“I want a life measured
in the places I haven’t gone,
short sleeps on long flights,
strange voices teaching me
new words to describe
the dawn.”

— Tyler Knott Gregson, Wildly Into the Dark

Tyler Knott Gregson is beloved for his typewriter series of poems scattered meaningfully upon found scraps of paper, makeshift canvases for simple, profound pieces of introspection.  He writes of courage and love and wanderlust, and the picture he paints with his words becomes a representation of a life lived wholly, fearless of the dark places and brilliant in the light.  Wildly into the Dark is his third outing in the publishing world – Gregson regularly shares his work on social media – and within the latest collection he goes on a journey into territory deeper still, sharing poetry and poetic wonderings as well as what the book’s subtitle charmingly calls, “rattlings of a curious mind.”

“There are no wrong answers here, no rules beyond this: be kind to everyone and everything, and give yourself away.”

— Tyler Knott Gregson, Wildly Into the Dark

Gregson is a master of romantic language in the traditional sense; he writes beautifully of nature, experience, truth, and vulnerability.  While his subject ranges from love to philosophy with dips too into the political realm, all of his poems maintain a lyricism and whimsy that makes the reader feel as though a journey through the book is an open-hearted conversation with the author himself.  He writes regularly on the insightful depths of our relationships, from the vulnerability and peace of intimacy to the burden of our imperfect struggles, but there are in particular many moments in this collection where the narrative of his poems becomes more subjective; a piece addressing missed opportunities could become an apology to oneself; uplifting words to a lover can become a love letter to spirit, a shift to a conversation with one’s own courageous nature.  In this and many other ways, Wildly into the Dark harbors secret compartments for readers to discover hidden messages left by their own curious, wandering hearts.

“Poetry is taking an ache and making it sing,” Gregson writes in one piece, and the lines are true for every poem within the book.  A gift of compassion and comfort to his readers, the poems in Wildly into the Darkencourage the reader to persevere and to thrive.  One gets the sense that through his poems Gregson is wishing for his listener the courage to trust love, choose love, and know love in the same way that the beauty of the world has inspired him to live.

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When writer Belinda Pollard acquired her spunky Australian Terrier in May of 1998, she had no idea in what ways the furry little hurricane would change her life - and herself.  In Dogged Optimism: Lessons in Joy from a Disaster Prone Dog, Pollard compiles the story of her adventure with bright-eyed, ever-inquisitive Killarney, and in her quietly humorous, heartfelt way she fills the pages of the memoir with the meaningful essence of dog ownership.  Through sixteen "lessons" Killarney teaches Belinda how to live fiercely and freely, while she, a natural-born worrier, warily follows Killarney's lead into the sometimes frightening joys of life.  The result is a heartwarming tribute to woman's best friend and an engaging examination of how growth can find its way to us in the most unexpected ways.

Over the course of life with the spirited Killarney, her dearly beloved "Puddly", Belinda faces challenges in work and in life as she wrestles with her career in publishing and her dreams of writing a novel.  Along the way, with one eye ever watchful on Killarney should anything treacherous arise in her Brisbane yard to disturb or harm her dog, Belinda suffers personal loss, survives heartbreak, overcomes fears, travels for work and pleasure, and finally brings her novel, Poison Bay, into the world.  The journey is frequently punctuated by emergency trips to the vet, late-night toad-hunting excursions, and the painstaking devotion of caring for an aging dog.  From puppyhood to her golden years, Killarney's colorful spirit inspires the author to live her fullest life - to "grab life by the scruff of the neck and shake it" in true Killarney fashion.

Pollard's love of dogs is immediately evident in her writing as she spins numerous stories with the wide-eyed wonderment and frazzled nerves of a new dog owner alongside the perpetual adoration with which we view our pets.  Not just a heartwarming biography of a special dog's happy life, Dogged Optimism also finds itself effective as a memoir on personal growth, the kind which dog ownership thrusts upon us unsuspecting, harried, utterly gratified humans. While thoroughly poignant and constantly empathetic, Dogged Optimism also avoids becoming an full-on tearjerker, which is rather refreshing in the realm of four-legged nonfiction.  Instead, Pollard devotes her every ounce of love and enthusiasm into this charming account of unexpected joy.  Through her compassionate narrative Pollard successfully introduces her readers to a most delightful little dog and instills in them the sense of loyalty, fulfillment, and purity of happiness as only our dogs can teach us.  Dogged Optimism is a treasure for anyone who has ever loved a dog.

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"This is the only life I have and I never step out of itexcept to follow a character down the alleys of a novel or when love makes me want to remove my clothes and sail classical records off a cliff." from One Life to Live by Billy Collins (Questions About Angels)

Billy Collins is a New York-born, California-educated poet, and his work combines the best of both coasts. Distinctly American in their narrative style, Collins’s poems evoke wit, wonder, and whimsy from the simplistic. In his way of lyrically illuminating the magical of the everyday, Collins teaches his reader how to reach back and grasp the open-hearted experience of youth, and how to search for it in small moments of our disillusioned grown-up lives. His fourth collection, Questions About Angels, was first published in 1991, and in the twenty-plus years since it first became available, the collection has lost neither its power of observation, its relevancy, nor its ability to charm a new generation.

"It is raining so hard and the Jazz on the radio is playing so loud, you almost feel like surrendering to the wish that somebody up there actually likes you or at least was keeping an eye on your solitude." from Putti in the Night by Billy Collins (Questions About Angels)

Like his contemporary, Mary Oliver, Collins likes to skirt the rules with nary a sideglance. He cheekily embarks on his own experience of the poetic art, utilizing the form to explore themes of nature, religion, youthfulness, imagination, and life. In his efforts he creates poems like First Reader, which spins a charming image of the commonplace into something necessary and profound, while poems like Purity and Cliché energetically use writing as a theme.

Collins teaches us to look at life with this same cheerful, mischievous curiosity. As the children in First Reader we are "forgetting how to look, learning how to read" and perhaps here is Collins’s best advice, not only on reading but also on life. In poems like The Hunt Collins is at his most playful as he conjures a whimsical image of Noah Webster and cohorts scouring the countryside for a new word ("It is a small noun about the size of a mouse,/ one that will seldom be used by anyone"). Other poems, such as Reading Myself to Sleep and Forgetfulness are warm – even empathetic – odes to books, a subject Collins writes about beautifully.

The titular poem begins the second part of the collection, in which Collins shares the only poems in the book that hint at the more spiritual leanings that the title poem suggests. Questions About Angels asks the staggering question: "If an angel delivered the mail would he arrive/ in a blind rush of wings or would he just assume / the appearance of the regular mailman and / whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?" Such are the gentle reminders from Collins to always, always be curious, and to never close ourselves off from wonder.

"Then he makes three circles around himself, flattening his ancient memory of tall grass before dropping his weight with a sigh on the floor." from Dog by Billy Collins (Questions About Angels)

For all his delightful phrasing, Collins is best enjoyed for his gift as a storyteller, whether writing about the First Geniuses of the prehistoric era or the observations of the moon over winter trees on a night drive, or instructing some future painter on how to go about his portrait (it is presumed, posthumously). Collins has a true and vivacious talent for conjuring the most intricate and enchanting details with the language of the everyday.

With the last two parts of the collection – especially the final – Collins turns a little more fully inward, and his work becomes a little more vulnerable in places, piercing and revealing. Writing about love, especially, the jovial energy of his other work quietly fades and his lyricism touches the reader’s heart. This is especially true for poems like Night Sand with its imagery of the subject healing himself beneath his shell armor like an armadillo after a love's fatal blow, "ready to burrow deep or curl himself into a ball / which will shelter his soft head / soft feet / and tail from the heavy rhythmic blows." Even poems like Metamorphosis take on a particularly profound air as the narrator longs for Kafka to write him "into something new".

"Ah, to awaken as the NYPL. I would pass the days observing old men in raincoats as they mounted the ponderous steps between the lions, carrying wild and scribbled notes inside their pockets. I would stare over Fifth Avenue with a perfectly straight face." from Metamorphosis by Billy Collins (Questions About Angels)

Perhaps my favorite from the collection is the one simply titled Wolf, which begins with the perfectly natural lines, "A wolf is reading a book of fairy tales. / The moon hangs over the forest, a lamp." The reader is so captivated by Collins's fantastical idea that there's no room to predict that the poem will end with the revelation that we've met this particular wolf before; it's a magical example of the curiosity that's so unique to Collins: a method of weaving a few commonplace words into something that will wake us up, that will allow us to shed the layers of our years and finally be old enough to believe in magic once again. Here is a poet so steeped in the wisdom of classicism but especially powerful for his childlike awareness. His gift to readers is a collection entirely accessible to newer poetry enthusiasts and lifelong fans alike; it’s the experience we hoped as children that books and poetry and fairy tales would be.

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“It was never really about eating pizza in Italy or meditating in India or falling in love in Bali. It wasn’t about travel or spirituality or divorce. No, Eat Pray Love was about what happens when one human being realizes that her life doesn’t have to look like this anymore...”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It (Introduction)

Ten years after its publication, Eat Pray Love remains one of the great sensations of the 21st century. Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster memoir of feeding her life’s hunger and unraveling the complex distance between fear and soul is a book that captivated readers worldwide and inspired a legion of fans. Each of us who opened the book were invited to join Liz in her quest for fullness as she sought to better understand the rhythm of her own soul.

We journeyed with her from a debilitating heartbreak to an overseas adventure that was filled with wit, sorrow, and compassion. In Italy, we found the pleasures of life – that perfect pizza that was worth a trip across Napoli’s most lethal intersection – even as we cried with Liz on the bathroom floor, mourning the loss of what was safe even though it didn’t serve us. In India, we met the unforgettable Richard from Texas and learned the hard-won lesson of valuing our unique experience. We wrestled with stillness and with our fears of what might lie on the other side of silence. We braved the malevolent ocean of all the things we didn’t know, and we came out weatherworn, but having glimpsed peace, as in Liz’s experience of transcendence in meditation. And in Indonesia, we reconnected with our passion under the strangely wonderful and unpredictable guidance of medicine man Ketut. We met Wayan, a colorful source of friendship, and her inspiring daughter Tutti; and we met Felipe, the unlikely Brazilian soul mate (whom we all probably imagined to look like Javier Bardem well before the film adaptation came into being).

What makes Liz Gilbert’s public account of her personal journey resonate with such an extremely diverse audience is a puzzle which even Liz herself has given up trying to solve, but she suspects, as I do, that the broad appeal of Eat Pray Love has less to do with eating, praying, and loving and everything to do with a 21st century reintroduction to the concept of self-realization. It's an awakening to the idea that adventure and soul-stirring surprises still wait for us in our increasingly predictable digital age; that we can actually say no to feeling stuck in a life being lived half-heartedly and take the leap of faith to pursue our greatest happiness. In many ways, Eat Pray Love speaks of permission to say yes to ourselves. Yes to our pleasure, our peace, and our passion, not as we’ve been told it should look – marriage, parenthood, career success – but as it is defined by the quiet, beautiful voice of the authentic soul.

My favorite line of Eat, Pray, Love is Liz's advice that "you must participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings." I think the book's greatest appeal is that it offers itself as an invitation to bring that idea into your own way of living - to get creative and dream up how a life full of manifested blessings might look, and then to take the radical action of choosing that life, and choosing to see it even in the moments that inevitably take us to our knees.

In celebration of a decade of inspiration comes Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It, an anthology of forty-seven stories from men and women across the world who have been motivated by Liz’s journey to say yes to their own souls. There are stories of spirituality, loss, hunger, adventure, love, divorce, motherhood, and identity; what connects them is the very indefinable thing that makes Eat Pray Love so special. Each story is the case of a person, feeling lost in some area of their life, finding that their soul is offering them the answer to the question they didn’t know how to ask.

It’s my belief that much of what separates Eat Pray Love from so many other self-discovery memoirs is Liz’s narrative voice, the honesty and vulnerability and humor with which she approaches the story. Her combination of deep insight and luminous hopefulness holds a certain charm for many readers; to see her speak in person is a way of experiencing how her essence is truly a spark of joy meeting compassion. The writers, artists, dreamers, creatives, and magic-makers who shared their stories in Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It are clearly not just students of that wonderful book, but of the special pull in Liz's writing style; each in turn offers their hard-won truth in poignant and colorful prose that in total creates the effect of sitting down to coffee and an intimate conversation with nearly fifty vibrant souls.

For this and many other reasons, reading the widely different experiences of each contributor is a rather extraordinary adventure of its own. The different accounts show how people were motivated not to step directly into the path of Liz’s footprints, but to see their lives in a new perspective under the light of Liz’s story. One woman wrestles with her role as a mother; a man leaves seminary in pursuit of God’s place in his life as a gay man; a woman’s heartbreak leads her to embark on the adventure of a childhood promise. The stories here are about something more fluid than the three categorical topics of Eat Pray Love – they’re about the human hunger for connection to God or to others through the ultimate connection to oneself. And it’s that captivating spirit that makes the stories in Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It so remarkable, even necessary. In many ways, here is food for the soul for anyone who longs for the excitement of connection, of wonder, of hope.

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“The most significant gifts are often the ones most easily overlooked. Small everyday blessings: words, health, muse, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered through our days.”

— SUE MONK KIDD, FIRSTLIGHT

Before becoming an international sensation and household name at the age of fifty-four with the publication of her first novel, Sue Monk Kidd was a writer of personal spiritual nonfiction. And earlier yet, writing was not her primary career at all. A longtime nurse, Kidd began her writing career by surprise when a piece she submitted to a contest was published by Guideposts, an interfaith publication founded in the 1940s. She went on to write for the magazine for twelve more years; thus began a superstar bestseller’s unexpected journey. From there, Kidd went on to write and publish an array of personal nonfiction, from pieces in magazines and eventually three memoirs on spirituality before she would ultimately publish The Secret Life of Bees. Her 2006 book Firstlight gathers together these early writings from her Guideposts years and other publications as well.

“Discovering our personal stories is a spiritual quest. Without such stories we cannot be fully human, for without them we are unable to articulate or even understand our deepest experiences.”

— SUE MONK KIDD, FIRSTLIGHT

When approached with the idea of gathering her early inspirational writings together, Kidd was highly uncertain. “It seemed likely that the writing I’d done in my literary pubescence would possess a natural greenness,” she writes; “less maturity in my voice, technique, style, and language.” She wonders, “Did I want to revisit what seemed like less seasoned times?” But revisiting the creations we put into the world helps us to ground ourselves and disconnect from ego in profound ways. “Opening myself to the creation of this book,” she says, “became an unexpected act of reclamation.”

At the core of this collection is the warmth of compassion and the energetic honesty of the imagination. Although the writings vary in length, some a page or two and others a mere paragraph, they feel as though their selection was done with great consideration and a hope that they would serve to inspire readers in even the smallest of ways. And they do inspire: from the heart-rending journey to acceptance after a routine surgery renders her husband nearly and indefinitely mute to her scare with cancer, and her experience of caring for a cancer patient in her time as a nurse. Kidd writes with touching empathy as she recalls her moments of weakness, how spiritual – even physical – strength came in unexpected ways. She writes about her childhood, her marriage, her travel; all are separated into thirteen themes that range from “awareness” and “compassion” to “severe grace” and “the sacred ordinary”. She chronicles in a voice fit for one friend to another of her desire to be available to others, to be present for her children, and in one particularly remarkable passage she writes with a sort of earnest grace her soul’s longing for spiritual reverence.

“The truth is that there is a ‘monk’ who lives in me, an archetypal monk whom I must honor and allow to be. This monk craves the depths of solitude and silence for creation. She is the part of me that wants to come out in cataphatic celebration – dancing, writing, and painting my spiritual journey. She is also the part of me that wants to enter the apophatic darkness of nothing. I love the monk that lives in me very much.”

— SUE MONK KIDD, FIRSTLIGHT

The writings in this collection are untitled save for the chapter’s themes, giving readers the freedom to read as much or as little as they want in a sitting; allowing their minds to work over, discover, and rediscover the treasures of insight tucked into Kidd’s accessible and poignant writing style. One of the jewels of this early writing is the chance to see a writer at her most open-hearted. Perhaps never is a writer more actively, willingly vulnerable than in their early years, before they realized they were being vulnerable in the first place. And in Firstlight, Kidd’s vulnerability carries an emotional charge that one finds quite inspirational in itself.

“I am compelled to uncover my own hidden and unconscious notions about whom I will open my heart to and to whom I prefer to keep it shuttered. I discover that while I’m making progress emptying myself and making my availability more mindful, I have a whole secret ledger of restrictions concerning who’s deserving of it. There are some folks, I realize, so idealogically and politically different from me I have no real intention of being available to them. ‘Welcome all,’ Mechtild wrote. ‘All.’””

— SUE MONK KIDD, FIRSTLIGHT

Some of my favorite passages in the book are the author’s stories of what she learned in times when she was in service, whether as a nurse or working in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter. Often she sends the message that when one sets about to be of help, they ultimately find themselves gifted with help they didn’t know they needed. Her availability to others and her openness to learn, to allow new perspectives and insights to touch her, is one of her most admirable qualities. Her gift to her reader is to share some of her incessant wonderment – be it at the world, society, the beautiful sides of love and human nature, or the confounding lucidity of grace. As such, she instructs us all by passing along the way grace has instructed her life, and she does so in a voice of unfaltering compassion.

“Deep availability requires a hospitality that receives people as they are; without necessarily seeking to cure, fix, or repair their problems. When you practice mindful availability, you are simply there with your heart flung open.”

— SUE MONK KIDD, FIRSTLIGHT

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"Deep down in the human spirit there is a reservoir of courage. It’s always available, always waiting to be discovered."

So writes Pema Chodron in the epilogue of her book, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, a collection of wisdom gained from her Buddhist teachers. It is, as Pema is known for producing, an attempt at honoring her beloved instructors, passing along their teachings as a means of healing a beautiful, broken world. Yet it becomes, as her work often does, a uniquely important rendering of timeless peace-based practices into a language the modern-day Westerner will be able to quickly understand.

“We are all a mixture of aggression and loving-kindness, hard-heartedness and tender open-heartedness, small-mindedness and forgiving open mind. We are not a fixed, predictable, static identity that anyone can point to and say, ‘You are always like this. You are always the same.’

Life’s energy is never static. It is as shifting, fluid, changing as the weather. Sometimes we like how we’re feeling, sometimes we don’t. Then we like it again. Then we don’t. Happy and sad, comfortable and uncomfortable alternate continually. This is how it is for everyone.”

— PEMA CHODRON, TAKING THE LEAP

In the book, Pema utilizes various stories - the myth of Ulysses, for example, and the painful ending of her second marriage - to illustrate the emotional ebb and flow of life. She instructs her reader to open their mind and heart to new wisdom drawn from ancient practices, and with little difficulty the reader is able to follow her. Her Western experiences woven into her Eastern beliefs, along with her passionate and earnest championing of the enduring goodness of the world, is just the surface of what makes an unlikely Buddhist nun – an American woman who didn't turn to Buddhism until 37 years and 2 divorces impacted her life – such a powerful, transcendent teacher.

“Buddhism encourages us never to reject what is problematic but rather to become very familiar with it. And so it is here: we are urged to acknowledge shenpa, see it clearly, experience it fully – without acting out or repressing.”

— PEMA CHODRON, TAKING THE LEAP

Pema does some of her most profound teaching as she turns the Buddhist principle of shenpa over her relatable vernacular. She explores the nature of human habit within the context of shenpa, the trigger that so often hooks us onto negative feelings and makes self-destructive behavior a reflexive habit. Where we respond to shenpa with fear, anxiety, blame, anger, and self-desctructive patterns, the Buddhist practice instead encourages adopting an awareness – an open, kind curiosity – toward the things that trigger difficult emotions, and even the emotions themselves. Pema walks the reader through the practices of acknowledging shenpa through sitting meditation, compassionate abiding, and the meditative tonglen.

“When things fall apart and we can’t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when the whole thing is just not working and we don’t know what to do, this is the time when the natural warmth of tenderness, the warmth of empathy and kindness, are just waiting to be uncovered, just waiting to be embraced. This is our chance to come out of our self-protecting bubble and to realize that we are never alone. This is our chance to finally understand that wherever we go, everyone we meet is essentially just like us. Our own suffering, if we turn toward it, can open us to a loving relationship with the world.”

— PEMA CHODRON, TAKING THE LEAP

As is her way, Pema connects these practices to everyday Western life by relating stories of people she has known and met, from criminals on death row to the Dalai Lama. In this, she shines her light onto the connectedness of humanity, illuminating the very sameness which she encourages us to see in each other as a tool for practicing compassion. And compassion for others, she points out, begins with compassion for ourselves. This is epitomized by the beautiful Sanskrit word maitri, which Pema informally translates to mean "unconditional friendliness to oneself".

Often, Pema reinforces the Buddhist belief that good and bad, happy and sad are all made of the same clear, unobstructed energy and space, and that our reaction to them is what creates difficulty and suffering. While we are only human in our patterns of either acting out or repressing, Pema encourages the alternative approach of staying, of leaning into the shenpa and dropping the storyline. The storyline, she explains, is the inner-dialogue we all know well which is encouraging us to act out or repress (which is to say, encouraging either anger or sadness).

“Learning to stay is the basis for connecting with natural warmth; it is the basis for loving ourselves and also for compassion. The more you stay present with yourself, the more you realize what all of us are up against. Just like me, other people feel pain and want it to go away. Just like me, they go about this in a way that only makes matters worse.”

— PEMA CHODRON, TAKING THE LEAP

With their focus on stillness, mindfulness, and letting go, the practices Pema puts forth in this book are a soul-filling glimpse at one of the world’s most beautiful and benevolent spiritual philosophies; and her intelligent, open-hearted rendering of the Buddhist language welcomes anyone to listen, to practice, and to grow. With her simple words on courage at the beginning of the epilogue, Pema summarizes all that’s needed to apply these practices in our lives not just to develop maitri – compassion for ourselves as a means toward compassion for others – but also so that we might contribute, as an enlightened society, to the ultimate survival and beautification of the natural world around us.

“So, we start by making friends with our experience and developing warmth for our good old selves. Slowly, very slowly, gently, very gently, we let the stakes get higher as we touch in on more troubling feelings. This leads to trusting that we have the strength and good-heartedness to live in this precious world, despite its land mines, with dignity and kindness. With this kind of confidence, connecting with others comes more easily, because what is there to fear when we have stayed with ourselves through thick and thin? Other people can provoke anything in us and we don’t need to defend ourselves by striking out or shutting down. Selfless help, helping others without an agenda, is the result of having helped ourselves. We feel loving toward ourselves and therefore we feel loving toward others. Over time all those we used to feel separate from become more and more melted into our heart.”

— PEMA CHODRON, TAKING THE LEAP

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