What Light Touches - Resources
W, Eugene Smith
Photographers of Interest:
Mary Ellen Mark: Photo Stories from NPR
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like a global pandemic, the death of a loved one, a break-up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be unexpected and even lonely.
This moving personal narrative is shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest, retreat, and befriending the darkness. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters, and sailing arctic seas.
Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.
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Audio/Podcasts
OnBeing: How Wintering Replenishes
Katherine May’s Podcast: The Wintering Sessions
Video:
Skylark Bookshop Interviews Katherine May
The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, Rainer Maria Rilke was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of syntax and imagery and in an aesthetic philosophy that strove to reconcile light and dark, beauty and suffering, life and death.
Audio:
Let This Darkness Be A Bell Tower
Emergence Magazine: Be Earth Now
Robert Macfarlane
Audio:
There’s dark matter in the cosmos, and inside us, and hidden beneath our feet. Robert Macfarlane is an explorer and linguist of landscape and his book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, is an odyssey that’s full of surprises — from caves and catacombs under land, under cities, and under forests to the meltwater of Greenland. “Since before we were Homo sapiens,” he writes, “humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and make meaning.” Darkness in the natural world and in human life, he suggests, is a medium of vision — and descent, a movement toward revelation.
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