Books & Articles

You Better Be Lightning

Andrea Gibson

Whether poetry speaks to your soul or it’s never been your jam… Just read this book.
Summary

Andrea Gibson is a messenger from the Divine and her words are evidence of pure love.
This is just one book of several – read them all, as soon as you can.

Hospice Care Needs Saving

Ira Byock, MD

Summary

In this article, Dr. Byock summarizes how hospice care has shifted from it’s non-profit roots to a for-profit, mega-million-dollar industry in our country… At the expense of those who are most in need of care and advocacy during this time in their living journey.

We are all alive. We all will die. It’s our role as a national community supporting each other in this country to advocate and speak out for change… A change to care and support that all of us may one day need in our own journey.

If you would like to know more about this issue, I’ve recently found a study published by CEPR – the Center for Economic and Policy Research – titled “Preying on the Dying: Private Equity Gets Rich in Hospice Care”. Both of these articles shine a bright light on how profit has compromised a beautiful and genuine effort to provide comfort and compassionate care to those who are dying and their people. We have a choice to advocate and make our voices heard to change this vital and necessary care structure back to it’s original intent of compassionate care at end of life.

Choosing Earth

Duane Elgin

What does our home, our Mother, our very existence look like in 50 years?
Summary

This book explores three distinct possibilities… only one of them preferred, all of them painful. It’s a choice. It’s our choice.

I appreciate how the author presents these potential outcomes clearly, honestly and without the malice that I find dominates our current literary choices about what the future just might look like.

Daytripper

Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá

This story about life – the mystery, the beauty, the fact that our next moment is not a certain – is wonderfully told in this medium of words and pictures.
Summary

How would you live your life if you acknowledged that it could end at any moment? You do know it can end at any moment, yes? There’s no guarantee we’ll reach specific milestones… Even if we have come to believe there must be. This story, or should I say these stories, of Brás’s life shows us what it would look like if life ended at different moments – all unexpected, all a surprise.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow

Francis Weller

Summary

Each time I read it, it seems I come away with a new understanding of “the long breath of grief” that we all experience as part of the strong individualism that defines existence in this time.

Francis Weller speaks truth about the place of grief in our lives. He gives voice to our silent knowing that “grief is an act of protest”. He provides a guide that will bring us through the shadowy parts that surround us in our world today, so we can find each other as we walk through the “Long Dark” back to belonging, back to community.

You can find out more about Francis Weller at https://www.francisweller.net

Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

Stephen Jenkinson

Summary

It is a moral, political, and spiritual obligation all people owe their ancestors and their heirs. Die Wise dreams such a dream and plots such an uprising. How we die, how we care for dying people, and how we carry our dead: This work makes our capacity for a village-mindedness – or breaks it.