Lobe den Tag

Rupi Kaur 's book of poems is a book of wisdom, female wisdom. "living is difficult, it is difficult for everybody. and it is at that moment when living feels like crawling through a pin-sized hole, that we must resist the urge of succumbing to bad memories. refuse to bow before bad months or bad years, cause our eyes are starving to feast on this world, there are so many turquoise bodies of water left for us to dive in." It is like the protocol of a bad year, and how to crawl out of it. It contains all manners of female misery, from rape, to a broken heart, to growing up in a society of misogynists, of being an immigrant, of being told by society that you are simply not good enough the way you are. It is a book about racism, female power and motherhood, or daughterhood. It shows the way from darkness, through more darkness, to light. How to empower oneself. The collection is split into five chapters: wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. Just like fl...

The first time, I heard anything about Terry Tempest Williams was many years ago, when I was about to go to New Mexico for a writing workshop with Natalie Goldberg at  Ghost Ranch , Georgia O'Keeffes former home. A little while, before the workshop started, Natalie sent us a list with things to bring and how to prepare ourselves. Among pen & paper, there was also the book " An Unspoken Hunger " by Terry Tempest Williams on that list, and the unambiguous order: READ! I did not understand the book back then, only that it was really good, and that Terry Tempest Williams was a great writer. I could taste the quality and depth of her words. But I guess, somehow, I was too young to fully grasp it. I still had my first very spiritual experiences in nature back during this workshop, walking the O'Keeffe landscape in combination with writing with Natalie and meditating with a zen-nun, brought me insights and joy, peace of mind really in an intensity, I had never exper...

"When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing, wether to kill himself or move to the Jewish Home. He had lived in an apartment with books touching the ceilings, the rugs thick enough to hide dice; then in a room and half with dirt floors; on forest floors, under unconcerned stars; under the floorboards of a Christian who, half a world and three-quarters of a century away, would have a tree planted to commemorate his righteousness; in a hole for so many days his knees would never fully unbend; among Gypsies and partisans and half-decent Poles; in transit, refugee, and displaced persons camps; ...." Here I am is, in short, a book about a marriage in a crisis, the Holocaust and its aftermath to jewish families or what is left of them (some in the US, some in Israel, some wherever, most dead) "German horticulturalists had pruned Isaac's family tree all the way back to the Galacian soil. But with luck and intuition and no help from above, he had ...

"Sister...all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters." I suppose, everyone feels it, this wild side, some more, some less. We have it in us. It connects us with life, with nature, with animals and plants, not just other human beings. In order to live and function in a human society, in our kind of human society, we have to suppress this side more or less completely, in order to not be considered weird, or even sick. Too much feeling, to much sensibility, and you can not share this capitalist, high achievement way of life, in which control is one of the most important assets. For me, before everything else, The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a book about a woman ( and it is not coincidental, that it has to be a woman, since in every society, ancient and modern, women have been and are still considered the ones most connected to life and nature), who basically wants to leave the brutality of human behaviour. She starts by not eating meat anymore. Since this woman...