Healing Up After the Election with Beacon Comfort Reads
November 20, 2024
It’s going to be another four years of accelerated survival mode. The results of the election greenlit the sequel of the orange demagogue franchise we didn’t want. And now we need to brace ourselves for it. However, the frustration, the anger, and the grief from the spoils of November 5 are still raw. As such, some recuperation is in order.
Facing the sequel can wait. Let’s put that on hold, take a breath, and pore over this handful of Beacon titles. If we’re going to spend the next four years in accelerated survival mode, we’ll heal up with all the self-care, inner peace, and restorative comfort we can get before Inauguration Day. And we’ll get that from these titles.
See you on the flipside of recovery.
Self-Care Starts Now
Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & the Meaning of Life
“[A] human being is a meaning-oriented being, and if he succeeds in finding meaning on his search, then he will be happy. But please note, only then. For if he pursues happiness, to the same degree that he does so, he simply cannot become happy, because he would have no reason to be happy.”
—Viktor E. Frankl
Living While Black: Using Joy, Beauty, and Connection to Heal Racial Trauma
“Our ancestral heritage recognizes the importance of connection. Resistance must therefore focus on connecting with our body, mind, community, history, and the environment. African-centered conceptualizations of wellness are based on a symbiotic relationship with the world around us, including nature, earth, soil, and our ancestors. It is that mutual relationship that exists between living and nonliving entities that ensures harmony and continuation of the past into the present.”
—Guilaine Kinouani
Man’s Search for Meaning: Gift Edition
“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
—Viktor E. Frankl
Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything
“in our normal spiritual lives, people usually know the extent to which any suffering actually belongs to life. For, let us ask ourselves, honestly and seriously, whether we would want to erase the sad experiences from our past, perhaps from our love lives, whether we would want to miss out on everything that was painful or pain inducing—then we would surely all say no. Somehow we know how much we were able to grow and mature precisely during these joyless periods of our existence.”
—Viktor E. Frankl
Sustaining Inner Peace and Faith through Grief
“Breathing in, bring complete attention to the in-breath. Wherever the breath may be in the body, feel the calm it brings. Just like drinking cool water on a hot day, feel how the breath cools the inner organs of the body. When practicing meditation, if the body is calm, then the mind is calm. Conscious breathing makes the body and mind one.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings
“[A]gape means a recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself. For example, white men often refuse federal aid to education in order to avoid giving the Negro his rights; but because all men are brothers they cannot deny Negro children without harming their own. They end, all efforts to the contrary, by hurting themselves. Why is this? Because men are brothers. If you harm me, you harm yourself. Love, agape, is the only cement that can hold this broken community together.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr., from “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”
“There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is ‘the angel with the flaming sword.’ Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes ‘the angel with the flaming sword’ to be placed upon your altar unless it be a part of ‘the fluid area of your consent.’ This is your crucial link with the Eternal.”
—Howard Thurman
The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation
“In those moments when you are upset or dispersed and find it difficult to practice mindfulness, return to your breath: Taking hold of your breath is itself mindfulness. Your breath is the wondrous method of taking hold of your consciousness. As one religious community says in its rule, ‘One should not lose oneself in mind-dispersion or in one’s surroundings. Learn to practice breathing in order to regain control of body and mind, to practice mindfulness, and to develop concentration and wisdom.’”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Curl Up with a Comfort Read
Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family
“Our kitchen was a place of entertainment, comfort, and healing that often smelled of brown bread rising and berry pies baking, of braising roasts and simmering stews, of gingerbread, and nutmeg and cloves. For the ill or injured or recently bereaved, it was base camp. Our mother made mustard-seed poultices for chest congestion, milk toast for anyone recovering from nausea, and a rich beef marrow broth to help heal broken bones. When we lost a beloved relative or neighbor, Mom would bake a ham or two chicken stews with dumplings shaped like heavenly clouds. One for the grieving family and the other for us. Never a heartache passed without our father saying, ‘Everyone has to eat.’”
—Deborah Joy Corey, from “All the World Loves a Good Cook,” edited by Deborah Joy Cory and Debra Spark
“There had been a bathhouse in town. It had been owned by a tall, lean man who, and this was the general impression, bathed too much. Seemed to make sense to me. The man had himself three tubs and all the soap anybody could want. I guess he just smelled too nice or something because he made everybody nervous. Why, he’d come into the general store or the stagecoach office and folks would just shut up and breathe. He smelled so good in fact that he kinda quieted down everybody else’s stink. He was around for about a year until Wide Clyde shot him dead.”
—Percival Everett
“But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face
of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself
even in those feathery fields?”
—Mary Oliver, from “Lilies”
Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
“All day the flicker
has anticipated
the lust of the season, by
shouting. He scouts up
tree after tree and at
a certain place begins
to cry out. My, in his
black-freckled vest, bay body with
red trim and sudden chrome
underwings, he is
dapper. Of course somebody
listening nearby
hears him; she answers
with a sound like hysterical
laughter, and rushes out into
the field where he is poised
on an old phone pole, his head
swinging, his wings
opening and shutting in a kind of
butterfly stroke.”
—Mary Oliver, from “Spring”
“James and I had been working at the difficult edges of love. I lived alone on Dartmouth Street in the Back Bay section of Boston, in a small shabby apartment with high ceilings and stained glass windows in the bathroom door. At night, I sat in the big bay window at the back of the house with the lights low, watching rats take over the nighttime alley. A man up a story across the alley stood each night at his window, watching me through binoculars. I stared back. Sometimes I filed my toenails for him, or read poetry out loud. I returned each night after work to the rats, my books, the man who watched me. I was very lonely. James and I had argued and had barely seen each other for several months. But when he came one snowy December night and asked me if I wanted to go to India with him, I immediately said yes. Maybe on the road to a faraway country I would find release from the griefs of my past.”
—Meredith Hall
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.