was overly giddy, strangely nervous, but above all grateful to be in conversation with Jim about his breathtaking new book, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation. Each page is a thousand pages deep, that is how Jim walks about the world, drawing from the depths and teaching with winsome grace, poetics, and of course, wisdom.
Read the full review here. Listen to my conversation with Jim here.
Gold by Rumi, translated and edited by Haleh Liza Gafori (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / APRIL 2023
Gold should be the next translation of Rumi you buy, spill wine on, fold the pages of, write "that's it!", and copy from onto slick postcards for friends far away from home. Haleh Liza Gafori’s translations sing with the vibrancy and rhythm of Rumi (Gafori is a vocalist too). Gafori’s expert eye of translation comes from a lifetime of chewing and embodying the poetry of Rumi.
Read the full review here. Listen to my conversation with Gafori here.
Sun House by David James Duncan (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / AUGUST 2023
Sun House is my only recommendation for August. Not because of its muscular stature and weighty paper stock, but because it has called forth a devotion from me. I will try to explain by walking around this whyless why. The mystics who have most mesmerized my attention these past few years; Meister Eckhart, Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Eihei Dōgen, make multiple appearances by quote, reference, or inspiration. Chewing on their juicy roots and spitting out my excesses gets me nutritionally balanced. Truly, the deathless presence of these mystics are more present and conversant than most of the yahoos buzzing for my attention. Then you toss in lines from luminary poetic pals, Chris Dombrowski and Teddy Macker, legends like Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield, and James Baldwin, and I am unspun. And I am missing more heavyweights champions of the heart, but better to peel back the pages and take the punches yourself.
David James Duncan breathes life into characters that evolve across pages, terrains, and seasons of life. They become so textured I can reach into my imagination and run my fingers through the thickness of one’s fur, see the glee gap between another’s teeth, and lean in close to hear the whispering rasp of the ocean. The characters in Sun House have been sucked up under my eyelids and sunk in opaque impressions on the wrinkles of my brain. No longer characters, but embedded friends playing etch-a-sketch with my dreams. Their stories bump into each other, exchanging and converging. My laughing heart welcomes the unabashed warmth they give me.
Read the full review here.
What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman by Lerita Coleman Brown (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / SEPTEMBER 2023
Howard Thurman is a contemplative juggernaut of the 20th Century. Thurman’s work was ahead of his time (which is one way of saying that he was ignored by dominant Christian culture), and will offer guidance, and grow in influence as the years pass.
The life lessons of this wise elder and teacher are the through lines of Lerita Coleman Brown’s What Makes You Come Alive. She examines the major moments, residual themes, and callings of Howard Thurman. Along the way Professor Brown invites the reader into her story and how she was introduced to Thurman’s work, and its revolutionary cascading of consciousness into her life. The covert mysticism and theological examination of conscious that Thurman embodied nipped at the heels of Brown’s own discerning call.
Read the full review here. Listen to my conversation with Professor Brown here.
Contemplify Update
The glass that is Season Four is empty. What a gift. As always you can find the complete list of Contemplify episodes here and below are the five most recent episodes of Season Four.
Listen to the Rice, the Rice Will Teach You Everything with Lucien Miller (Season 4, Ep 12)
In Hard Times, In All Times, Eat Sacred Words with Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Season 4, Ep 11)
Kim Haines-Eitzen on Practicing the Cello in the Dark and Sonorous Deserts (Season 4, Ep 10)
Lerita Coleman Brown on Waiting for a Word in the Heart (Season 4, Ep 9)
Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practice Session (September 2023 / Autumn Equinox) (Season 4, Ep 8)
All episodes are available from Contemplify through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get the snazziest podcasts.
Arts & Articles
THANK GOD WE LEFT THE GARDEN by Jeffrey Martin (Bandcamp): This album is my listen of the year. It felt written for contemplatives intent on lyrics unlocking a door inside. (I know this was a repeat from last month, but I still can’t get enough)
PAST LIVES directed by Celine Song (YouTube): This movie aches with end of year musings on changing lanes, exits missed, and contentment in the accelerated age of road rage.
LO-FI & HUSHED (Contemplify): This contemplative practice of poetry, lectio, self-examination, and group reflection rings my bell. Gorgeous yet unglamorous. Subtle ripples in a still pool.
This is us shedding years
skin
layers
progress
tears.
This is us reading
banned
nicked
absorbed
ridiculed
the NonRequired.
Let us practice Beauty
wastefully
in
unshackled
contemplation.
May 2024 be better than unexpected waffles,
Paul
All Bookshop links give a kickback to a local New Mexico bookstore and to Contemplify. What a kindness.