by Joyce Wycoff
shadows tell stories erased moment by moment never to return
Kindle to Readwise … one of my favorite apps
My kindle reading began about ten years ago, primarily to boost my memory.
I’m a fast reader and a faster forgetter. The ability to highlight and make notes, slowed me down and seemed to help my memory. Also, being able to go back to my online stored notes gave me a way to refresh that memory. However, it wasn’t until I discovered Readwise, that I began to feel like I was actually making progress with remembering what I had been reading.
Every day, Readwise randomly sends me 5 of my own highlights for review. Like flash cards, I can quickly flip through them, read them, like them, delete them, or just move on. There are days when I don’t read them at all and there are days when they are almost uncanny in sending me reminders of what I truly want to remember.
The following thoughts come from what shows up in my inbox every day. They are highlights I made for myself…I hope they inspire you.
I would love to know if you decide to try Readwise for yourself. Hope you have a delightful summer …
Radical Friendship
Kate Johnson
To become a friend is to commit to a path of practice. Friendship is not an identity—it’s an activity.
Friends feed each other, check in on each other, cheer each other up, and let each other be.
We help when help is needed and wanted. We do our very best to protect each other from harm. We support each other in accountability when we fail to live up to our values and agreements. We begin again. Friendship is something we practice not because we should but because we want to. Because it restores our access to our full humanity. Because it makes life beautiful and meaningful and divine.
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
Instead let's ask ourselves like that new mother: What do I feel growing inside me? Let me bring that forth, if I can, for its own sake and not for what it can do for me or how it can advance my standing.
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
Falling Upward
Richard Rohr
Pope John XXIII's motto might be heard here:
“In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.”
The Art of Pilgrimage
Phil Cousineau and Huston Smith
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
Friedrich Nietzsche also remarked, “Never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking.”
All of the answers are within us, but such is our tendency toward forgetting that we sometimes need to venture to a faraway land to tap our own memory.
Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit
David S. Whitley
Not only are the paintings and engravings commonly found far removed from the living areas and refuse dumps of the prehistoric artists, but they also contain occasional images that can only be plausibly reconciled with sacral intent.
Key among these are depictions that are half-human and half-animal: ritual performers, not hunters, by common consent.
Stillness Is the Key
Ryan Holiday
The need to ask questions. The need to study and reflect. The importance of intellectual humility. The power of experiences— most of all failure and mistakes— to open our eyes to truth and understanding.
©
Joyce Wycoff, 2024
Annals of the Former World
John McPhee
The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock. Wells will flow faster during lunar high tides.
Show Your Work!
Austin Kleon
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
I do use some of the same tactics as crowdfunders: I try to be open about my process, connect with my audience, and ask them to support me by buying the things I’m selling.
The Overstory
Richard Powers
No one sees trees.
We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop.
But trees—trees are invisible.
Tips from the Readwise Team:
Readwise doesn’t just feed you back your own highlights, it gives you ideas for making your reading and highlighting more effective. And, these ideas come with your highlights rather than in some long-ago-lost instruction booklet.
Examples:
Noting: We highly recommend taking notes alongside your highlights. After all, the best way to read between the lines is to write between the lines.
Tagging: Tags are a great way to organize your highlights by topic, keyword, or a variety of other use cases. You tag in the Readwise Email by clicking the Tag link underneath each highlight.
Favoriting: If you see a highlight you particularly love and/or you'd like to make easily retrievable, you can "favorite" it. You favorite in the Readwise Email by clicking the Favorite link underneath each highlight.
Delete Notes from Books: By default, your Daily Review will randomly select highlights from all books (and articles) contained in your library. If there’s a book you no longer want to revisit, you can exclude it from future Daily Reviews by selecting Books from the Readwise Dashboard, clicking the down arrow for the book in question, and then sliding the Review Frequency to “Never”.
Discarding: Let's be honest: Many of our highlights are not so good. Maybe we highlighted a fragment because of Kindle's annoying refresh rate. Maybe we highlighted a passage that made sense in the moment, but makes no sense now. Either way, if Readwise resurfaces a highlight that's unlikely to have any future value to you, you should "discard" it. You discard in the Readwise Email by clicking the Discard link underneath each highlight.
Open in context: Many times a highlight resurfaced in Readwise will not be enough. You'll want to return to the highlight in the context of the book or article. You can automatically launch the Kindle app (assuming it's installed) and open the book to the appropriate location by clicking the down arrow in the upper right of each highlight and selecting "Open this book in Kindle".
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
How We Live Is How We Die
Pema Chödrön
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
How we live is how we die.
For me, this is the most fundamental message of the bardo teachings. How we deal with smaller changes now is a sign of how we’ll deal with bigger changes later. How we relate to things falling apart right now foreshadows how we’ll relate to things falling apart when we die.
10% Human Alanna
Collen
The fungi that live on us are often yeasts; more complex than bacteria, but still small, single-celled organisms. The archaea are a group that appear to be similar to bacteria, but they are as different evolutionarily as bacteria are from plants or animals. Together, the microbes living on the human body contain 4.4 million genes – this is the microbiome: the collective genomes of the microbiota. These genes collaborate in running our bodies alongside our 21,000 human genes. By that count, you are just half a percent human.
On the Brink of Everything
Parker J. Palmer
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
What I know for sure is this: we come from mystery and we return to mystery. I know this, too: standing closer to the reality of death awakens my wonder at the many gifts of life.
The Antidote
Oliver Burkeman
‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with much more calm than the one he is headed for.’
If you weren’t traumatised by not having yet been born, it seems logical not to worry about being traumatised by being dead. But of course, Tillinghast pointed out, ‘it’s not very useful, for most people, to point out that a fear is illogical. It doesn’t make it go away.’
Rising Strong Brené Brown
I don’t trust a theologian who dismisses the beauty of science or a scientist who doesn’t believe in the power of mystery.
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
Paths to God
Ram Dass
Once it’s all “us,” it immediately changes the way we deal with other people.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration— how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
The Secret Lives of Color
Kassia
St Clair
Because of its link with light, white has laid deep roots in the human psyche and, like anything divine, can simultaneously inspire awe and instill terror in the human heart.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
© Joyce Wycoff, 2024
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.
Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find— if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Sand Talk
Tyson Yunkaporta
Nothing is created or destroyed; it just moves and changes, and this is the First Law.
Madeline Miller
©
Joyce Wycoff, 2024
The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.
Circe
An Absorbing Errand
Janna Malamud Smith
The love of a practice, the effort of trying to master it, gives us a different portal through which to enter the world and, thus, another way both to see new places and to draw from our innate beings the things that are potentially contained within it.
Into the Magic Shop
James R. Doty
We can study every single mystery of the brain, but its greatest mystery is its ability to transform and change. © Joyce Wycoff, 2024
How to Change Your Mind
Michael Pollan
You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered.
