What I'm Reading: December 2022

The Flowering Wand and Die Wise

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my “What I’m Reading” monthly series where I review the books I read each month. Some of the books I feature will be ones I’ve read on my own, and others will be books I’ve read with this community as a part of the MGSW Book Club. (We just started the January book club, so there is still time to join if you’d like to!)

The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine by Sophie Strand

In a time of monoculture and monomythology, of tree farms and grocery-store tomatoes, it is important to understand that myths that stay the same don’t survive. Or worse, they make sure we won’t survive by reinforcing extractive behavior no longer tailored to our ecosystems. They don’t adapt to changing climate and shifting social conditions. We must understand that storytelling is not a human event. It is a relationship. An ecstatic reciprocity with the Animate Everything, A relationship that is constantly changing and evolving.

I am so grateful for the ideas that Sophie Strand is spreading through the collective ecosphere. Her reinterpretation of myth through the lens of ecology, reciprocity, and collectivism is both refreshing and revolutionary. The ease with which she is able to identify uprooted, harmful mythologies and reroot them within the context of animism and interconnection is undeniably inspiring in a time when inspiration seems increasingly hard to come by.

What Sophie offers via her work is not simply an alternative narrative, but rather, an invitation to engage with mythology on our own terms. As she explains in the introduction of The Flowering Wand, “A single voice cannot hope to encompass the biodiversity of the world’s perspectives and ecosystems, and so the aim of this book is not to be comprehensive but to represent an invitation.” Instead of writing at her readers, Sophie asks instead to be in conversation with us. 

The Flowering Wand takes on the perpetually contentious topic of masculinity. The book is organized into thirty-three short chapters (the book is only 158 pages long), and each chapter is dedicated to reexamining the mythology behind popular “masculine” mythological and religious characters including Dionysus, Jesus, Narcissus, Merlin, and Parsifal. 

My favorite chapter was called “Sleeping Beauty, Sleeping World.” To be honest, Sleeping Beauty was never really my thing as a kid. I was much more of a Lion King kinda gal. Less beauty sleep, more roaring. Having said that, after reading Sophie’s ingenious interpretation of the story, I feel inclined to spend more time with it.

The quest of the prince in Sleeping Beauty is the quest of waking up the world. Sleeping Beauty isn’t just a beautiful princess on silken cushions. Sleeping Beauty is the dry soil. The mites and fungi and invertebrates that enliven our lives without ever being noticed.

My only disappointment after reading this book was that I felt each chapter deserved to be longer. Each of the myths Sophie writes about are so dense, and I would have loved to read more of her insights on each.

Sophie’s next book, The Madonna Secret (set to be released mid-August of this year), is a retelling of the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It also looks like it’s over 600 pages long! I’m looking forward to the opportunity to accompany Sophie’s detail-oriented and beautifully descriptive writing through the stories and characters of such a vast, complex and nuanced mythos, without having to jump to a different story each chapter.

#119 Rerooting our Stories and Rewilding our Mythology with Sophie Strand

Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul by Stephen Jenkinson

The crucible for meaning in your life is how you wrestle with the way things are.

I bought Die Wise on November 6th, 2018. I had never heard of Stephen Jenkinson before, but was extremely moved by an interview with him that I heard on

Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan

, and I ordered his book right away.

In late 2018, after two long and arduous years crawling my way through a particularly brutal post-divorce Saturn return/dark night of the soul, I had come to accept grief as my greatest teacher. I had read and re-read books like The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller and The Smell of Rain on Dust by Martín Prechtel. Die Wise seemed right up my alley, so it’s a wonder why I didn’t get around to reading it until last month. 

#41 Grief, Community, Ritual & The Wild Edge of Sorrow with Francis Weller

#123 Reckoning With Our Disconnection From Grief, Elderhood and Community, Part One with Stephen Jenkinson

Now, after reading Die Wise, I realize that this isn’t a book about grief per se, but rather, about death and dying. Of course there is talk of grief, and of death as a metaphor for all things that inevitably come to an end like relationships, identities, places we call home, etc., but this book isn’t really about either. This is a book about “the death trade,” as Stephen calls it – the industry, mythology and culture that surrounds and defines the practices and values of the modern-day palliative care industry.

Die Wise isn’t a book about the grief of dying, but instead, about the grief of dying (and living) in the specific time and place we happen to find ourselves in.

There are cultures that know that the ways of the world include them and that the ways of the world need them to be able to continue. These cultures know that the essence of being human is the learned capacity to maintain the world, or to care for the world as they are cared for. They understand themselves as needed by the world in order for the world to continue, not as fodder or raw material but as caregivers.

This, of course, is not an understanding we have in our culture.

Our culture is a culture of orphans, disconnected from tradition, from tribe, and from place. We don’t experience death as an expression of caregiving, or as a final offering expressing our gratitude to the land for having furnished us with such an abundant and meaningful life. If we want to find out how our culture experiences death, we needn’t look much further than the language we use to describe it.

Instead of saying death we say end of life, as if death is somehow separate and disconnected from life itself.

When someone dies, we say we lost them, implying that death is an error, or a mistake, or something we need to blame someone for.

The root of the word palliative means “to cloak, to conceal.”

These are just a few insidious examples of how our language and culture perpetuates the idea that death is a mistake and something separate from life, and that the “care” we deserve when we’re dying is the kind that helps us to die painlessly, quickly, and hidden away from view.

It might seem strange, not to mention taboo, to argue for anything other than a quick, painless, and private death, but Stephen Jenkinson delivers this argument masterfully well. Stephen equates our avoidance of death with an avoidance of life. If grief is the twin of love, then our death should be an expression of love, and our life an expression of death. In other words, if we avoid the fullness of death, how fully can we expect to live?

It isn’t a surprise that our culture fears, avoids, and hides from death as much as it does. There is so much trauma and loss for each of us to face, especially when we’ve waited until our death to do so. Stephen argues that in order to die well, we need to support one another in the process of living well, which includes re-learning how to grieve and love.

Grief is an ability as vital to our emotional and spiritual and community life as the skill of love. We may be born with the need for them, maybe even with the longing for them, but we are not born knowing how to do either. They have to be learned, and by some ordinary miracle they are both learned in the same way.

Ultimately I’m grateful to have waited until now to read Die Wise. So much of the book speaks to the importance of engaging in and embracing death communally, so it felt very appropriate to read this book alongside the MGSW community as a part of our book club. The courage and curiosity of this community continues to delight and inspire me!

If you want to tune into our live Zoom discussion of Die Wise, you can do so by watching the recording below.

Also! Our book club members co-created this fantastic death-themed Spotify playlist titled “Death Ditties” and it’s just so good that we decided that it had to be shared far and wide! Enjoy.

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This month for the book club we’re reading Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, And Me by Adrienne Brodeur, and the conversation will be co-hosted by my close friend and Whore Rapport co-host, Erin Ginder-Shaw.

If you want to join us and stay up to date on all the book club happenings, click here.

In addition to Wild Game, I’m also planning to read Trauma Magic by

Clementine Morrigan

, and Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture by Cynthia J. Novack. Let’s see if I can finish all three!

I’m looking forward to sharing my reflections with you in a month’s time, and can’t wait to see some of your faces later this month for our Wild Game group discussion!

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I would love to hear from you too! Leave a comment about what you read this month at the bottom of the post. Let’s share good books with each other! (And maybe also help each other avoid the duds.)