biography – Books Can Save A Life

When the ancient forest embraces you

October 9, 2018October 9, 2018 Valorie Grace Hallinan12 Comments

embrace: to hold (someone) closely in one’s arms. From Middle English, encircle, surround, enclose; Old French, embracer, based on Latin ‘in’ ‘arm.’ (English Oxford Living Dictionaries)

Last week I had a writer’s residency in the 16,000-acre H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. West of the Oregon Cascades, the Andrews is the most studied forest in North American and perhaps the world. Much of the forest is old growth, and some of it is ancient – between 500 and 700 years old.

Over 100 research projects are ongoing there, many of them so long-term the original researchers won’t live to see the outcomes. Walking through the forest, you’re liable to encounter a team of scientists digging in the soil to find out what it reveals about decades past. Or a massive Douglas Fir wired with sensors and instruments downloading data 24/7, such as leaf wetness and relative humidity. Listening to the forest canopy breathe may help us respond and adapt to climate change.

A fantastic thing about the Andrews Forest, which is supported by Oregon State University and the US Forest Service, is that the scientists and researchers there value partnerships with the those of us in the humanities. The Long-Term Ecological Reflections Program, co-founded by Kathleen Dean Moore, invites writers, photographers, musicians, artists and philosophers to “reflect on the meaning and significance of the ancient forest ecosystem as the forest – and its relation to human culture – evolves over time.”

Writing, art and music produced by guest artists at the Andrews become part of the Andrews Forest Log, which will be compiled for two hundred years.

Although I didn’t get a chance to do so during my stay, often writers and artists can tag along with scientists as they go about their research. My wish is to return to the Andrews so that I can go out with the spotted owl team – we’ll see.

I shared the beautiful Green House, trimmed in forest timber, with a talented writer (my son’s age!) and all-around beautiful person who has already in her young life drafted a novel and written and directed a play. Georgina and I were lucky that our stay overlapped for a couple of days with a working visit by photographer David Paul Bayles.

We spent an evening with David talking art and life. After you see David’s photos, you’ll never look at trees the same way – and you’ll understand why he refers to his photographs as magical realism. David spends hours in the forest shooting one photograph, followed by many more hours editing in his studio to achieve his singular technique.

“The forest is my cathedral and trees are my teachers,” David said. “I feel most at home and most comforted by them.” Take a look at his Old Growth Dialogue, photos from the Andrews Forest. On his website you can also order his book, Urban Forest: Images of Trees in the Human Landscape.

“One of my meditations is from a guided journey I was led on years ago. I enter a very large tree through the needles near the ground and I course upward through veins and into my own curving, organic gallery space where the walls are always flowing and the art is always changing.” David Paul Bayles

WildernessWarrior

As for books and reading: at Andrews, I finished The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, a biography. I also read Barbara Kingsolver’s newest novel, Unsheltered, which will be published in mid-October. (A friend gave me an Advanced Reader’s Copy.)

I was anticipating synergies between the two books: Teddy Roosevelt fully embraced Darwin’s new theory of evolution, and Kingsolver’s novel tells the story of a 19th century instructor shunned for teaching his young students about Darwin’s theory.

I loved the Roosevelt biography but Unsheltered wasn’t for me.

I chose to read the biography because in my Oregon Master Naturalist class, one of the naturalist teachers literally hugged the volume as she referred to it as her bible. I don’t usually read biographies, especially of US presidents, but this one is fabulous. Author and historian Douglas Brinkley tells the story of Roosevelt’s passion for the natural world and how he set aside millions of acres in perpetuity for the public to enjoy. At 800 pages, it is a reading odyssey, but it’s well worth it if you’re interested in TR as an undeterred trailblazer of US conservation.

In the early 1900s, Roosevelt wrote in a letter that he thought the vast majority of the educated American public had come to accept the theory of evolution. I wonder how that compares with today?

I read all of Barbara Kingsolver’s fiction – I loved The Poisonwood Bible, Flight Behavior, and The Lacuna – but I was disappointed in Unsheltered. The intertwined tales of two 19th century devotees of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and a modern-day family in crisis underwhelmed me.

Kingsolver sometimes uses her characters as mouthpieces for her themes and political beliefs, and she does this whole-heartedly in Unsheltered. The dialogue is preachy and tiresome, especially between the modern-day out-of-work journalist and her professor husband. Granted, the two are intellectuals, but I found their conversations (even in bed!) heavy-handed and unbelievable.

I’m just starting Richard Powers’ latest novel, The Overstory, which has gotten excellent reviews. David Paul Bayles is reading it too, and he told us that the forest depicted in the novel is the HJ Andrews Forest!

I’ve heard this is a complex, multi-layered book. I’ll let you know what I think.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be working on a new “From Where I Stand” audio essay based on my stay at the Andrews Forest.

I don’t want to give away the theme of my essay, but here’s a clue: yesterday, a newly released report warned of a planetary climate crisis as early as 2040.

Oh, but some of us in this country don’t believe in science, do we?

9B84C0F9-1BD2-4F32-86F0-474882F5D1DE — Forest fire

45242B98-16B3-41AD-AFB1-EDEA83A1915E — A nurse log

6494F8F0-3D17-4D60-AA0C-BCF9507DF432 — The small forest treasures we can easily overlook. These are bird’s nest fungi.

The rainy season arrives. Average annual rainfall in the Andrews Forest: over 7 feet.

Many thanks to the H.J. Andrews Forest folks for generously supporting opportunities for science and the humanities to meet and for enabling artists of all kinds to enjoy this special place.

Have you been reading good eco-fiction or nonfiction nature writing? Tell us about it.

Let My People Go Surfing

February 4, 2018February 10, 2018 Valorie Grace Hallinan16 Comments

“Reusing something instead of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity.” Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, an encyclical letter by Pope Francis, 2015

It was great timing: I finished Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman just when Nicholas Kristof published his op-ed column, ” “Is the Business World All About Greed?”

I think this is going to be one of my favorite nonfiction reads of 2018.

Our industrial/product designer son Matt gave us Let My People Go Surfing for Christmas. Written by Yvon Chouinard, rock climber, environmentalist, and founder of Patagonia, as a manual for his employees in 2006, Let My People Go Surfing is immensely popular among lay readers. It’s been translated into many languages and is required reading at many business schools.

Now 80 years old, Yvon revised his book in 2016, with a new preface by Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything.

If the ways of the world have been getting you down, you might want to pick up this book. You don’t have to be in business, or planning to start your own business, or interested in extreme sports to appreciate and enjoy Let My People Go Surfing. You don’t have to be a customer of Patagonia, either. I’ve never bought anything from Patagonia. But I enjoyed Yvon’s story of how he almost accidentally started his company to meet a particular need in a specialized market. He and his friends and first employees ended up doing so in an ethical way, while carving out a business model that challenges our culture of limitless consumption. They were ahead of their time.

The books is an inspiring life story and an eloquent articulation of a business ethic and approach to life we’ll all need to adopt if we and the planet are to survive and flourish.

“My company, Patagonia, Inc., is an experiment. It exists to put into action those recommendations that all the doomsday books on the health of our home planet say we must do immediately to avoid the certain destruction of nature and collapse of our civilization.”

Yvon Chouinard and his friends just wanted to go mountain climbing. They enjoyed reading the transcendental writers – Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir – and they learned from these authors that when you visit the wilderness, it’s best to leave no trace upon leaving.

But they were doing multi-day ascents in places like Yosemite and using “soft” European-made pitons, which were secured in the rock as they climbed and then left behind. Hundreds of pitons were required to complete a climb, and when a climber was finished, the rock walls were littered and defaced.

In 1957, Yvon bought a forge and some equipment and taught himself blacksmithing. He and his father converted an old chicken coop in their Burbank backyard into a blacksmith shop, and Yvon began making climbing hardware for himself and his friends. Yvon developed a stronger piton that could be used over and over again and placed in existing cracks in the rock. When a climber completed a climb using Yvon’s pitons, the rocks left behind were clean.

Yvon worked in his shop in the winter, and spent the rest of the year in Yosemite, Wyoming, Canada, and the Alps climbing (when he wasn’t surfing), while selling his equipment from the back of his car. Things took off from there.

“I’ve been a businessman for almost fifty years. It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or a lawyer. I’ve never respected the profession. It’s business that has to take the majority of the blame for being the enemy of nature, for destroying native cultures, for taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and for poisoning the earth with the effluent from its factories. Yet business can produce food, cure disease, control population, employ people, and generally enrich our lives. And it can do these good things and make a profit without losing its soul. That’s what this book is about.”

Much of Patagonia’s story is told in chapters that focus on the company’s philosophies: Product Design Philosophy, Production Philosophy, Human Resource Philosophy, Environmental Philosophy, etc. The book ends with an eloquent call to action, “Turn Around and Take a Step Forward.”

Here are themes and stories in Let My People Go Surfing I especially enjoyed:

How Patagonia came into its own over many years, forging a distinctive identity and set of values, and successfully cultivating a loyal niche market.
How Patagonia expanded into outdoor clothing and made the extremely difficult transition to using only organic cotton, which entailed searching out suppliers and learning alongside them.
How Patagonia was the first company to formally use the principals of industrial design to make clothing. I’ve learned a little about this from our industrial designer son, who was initially inspired by the simple, elegant design of Apple products. “…the function of an object should determine its design and materials….Function must dictate form….The functionally driven design is usually minimalist…Complexity is often a sure sign that the functional needs have not been solved.”
Patagonia clothes are guaranteed for life. The company offers repair services, publishes free repair guides and videos for customers, and encourages customers to recycle and re-gift used clothing.
Patagonia values personal and family time highly. They have a “Let My People Go Surfing” flextime policy and a world-renowned onsite child care (Great Pacific Child Development Center). New mothers have 16 weeks fully paid and 4 weeks unpaid leave, and new fathers have 12 weeks fully paid leave.
- (I worked in hospital public relations when our boys were very young, and I had two weeks of vacation a year. One of those weeks, a reservation snafu meant we spent seven days cramped in the same condo with two or three other families with babies and young children. I was exhausted when I returned to work. As a mother, I found just 14 days of vacation a year personally unsustainable. I think it isn’t sustainable for people who aren’t parents, too. I hope the rarefied Patagonia work culture becomes more common in the American workplace. If we let go of our relentless focus on productivity and stock value, and if more women were leaders in business, I believe things would be different.)
The first CEO of Patagonia was a woman, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins. Many years ago she left Patagonia and moved to Chile with her husband. This is what they have done with their lives, just published in The New York Times: “Protecting Wilderness As an Act of Democracy.”

Yvon Chouinard is a refreshingly practical, straightforward guy who has lived life to the fullest and wants to get a message out to the world. He fully admits no company is perfect, least of all Patagonia. It hasn’t managed to fully live the values it embraces. He says he’s doubtful we’ll be able to pull out of the mess we’re in. He takes the Buddhist view and seems able to detach himself from the idea that perhaps we humans as a species will run our course and die out. This hasn’t meant, though, that he thinks we should give up trying.

“Despite a near-universal consensus among scientists that we are on the brink of an environmental collapse, our society lacks the will to take action. We’re collectively paralyzed by apathy, inertia, or lack of imagination. Patagonia exists to challenge conventional wisdom and present a new style of responsible business. We believe the accepted model of capitalism that necessitates endless growth and deserves the blame for the destruction of nature must be displaced. Patagonia and its two thousand employees have the means and the will to prove to the rest of the business world that doing the right thing makes for a good and profitable business.”

If there is hope for us, it will be because of leaders and thinkers like Yvon Chouinard who got their start during the Beat and hippie heydays, and even more so because of the millennial leaders and thinkers coming into their own now who are refusing to succumb to apathy, inertia, or lack of imagination.

As Nicholas Kristof says in his op-ed piece, millennials want to work for ethical, socially responsible companies. They want to make a difference in the world. (And, he points out that investment companies like BlackRock are looking to invest in companies aiming to make “a positive contribution to society.”)

We, as customers, have a responsibility, too.

“The Zen master would say if you want to change government, you have to aim at changing corporations, and if you want to change corporations, you first have to change the consumers. Whoa, wait a minute! The consumer? That’s me. You mean I’m the one who has to change?” – Yvon Chouinard

Let my people go snowboarding….I saw this cake in our local grocery story/bakery in Bend, Oregon.

Let my people go mountain climbing….Sometimes you can see two of the Sisters at Mirror Lake in Drake Park, a short walk from our house.

We saw the largest ponderosa pine ever recorded, 8 1/2 feet wide, 28 feet round, in La Pine State Park. I’ve been taking a master naturalist class, and in the East Cascades ecoregion alone, climate change will bring challenges that seem overwhelming, especially given the lack of will to solve our problems Chouinard speaks of. Although, here I’ve seen much enthusiasm for and appreciation of nature. There are many, many people, young and old, volunteering time to restore species and wilderness habitats.

The Invention of Nature

November 16, 2017November 18, 2017 Valorie Grace Hallinan15 Comments

Texas Oil Fields.jpg

“Humboldt talked of ‘mankind’s mischief…which disturbs nature’s order’. There were moments in this life when he was so pessimistic that he painted a bleak future of humankind’s eventual expansion into space, when humans would spread their lethal mix of vice, greed, violence and ignorance across other planets. The human species could turn even those distant stars barren and leave them ‘ravaged’, Humboldt wrote as early as 1801, just as they were already doing with earth….”

“Maybe now is the moment for us and for the environmental movement to reclaim Alexander von Humboldt as our hero.” – The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf

I didn’t have the camera or the skills to do justice to the landscape we drove through late one afternoon and into the evening on our cross-country journey. Mile after mile of drilling, fracking, and water pillaging, as far as the eye could see. We found our way into this surreal place unawares, and emerged a few hours later, shaken and sober.

Flame:Derrick

Living in the Finger Lakes region, I’ve been spoiled: citizens came together to successfully outlaw fracking. Scenes such as these are not unfamiliar to me, though. I grew up in Cleveland and saw heavy industry smokestacks often. But I have never seen anything on this scale before. Hundreds of gas flares marked the landscape as if there were some dire emergency – which I believe there is.

We arrived at our rather desolate, but welcome, motel room and, as timing would have it, that evening I finished reading The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf, about a man who, over 200 years ago, predicted that humans would wreak havoc on the environment.

The Invention of Nature The German scientist and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt has been largely forgotten, even though he was an international “rock star” of his time, and even though many parks, lakes, mountains, towns, and counties in the US are named after him. Andrea Wulf’s biography, published in 2015, has resurrected his legacy and spirit. Her book won the James Wright Award for Nature Writing, the Royal Geographical Society Ness Award, and many others, and it was named a best book of the year by many newspapers and publications.

It’s a wonderful read, especially if you love well written biographies with themes of history, nature, travel, and adventure. Here’s how Humboldt’s story opens:

“They were crawling on hands and knees along a high narrow ridge that was in places only two inches wide. The path, if you could call it that, was layered with sand and loose stones that shifted whenever touched. Down to the left was a steep cliff encrusted with ice that glinted when the sun broke through the thick clouds. The view to the right, with a 1,000-foot drop, wasn’t much better. Here the dark, almost perpendicular walls were covered with rocks that protruded like knife blades.

Alexander Humboldt and his three companions moved in single file, slowly inching forward….It was 23 June 1802, and they were climbing Chimborazo, a beautiful dome-shaped inactive volcano in the Andes that rose to almost 21,000 feet, some 100 miles to the south of Quito in today’s Ecuador.”

As a young man, Humboldt spent five years exploring South America and, later in life, about a year traveling through Siberia. For much of the rest of his years, he conducted research and scientific experiments, lectured, taught, and wrote books about his findings. His books were unlike any seen before, with his discoveries about climate and the natural world. Nearly bankrupting himself, he hired botanical illustrators, naturalists, and researchers to assist him in creating magnificent volumes that were much in demand and translated into many languages.

Humboldt is incredibly important because he concluded that nature was a vast, interconnected global force, and that human impact locally could have ramifications globally.

He had the radical notion that nature did not exist to serve humanity. His work and ideas influenced Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and others. I like that Wulf devotes entire chapters to Darwin, Thoreau, Muir and a few others, so we can see how they carried Humboldt’s ideas forward in understanding nature and climate.

“… [John] Muir experienced the natural world in a new way….he now began to see connections. Everything was important in this grand big tangle of life. There existed no unconnected ‘fragment’, [John] Muir thought. Tiny organisms were as much part of this web as humankind. “Why ought man to value himself as more than an infinitely small unit of the one great unit of creation?’ Muir asked. “The cosmos,’ he said, using Humboldt’s term, would be incomplete without man but also without ‘the smallest transmicroscopic creature.’”

I love this description of Humboldt’s privately sponsored lectures, which women were allowed to attend. (At that time, women could not attend university lectures or meetings of scientific societies.)

“By not charging any entry fee, Humboldt democratized science: his packed audiences ranged from the royal family to coachmen, from students to servants, from scholars to bricklayers – and half of those attending were women.

With his gentle voice Humboldt took his audiences on a journey through the heavens and deep sea, across the earth, up the highest mountains and then back to a tiny fleck of moss on a rock. He talked about poetry and astronomy but also about geology and landscape painting. Meteorology, the history of the earth, volcanoes and the distribution of plants were all part of his lectures. He roamed from fossils to the northern lights, and from magnetism to flora, fauna and the migration of the human race. The lectures were a portrait of a vivid kaleidoscope of correlations that spanned the entire universe.”

Truck

Humboldt wrote prolifically. His most influential books are:

Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (Five Volumes)

Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799 – 1804

Views of Nature

Natural gas tanks

“The connection between knowledge, art and poetry, between science and emotions – the ‘deeply-seated bond’, as Humboldt called it – is more important than ever before. Humboldt was driven by a sense of wonder for the natural world – a sense of wonder that might help us today realize that we will protect only what we love.”

Our reward for making it through the landscape in these pictures was a full moon rising.

Moonrise

Days later in our journey, we passed by Humboldt Toiyabe National Forest in eastern Nevada.

Coming up next, places and images of great beauty and more luscious books, I promise!

Lab Girl

October 11, 2016October 12, 2016 Valorie Grace Hallinan16 Comments

lab-girl “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” – Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant’s yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory.”

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

Lab Girl is an extraordinary memoir, and Hope Jahren is an important new voice who breaks new ground in literary autobiography. We just don’t hear from enough scientists and researchers, and certainly we don’t hear from enough women in science who have struggled and prevailed at making careers in difficult, often male-dominated fields.

Lab Girl is for the lay person who loves plants, trees, and nature, and for the lay person who thinks plants, trees, and nature are boring and who wants to be dazzled, moved, changed, and reconnected with the holiness and mystery of life.

Lab Girl is for women in science and research, and women thinking of careers in science and research. But men in science and research will love the book, too.

Lab Girl is for anyone making a career and building a family in the face of a serious mental illness, and for those who want to better understand people with mental illness.

Lab Girl is for those who care about the environment and climate change, and who want to connect with someone of like mind whose passion and energy are contagious. Because, as Hope says, we won’t have any trees left in six hundred years if we keep on our current path.

Lab Girl is for anyone who has important work to do and wants to be inspired and emboldened by someone not afraid to be different and go her own way.

I have Katie at Doing Dewey to thank for letting me know about this book. I’ve included several passages from the memoir because I couldn’t decide between them. They make me want to read Lab Girl all over again. I’m sure I will, since I’m working on a memoir of my own. For those of you who are memoir writers, this one is both inspiring and a great memoir model.

Women, and men, doing important work in science simply don’t get enough attention in our culture, which is especially saturated by superficial drivel at the moment. Lab Girl is the antidote. When I was a clinical librarian at UR Medicine, I was always impressed and mystified by the grad students and faculty, the women especially, who had lives so different from mine, who spent hours and hours in labs and out in the field researching esoteric topics that had the potential to change lives.

We should know more about them, the important work they are doing, and how they navigate the challenge of carving out rich, fulfilling personal lives as well. There is a deep vein of fascinating life stories in science that appeal to experts and lay people alike, and I hope Lab Girl will inspire many more memoirs of this kind.

The excerpt below is a good example of the organizing metaphor in Lab Girl: the rich and evocative parallels between plant life and human life. Hope alternates between chapters about plant life and her own life, which makes for a satisfying structure:

“Every species on Earth – past or present – from the single-celled microbe to the biggest dinosaur, daisies, trees, people – must accomplish the same five things in order to persist: grow, reproduce, rebuild, store resources, and defend itself….It seemed outrageous to hope that fertility, resources, time, desire, and love could all come together in the right way, and yet most women did eventually walk that path.”

Below are a few more quotes. Read the memoir!

“On some deep level, the realization that I could do good science was accompanied by the knowledge that I had formally and terminally missed my chance to become like any of the women that I had ever known.”

The boldface in the next quote is mine; I think it is an important point:

“A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs.”

“Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly be what you are.”

“I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.”

Have you read Lab Girl? Do you have memoir favorites to recommend?

Braiding Sweetgrass

May 20, 2016February 14, 2020 Valorie Grace Hallinan3 Comments

Braiding Sweetgrass cover

“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair… Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you had forgotten.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

I’ve been working on my first podcast in a nature series, and as part of my research I visited Ganondagan, a cultural center and historic site that was the home of the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. It has an intriguing array of programs, from animal tracking to music to meditation to dance. Last Sunday, I heard Robin Wall Kimmerer speak about her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, which I highly recommend to anyone who cares about nature, the land, and saving the earth.

Robin Wall Kimmerer leads us in a song to save the earth at Ganondagan

I first heard of Robin Kimmerer via Elizabeth Gilbert, who found the inspiration for her book, The Signature of All Things, when she read Gathering Moss by Kimmerer.

I’m about a quarter of the way through Braiding Sweetgrass. I’m loving the poetry of her writing as I take in the simple but profound indigenous wisdom Kimmerer is eager to pass on. It’s wisdom we as a culture have long overlooked and which may save us all, if we pay attention. Braiding Sweetgrass is a book to read slowly and savor.

Robin is a botanist, a professor of environmental biology, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is descended from the Anishinabekwe of the New England region; in the forced Native American migration her people settled in Oklahoma.

There, her grandfather, by law, had to leave the reservation when he was nine years old to attend public school. At that point, their language and most of their indigenous wisdom was lost.

Robin has spent a good part of her adulthood reclaiming both as she also pursues the life of a botanist and university professor.

597px-Making_Sweet_Grass_Medicine

Here Robin expresses what she aimed for in writing Braiding Sweetgrass:

“I offer…a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story – old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.”

I’ve still many pages to go, so I’ll write more once I finish the book. I’ll leave you with this:

“In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us….It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be sold.”

Indigenous Peoples

When Breath Becomes Air

April 8, 2016 Valorie Grace Hallinan25 Comments

When Breath Becomes Air

“There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.

That message is simply:

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.” Paul Kalanithi, in a letter to his daughter. Excerpt from When Breath Becomes Air

My brother passed away from pancreatic cancer last fall, and I didn’t feel quite ready for When Breath Becomes Air, a Stanford neurosurgery resident’s memoir about his cancer diagnosis. Also, in my work as a clinical librarian, I’d spent time supporting and rounding with clinical staff in neurology/neurosurgery. I had a special affection and respect for the brilliant, hard-working residents, who were about the same age as my sons. So to read about the death of a young resident from lung cancer….

But if you are a living, breathing person who likes to read memoir and nonfiction, and if you consider yourself an engaged participant in our death-denying culture, I would say When Breath Becomes Air is required reading.

One of my favorite authors, Ann Patchett, who owns a bookstore that practices the art of making personal recommendations to readers based on their interests, says, “This is one of the handful of books I consider to be a universal donor – I would recommend it to anyone, everyone.”

On publication, When Breath Becomes Air shot to number 1 on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller List. So when I saw Paul Kalanithi’s memoir on our library’s “Most Wanted Book” shelf, I decided to grab it.

Paul Kalanithi set out to be a writer and then switched to medicine and neurosurgery, one of the most challenging and consuming of all clinical disciplines. He believed that a person’s brain determines his identity, which is inseparable from his values and sense of life’s meaning.

Finding meaning was all-important to Kalanithi. During his residency, Paul came to see it was his responsibility to do his best to give his patients the quality of life that would allow them to live according to their most precious values.

We need more doctors who have both the time and desire to get to know and serve their patients in this way, wouldn’t you say?

In his memoir, Kalanithi says the twin pursuits of caring for patients with brain illnesses and writing as a way to explore the meaning of life’s joys and traumas was his perfect calling.

It’s just that he hadn’t planned on doing the writing part until much later in his career. Many months after his diagnosis, when he could no longer work as a neurosurgeon, Paul chose to use his remaining time to write a memoir that, among other things, explores living and dying from the unique perspective of someone who is both a patient and healer.

He and his wife decided to have a child, too. Paul writes of becoming a father with great joy. It reminded me of last summer, when my brother (and our extended family) lived with end-of-life illness, even as we celebrated his daughter’s wedding.

As you can see from the memoir excerpt above, Paul was an extraordinary writer. Medical humanities literature, also known as narrative medicine, written by patients, doctors, nurses, and clinicians, is really coming into its own, and I think When Breath Becomes Air will become a classic.

Paul Kalanithi stands right alongside Anthony Verghese, Danielle Ofri, Sherwin B. Nuland, Tilda Shalof, Theresa Brown, Atul Gawande, Oliver Sachs, and others as one of the best. Really, his memoir is not to be missed.

“The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.” Paul Kalanithi

Below is the trailer for When Breath Becomes Air.

Have you read When Breath Becomes Air, and what did you think? Have you read another medical humanities or health related memoir, novel, or essay that you have especially liked? Please share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments.

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