The chat in my stack.

This Morning, No 60

I started this newsletter on a whim over a year ago and have kept at it. 60 times in a row! That nice round number feels like some kind of milestone. I have no plans on stopping anytime soon. So to celebrate 60, take 60% off This Morning for the next 24 hours! Thank you for reading and allowing me into your inboxes. That real estate is precious and I don’t take it lightly!

My stack follows me from room to room. Averaging around three books and two journals high, it’s my constant companion. From coffee table, to bedside, to my desk, it’s my shadow.

My current stack stands seven layers tall. Five books by two notebooks. This is likely not the most effective way to read. It’s actually a bit chaotic, but it seems to be inevitable. I find that reading multiple books at once inserts you into a conversation between the authors. No matter how disparate the topics may be, I always find a through-line. I’m not necessarily looking for it as I assemble the ever morphing pile. The chats just seem to develop naturally.  Chloe-Cooper Jones, John O’Donohue, and Maggie Smith had lots to say on beauty; who defines it, creates it and why it matters a couple of stacks back. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Ling Ma were all dealing with the potential visions for our  future on earth and our role in care-taking it’s ecology, and what happens when we don’t.  

The stack for the past week or so has been:

-My thin navy journal where I’ve just started recording my dreams

-My white journal where I keep disparate thoughts

-Sheila Heiti, Motherhood

-Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal

-C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

-Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

-Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter

The thoughts that have been orbiting me during this phase of stack are questions of where we want our lives to go, versus where they naturally want to go, versus where the culture wants our lives to go. More broadly, the unknowable trajectory of a life and the varying forces that get you where you’re going (we are all going to the same place :)). I haven’t finished any of these books in this current read-through. I’ve read Blood, Bones and Butter and An Everlasting Meal before, but a minor blessing of a bad memory is that if you put a couple years between you and a book, when you pick it back up, it’s like reading it for the first time. I’m sure the conversation in this stack will shift after having read them all the way through, but currently it’s got me thinking about varying life trajectories and how desperate we all are to know how ours will turn out. To have some certainty in the decisions and choices we make. But also, we all know in some deep way, that knowing isn’t really the point.

For Jung, he was reflecting on his life and work from the vantage point of his mid-eighties. In hindsight, there appears to be a fluidness or inevitability in his experience, but I can imagine living it didn’t feel that way. Heti is questioning motherhood, whether or not to participate in it by having a human child (she has many book babies), and how that will derail her life or give it a newfound depth. Adler basically gives us a manifesto on how enhance the texture of your life through cooking. You may not know how your life will unfold, but you will know what you’re going to have for dinner. Similarly, Moore encourages the reader to tend to the particularities of their lives, to find the soul in the mundane. Through constant tending in that way, the existential questions seem to answer themselves. And for Hamilton, things just didn’t turn out the way she had planned. The subtitle “The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef” says a lot of her experience. Though her young adulthood at times seemed to be in free-fall, her distinct and discerning aesthetic resulted in the creation of one of the most iconic NYC restaurants, Prune (R.I.P.).

When a stack is alive in my mind, I am in it. These authors are the people I’m in conversation with. It also happens, that whatever conversation is occurring in the stack gets mirrored in conversations with friends, heard in podcasts, or reflected back in synchronous moments. Or maybe that’s just my ability to make meaning and connections with everything, or my inability to compartmentalize. It occurs to me, in writing this, that I should start noting down my stacks, because ones they dis-assemble, which is gradual and amorphous, leaving the room one by one, I often forget what we were talking about. Like in the way my dreams slip away from me as I’m waking up.

My dream notebook is a new addition to my stack, and let me tell you…we are weary of it. I am not usually one to remember my dreams, but now that I’m paying attention…the data I am collecting is a little frightening! What is going on down there in my dream state? I’ll keep that mostly to myself, but the stance that the most recent grouping of dreams is having in the context of the chat in the stack, is the fear about losing one’s agency, one’s grip on their life. The fear of your life spiraling to a place you didn’t want or plan on it going and can’t get yourself out of it. A certain helplessness. And also, I dreamed about being on a boat surrounded by flamingos, so that one was okay.

As a balm after an unsettling dream, I turn to Thomas Moore who affirms to me that whatever helplessness I’m feeling couldn’t be further from the truth. That my life is created by me in each little, invisible way that I tend to myself, through caring for my soul and the souls of those around me. And if that feels unbelievable, I turn to Heti, who is deft at weaving earnest questioning of how to live (see her book How Should a Person Be?) with the consciousness of how absurd, funny, ridiculous, and unknowable this whole experience is.

My friends from college and I have this email thread that has been going since we graduated. My beloved Lucy (there are two, friend and sister, this one friend) recently archived it all, an endeavor that she said took her almost six hours. I was asking her what patterns she saw reading over it. For one, she said it was so sweet to see when someone first mentions the seed of a thing that they want to pursue or bring in to their life, for the most part has come to pass and  is now part of that person’s lived experience. Also, she noticed for herself and for others, a lot of the fears or anxieties we had six or seven years ago, are the same. Which doesn’t invalidate them but does clarify that worrying about them hasn’t necessarily solved for them yet, so maybe we should focus our energies somewhere else. Throughout all of the conversations in the stack and with friends in our emails, it makes me curious about the balance between pushing and allowing the unfolding’s of one’s life.

Here's what the stack has to say:

“The soul doesn’t necessarily benefit from long, hard work, or from fairness of any kind. Its effects are achieved more with magic than effort.” -Moore¹

“Your idea about what your life is about, or should be like, occurs even before your life has had a chance to unfold. So much time that hasn’t had the opportunity to present itself, you spend in efforts trying to make the space ahead fill in exactly the way you hope it might….Nobody completely expected it to go the way it went - their life. Nobody is completely happy with the way things turned out for them. But most people manage to find some pleasure in it anyway.” -Heti²

“Care of the soul requires ongoing attention to every aspect of life. Essentially it is a cultivation of ordinary things in such a way that sou is nurtured and fostered.”-Moore³

“Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims, and promoters of a collective sprit whose years are counted in centuries. We can well think all our lives long that we are following our own noses, and may never discover that we are, for the most part, supernumeraries on the stage of world theater. There are factors which, although we do not know them, nevertheless influence our lives, the more so if they are unconscious.” -C.G. Jung⁴

“When I was pregnant with our first son, I succumbed for a brief period to large ponderous reflections about the big stuff: Family. Motherhood. Lineage. Heritage. For a short time, I frequently thought about contacting my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years, but then I never got around to it. And then, very suddenly, my brother Todd died, and ten days later my own son was born and because of the inverted parallel of that, I wrote her a note.” -Hamilton⁵

“Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made – imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn; a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell.” -Adler⁶

Do you have a stack practice? I’d be curious to hear about it!

1. Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) 123.

2. Sheila Heti, Motherhood (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2018) 29,30.

3. Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) 177.

4. C.G.Jung,Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Toronto: Pantheon Books, 1963) 91.

5. Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones and Butter (New York: Random House, 2011) 174.

6. Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011) 3.