The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter ~ text and drawings by Margareta Magnusson, 2018, self-help, 8/10
In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage, but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming. She suggests which possessions you can easily get rid of (unworn clothes, unwanted presents, more plates than you’d ever use) and which you might want to keep (photographs, love letters, a few of your children’s art projects).
At 128 pages, this is a quick read, and I love the author's drawings. My favorite is the books flying away (shown above). Books and papers are my biggest problem, so it isn't surprising I marked these two quotes:
"I own too many clothes and too many books and I do not need sixteen plates when there is only room for six around my table" (p. 53).
"I only keep books that I still haven't read or books that I keep returning to" (p. 62).
Old clothes dancing away (page 58)
And then there's this great drawing of old clothes dancing away. I found a video from the Washington Post about Margareta Magnusson, which summarizes her hints on decluttering. It's only 2 minutes and 20 seconds long and well worth it.
"If your family doesn't want your stuff when you're alive, they sure won't want it when you're dead" (from the article).
Okay, this is the day. I'm gonna take a couple of boxes of my books to the used bookstore and donate a stack of old clothing (and dishes, since my table has only three chairs). Fly away to new homes, books! Find yourselves someone new to wear you, clothes!
Yellow Crocus ~ by Laila Ibrahim, 2014, fiction (Virginia). 9.5/10
April 14, 1837
Mattie lay curled around the warm shape of her son when the unwanted messenger knocked. She stayed on her pallet, reluctant to end this precious time, and listened to the sound of quiet snores coming from her grandfather. She gazed at Samuel, pressed her nose close against his soft neck to take in his sweet baby scent. She gently wiped the glistening sweat away from his damp forehead and gave him a tender kiss upon his temple. Another intrusive knock struck the door.
These few lines make me want to know (1) who's knocking on the door while the baby and the grandfather sleep, and (2) what does that person want? Here's the book's summary from Amazon:
Moments after Lisbeth is born, she’s taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come. Though Lisbeth leads a life of privilege, she finds nothing but loneliness in the company of her overwhelmed mother and her distant, slave-owning father. As she grows older, Mattie becomes more like family to Lisbeth than her own kin and the girl’s visits to the slaves’ quarters — and their lively and loving community — bring them closer together than ever. But can two women in such disparate circumstances form a bond like theirs without consequence? This deeply moving tale of unlikely love traces the journey of these very different women as each searches for freedom and dignity.
The top item of my Facebook news feed this morning was Joy Weese Moll's regular feature:
What will we do today to take care of ourselves? What will we do today to change the world?
Today, I will work through some negative feelings. I've been suppressing them, but then I read the first line of Amy Siskind's Weekly List this morning: "Generations from now will mark this week as the moment Americans realized we were losing our country as we have known it." It's probably healthy to go through all five stages of dying right now.
Today, I will walk away from despair toward determination and be part of the 3.5% of the population that is all it takes to sustain resistance to inhumane and oppressive policies.
In the first comments, Joy shared links to explain some of this:
(1) Amy Siskind's Weekly List is new to me. I see from the latest list (Week 84) why I'm feeling so overwhelmed by the news. Siskind compiled the first 52 weeks into a book (The List, published in March 2018):
The shocking first-draft history of the Trump regime, and its clear authoritarian impulses, based on the viral Internet phenom “The Weekly List.” In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's election as president, Amy Siskind, a former Wall Street executive and the founder of The New Agenda, began compiling a list of actions taken by the Trump regime that pose a threat to our democratic norms. Under the headline, she has these words: “Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you'll remember.” Siskind's “Weekly List” now has more than half a million viewers every week.
Compiled in one volume for the first time, The List is a comprehensive accounting of Donald Trump's first year. Beginning with Trump's acceptance of white supremacists the week after the election and concluding a year to the day later, we watch as Trump and his regime chips away at the rights and protections of marginalized communities, of women, of us all, via Twitter storms, unchecked executive action, and shifting rules and standards. The List chronicles not only the scandals that made headlines but just as important, the myriad smaller but still consequential unprecedented acts that otherwise fall through cracks. It is this granular detail that makes this such a powerful and important book. For everyone hoping to #resistTrump, The List is a must-have guide to what we as a country have lost in the wake of Trump's election. #Thisisnotnormal
(3) And then Joy shared a book title: This Is an Uprising by Mark Engler and Paul Engler (2016).
Strategic nonviolent action has reasserted itself as a potent force in shaping public debate and forcing political change. Whether it is an explosive surge of protest calling for racial justice in the United States, a demand for democratic reform in Hong Kong or Mexico, a wave of uprisings against dictatorship in the Middle East, or a tent city on Wall Street that spreads throughout the country, when mass movements erupt onto our television screens, the media portrays them as being as spontaneous and unpredictable. In This is an Uprising, political analysts Mark and Paul Engler uncover the organization and well-planned strategies behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest.
This is an Uprising traces the evolution of civil resistance, providing new insights into the contributions of early experimenters such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., groundbreaking theorists such as Gene Sharp and Frances Fox Piven, and contemporary practitioners who have toppled repressive regimes in countries such as South Africa, Serbia, and Egypt. Drawing from discussions with activists now working to defend human rights, challenge corporate corruption, and combat climate change, the Englers show how people with few resources and little influence in conventional politics can nevertheless engineer momentous upheavals.
Although it continues to prove its importance in political life, the strategic use of nonviolent action is poorly understood. Nonviolence is usually studied as a philosophy or moral code, rather than as a method of political conflict, disruption, and escalation. This is an Uprising corrects this oversight. It argues that if we are always taken by surprise by dramatic outbreaks of revolt, and if we decline to incorporate them into our view of how societies progress, then we pass up the chance to fully grasp a critical phenomenon—and to harness its power to create lasting change.
I can't read every book I want to read, but (having discovered that Amy Suskind's first 52 weekly lists have been published (in March 2018), I rushed to put it on reserve at my library. There are two in the system, and one is checked out. I'm first in line for the other copy, which happens to be my own library branch. Since it's labeled NEW, I'll be the first person to read that copy. In the meantime, I'll start reading her weekly lists.
Now I feel better! As I commented on Joy's Facebook post:
Thank you, Joy. I needed this right now, as I'm beginning to lose hope. I'll also work on that despair today, in part by blogging about it, using what you've shared here. I want to be among those toppling our dictator, so I've added Amy Siskind's Weekly List to my reading (I have a lot to read over the 84 weeks she's posted to date). My library has a new copy of her book of the first 52 Weekly Lists, so I put it on reserve. Just seeing something positive I can do today to get me out of this funk has already made me feel better.
The Lightkeeper's Daughters ~ by Jean E. Pendziwol, 2017, fiction (Canada)
Though her mind is still sharp, Elizabeth's eyes have failed. No longer able to linger over her beloved books or gaze at the paintings that move her spirit, she fills the void with music and memories of her family — a past that suddenly becomes all too present when her late father's journals are found amid the ruins of an old shipwreck. With the help of Morgan, a delinquent teenage performing community service, Elizabeth goes through the diaries, a journey through time that brings the two women closer together. Entry by entry, these unlikely friends are drawn deep into a world far removed from their own — to Porphyry Island on Lake Superior, where Elizabeth’s father manned the lighthouse seventy years before. As the words on these musty pages come alive, Elizabeth and Morgan begin to realize that their fates are connected to the isolated island in ways they never dreamed. While the discovery of Morgan's connection sheds light onto her own family mysteries, the faded pages of the journals hold more questions than answers for Elizabeth, and threaten the very core of who she is.
I discovered this book on Sue's Book by Book blog, googled the book, and decided to put it on reserve at my library. She wrote:
"On audio, I finished listening to The Lightkeeper's Daughter by Jean E. Pendziwol, an intriguing novel that reminded me a bit of The Orphan Train, with its mix of past and present. A modern teen is sentenced to community service at a retirement home and gets to know one of the residents, who is wondering about secrets from her own childhood spent on a remote island where her father was the lighthouse keeper. It was excellent, with warmth and emotion but also plenty of surprises!"
The Overstory ~ by Richard Powers, 2018, fiction
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers — each summoned in different ways by trees — are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."
I've been on the library's reserve list for many weeks waiting to read this one. In the meantime, I found an article about it: The Novel That Asks 'What Went Wrong With Mankind?' (It was entitled "Rhapsody in Green" in the June 2018 print edition of The Atlantic.)
The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth ~ by Michio Kaku, 2018, science
Formerly the domain of fiction, moving human civilization to the stars is increasingly becoming a scientific possibility — and a necessity. Whether in the near future due to climate change and the depletion of finite resources, or in the distant future due to catastrophic cosmological events, we must face the reality that humans will one day need to leave planet Earth to survive as a species. World-renowned physicist and futurist Michio Kaku explores in detail the process by which humanity may gradually move away from the planet and develop a sustainable civilization in outer space. He reveals how cutting-edge developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology may allow us to terraform and build habitable cities on Mars. He then takes us beyond the solar system to nearby stars, which may soon be reached by nanoships traveling on laser beams at near the speed of light. Finally, he takes us beyond our galaxy, and even beyond our universe, to the possibility of immortality, showing us how humans may someday be able to leave our bodies entirely and laser port to new havens in space.
Interesting that this book I recently put on reserve arrives at the same time as The Overstory, but this one is nonfiction. And both are about humanity's impending future. I've also read Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible and rated it 9 of 10, so I look forward to reading this one, even though it looks daunting.
Home to Harmony ~ by Philip Gulley, 2002, fiction
In this inaugural volume in the Harmony series, Philip Gulley draws us into the charming world of minister Sam Gardner in his first year back in his hometown, capturing the essence of small-town life with humor and wisdom.
When I got home with this book, I pulled Gulley's Front Porch Tales (1997) off my shelf and discovered an article I'd printed out and folded inside the book: "Beyond Belief" (March 31, 2015) from Indianapolis Monthly.
Clawdia watched this whole video, and then watched most of it again. She has NEVER paid any attention to anything on my computer screen. So I decided to buy this toy for her. I like that it has two tracks for the balls. From what Clawdia wrote yesterday, my cat apparently likes the catnip wafting into the air. If this video quits, view it on YouTube.
Why does Bonnie think Caturday is the day after Friday? Doesn't she know EVERY day is Caturday? I didn't realize it's the day after Friday until she left to go to lunch with someone (probably our friend Donna), and I was able to get online.
When the food-giver is away, the cat will play ... on the computer. She gave me a thing to play with, like the cat is playing with in this picture, and it has catnip in the middle. Oh, the catnip made me roll on my back and purr. Okay, I pushed the balls this way and that way for awhile, because I could smell the catnip even better. But I can't reach the catnip in the middle. I know because I tried to lick it ... and touch it. If I can't have the catnip, I'd rather play on the computer.
Psalm 69:34 (CEB*)~ "Let heaven and earth praise God,
the oceans too, and all that moves within them."
This blogger thinks of the places in the ocean
"where the garbage gathers.
Swirling islands of plastic bags and water bottles
and things we have thrown away."
What an image to ponder today! I've seen photos like this one (found here), and I am appalled at what we are doing to our planet. We don't have an alternate, you know. We'd better take care of this one.
Since this book is about Tamsen escaping from the life her stepfather forced upon her, we need her first chapter as well as the one about the frontiersman who helps her escape, which comes first. (I described the book when I bought it last week.) The blue dress on the cover? She's wearing it in her first scene, but I'm pretty sure it won't recur in most of the story. Two beginnings:
Western North Carolina
September 1787
To Jesse Bird's reckoning, any man charged with driving forty head of Overmountain cattle to market best have three things in his possession ― a primed rifle, a steady horse, and a heap of staying power.
Morganton, North Carolina
Tamsen Littlejohn peered through rippled window glass at the rutted street beyond. "I suppose this is entirely that painter's fault," she murmured and hoped her mother didn't hear the dread behind the words.
I was ready for some fiction when I started this book last night. I've been reading lots of nonfiction, and it was nice to fall into a story for a change.
