May Scrapbook

My month in quotes, books, and images

It felt like this May had more cold and rainy days than usual. I spent a lot of time wondering why I felt so tired, bleak, and depressed all the time. The rest of the time I spent reading some (REALLY) good books, knitting a pair of socks, and forcing myself to get outside even when I didn’t feel like it. I survived.

Below is my month in quotes, books, and images.

Here’s to a more seasonable June. What are you reading or pondering these days, my friends?

Books I read this month

• Stephen Muse, When Hearts Become Flame: An Eastern Orthodox Approach to the Dia-Logos of Pastoral Counseling (Rollinsford, NH: 2011). **Still reading**

• Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (Knopf Doubleday, o.p. 1961). **Still reading**

• John Williams, Stoner (New York Review of Books, 2010).

• Susan Grundy, Mad Sisters: A Memoir (Ronsdale Press, 2024).

• Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life (Ecco, 2017).

• Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (HarperOne, 2001).

Scroll down for my fave quotes and photos from this month!

If there’s a way to cut corners or turn an already lazy activity into something even lazier, my dog Felix *will* find it. Featured: resting snout on window sill… while resting.

Faith, Asceciticsm, and Forces within us in When Hearts Become Flame

There are two forces in constant tension within us: consumption and contribution. Left on our own without repentance, without seeking to respond to something greater than our own unchecked appetites, daydreams (whether personal or cultural) and self-calming philosophizing, we are mere consumers; vampires sucking the blood out of life for our own individualistic and privatistic whims, whatever outward form this may take. Struggling against the forces of consumption without repentance, when it does not lead to burnout, merely leads to becoming a zealot…
—Stephen Muse, When Hearts Become Flame

Asceticism rightly understood is the struggle to become free of lesser forces in order to be responsive to the greater force of Grace. Thus, asceticism is part of the conditions freely accepted which provide a context for struggle or inner separation from identifying with suggestions as they arise without discrimination.
—Stephen Muse, When Hearts Become Flame

Helpful reframe? 🙃

Learning, Love, and the Perception of Middle Age in Stoner

One moment was juxtaposted against another, yet isolated from it, and he had the feeling that he was removed from time, watching as it passed before him like a great unevenly turned _diorama_.¹
—John Williams, Stoner

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.
—John Williams, ibid.

A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back.
—John Williams, ibid.

He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. … The question brought with it a sadness, but was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate. …. It came, he believed from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them.
—John Williams, ibid.

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.
—John Williams, ibid.

In his extreme youth, [he] had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age, he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
—John Williams, ibid.

I didn’t get my DSLR camera out much this month, but I did take it to a show for my husband’s band, Wreckless Harbour.

Shock and loss in Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember

Culture shock is brain shock—experiences such as immigration are hard on the plastic brain—Doidge says it ‘unending, brutal work for the adult brain.’
—Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke that Changed My Life

Vonnegut wrote, ‘There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.’ I write, There is nothing intelligent to say about a death.
—Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, ibid.

Grief is a natural part of recovery from any life-changing injury or medical condition. This makes sense—the survivor is mourning lost abilities and lost time and lost friends and lost identity. It also makes sense that the survivor does not take grief into consideration as a part of recovery; after all, shouldn’t one be grateful for simply being alive? For having survived? But no. It did not work this way for me.
—Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, ibid.

It was a cold May! I knit myself some wool neurospicy socks to keep warm.

Hospitality, open spaces, and conspiracy theories in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.” ― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.” ― Kathleen Norris, ibid.

“Blaming others wouldn't do. Only when I began to see the world's ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior.” ― Kathleen Norris, ibid.

“The insight of one fourth-century monk, Evagrius, that in the desert, most of one’s troubles come from distracting ‘thoughts of one’s former life’ that don’t allow us to live in the present, reflects what I regard as the basic principle of desert survival: not only to know where you are but to learn to love what you find there.” ― Kathleen Norris, ibid.

“The fact that one people's frontier is usually another's homeland has been mostly overlooked.” ― Kathleen Norris, ibid.

But don’t rush to tell me all of them just because I shared this.

1. **This quote prompted me down a fascinating rabbit hole trying to figure out what Williams meant by diorama, since the analogy to one moving/passing by or “unevenly turning” didn’t make sense to me (my concept of a diaroma was the small shoe-box ones we’d make in grade school, which was a static scene). Turns out that earlier notions of a diorama could refer to a 19th-century form of entertainment. This “moving panorama” was a special kind of revolving theatre featuring a panorama painting with different elements that appeared to move or shimmer as different lighting was applied. It’s hard to explain or understand from the pictures in that article, so if you’re curious, this is a good mini-documentary about it and this one shows what a visual experience may have been like (it’s not necessary to understand the French).