We had the pleasure of travelling to Jerusalem this past week to visit my best friend and her husband who make their home there. We settled down to read a menu at their favourite eatery tucked atop a narrow stairway, when I noticed that the menu read backwards to me. As in, what I would consider the back was the front, and the pages flipped forward to the end. It was written right to left.
Peculiarities like this (to my North American menu reading habits) make my toes curl with joy because it’s a gentle voice going: pppssttt you’re not in your own country anymore! Open your ears, eyes and heart and see what you can see.
I would like to end the month of February (or begin the month of March) with a Slow Read Suggestion: Redefining Rich by Shannon Hayes.
This tenuously connects to “reading backwards” as Shannon has written many books before this one, but I “met” her and her delightful writing style by happenstance through this book first.
I consider this a non-fiction slow read because Shannon speaks beautifully and passionately about creating meaningful connection in your life and community, focusing on what matters to you but doesn’t mince words about the hard work and effort. She doesn’t promise get rich schemes (we’re redefining wealth after all) and she stretches her mind beyond their farmgate and applies it to you and me, sitting at our apartment tables.
Shannon is also living one of my dream realities of having a farm, a farm café and of course, a writerly existence. She writes intelligently but informally. Perhaps, we sitting at her favourite place in the woods behind her farmhouse, with our own cup of coffee, and listening to her and her husband chat about the day.
Shannon brings more to the kitchen table than gratitude lists (although that’s good too) but analyzes how she and her husband manage their enterprises, raise their children and relate to their community. It’s a great read and, in my reading backwards fashion, I have her one of her first, initially self-published books Radical Homemakers slowly inching closer and closer to me, via library loans.
Read Radical Homemakers first, if you like, or take a peek at the cover, as you’ll get a glimpse at Shannon’s clever sense of humour that awaits you in any of her books, her blog or on her podcast.
Sew, until next week, I knit.
Kaitlyn
From the travelling camera roll: Jerusalem in their winter
“We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.”
–Anais Nin