Phosphorescence

When my faraway friend and fellow reader, Louise, recommends a book, I look for the book and read it.

Louise recommended Phosphorescence.

Thank you, Louise.


I think some quotes from this book will serve as a nice review...

A few years back, I was suffering heartbreak so intense I lost my appetite for months, and barely slept. I was skeletal, scattered, shorn of confidence. I called my counselor in tears and said, “I just don't know how I am going to get through this.” He told me that, when he was a young man, he had once said exactly the same thing to a wise mentor of his. This man, an Argentinian, abruptly slapped him and said, “It is now that everything that you have been given in your life matters; this is what you draw on. Your parents, your friends, your work, your books, everything you have ever been told, everything you have ever learned, this is when you use that.” And he was right.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. xvi). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


What has fascinated and sustained me over these past few years has been the notion that we have the ability to find, nurture, and carry our own inner, living light—a light to ward off the darkness. This is not about burning brightly; it's about yielding a more simple phosphorescence—being luminous at temperatures below incandescence, having stored light for later use, quietly glowing without combusting. Staying alive, remaining upright, even when lashed by doubt.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. xviii). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


Every now and then you actually do encounter someone who glows: someone who radiates goodness and seems to effortlessly inhabit a kind of joy, or seems so hungry for experience, so curious and engaged and fascinated with the world outside their head, that they brim with life, or light. These people are simultaneously soothing and magnetic.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. xxiv). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(Note to self: Find more of these people and befriend them, if possible, and, if not, simply watch them and learn from them.)


One of the world's longest studies of adult life, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, followed subjects for eighty years—beginning in 1938—and found that social connection and relationships are the single greatest predictor of health and happiness throughout your life.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 15). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


A 2014 study by researchers at the University of British Columbia found that even interactions with “weak social ties” such as casual acquaintances—like members of a sporting club—were significant.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 15). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


Why then don't we all do more to foster a sense of community?

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 15). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(Why indeed?)


Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, a Christian Indigenous elder from the Nauiyu community of the Daly River in the Northern Territory, ...believes that the greatest gift her people can give to fellow Australians is a respect for silence and alert, calm contemplation. This is called many different names in different Indigenous languages across Australia, but in her Ngangikurungkurr language it is known as dadirri and means, specifically, “inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness.”

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 69). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


I have only just discovered, while writing this, that the bones of women become aerated, filled with bubbles of air, and thinner, as they grow older, just like the hollow bones of birds. Sometimes this makes them frail. But perhaps, also, this lightness of limbs enables flight. It allows us to let go.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 122). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(I must remember this.)


...you must avoid people who would control, criticize, or diminish you, in any way, or are jealous of you or make you feel small, or are drawn to your strength but then suck it dry.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 127). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(Keyword is avoid.)


Michelle Obama so beautifully put it, “When they go low, we go high.”

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 128). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(Love this Michelle Obama quote.)


But it is possible Dass will be remembered most for just one sentence he uttered: “We are all just walking each other home.”

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 135). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(Another great quote.)


...to recognize that even in the madness, the toxicity, the decay and rot of the world, music is made, and played, and danced to.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 180). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


That, as Aslan revealed in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, behind every earthly law is a deeper magic that defies logic: a forgiveness of the unforgivable, a selfless gesture, a moment of grace. That this grace fuels galaxies, that the sun powers the planet and the moon pulls the tides, but the universe is largely unknown, spinning and vast, and that in itself is an ode to curiosity.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 180). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


One of the keys to happiness, it seems, is having a low bar.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 185). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(No expectations.)


Cuttlefish changed my life in quiet ways, while jellyfish changed Lisa-ann's in spectacular ways. Crunching through a plate of liver pâté on toast, she said she had been searching for “ert”—a term she coined, meaning the opposite of inertia—since she was thirteen, and she had only just worked out what it was: purpose. “I don't think it needs to be jellyfish for everybody, but it is for me,” she said in her radio interview. “It's having a purpose. It's finding meaningful employment, it's finding a meaningful hobby that absorbs your fascination to a place where depression just can't get in. It just can't exist when you are in that place. So that's ert. Find something you love.”

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 192). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


...as Oscar Wilde said, “Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground,” and he was right, hard as it is to till.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 202). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


I frowned at the complaints posted on social media when I was recovering—people who had the flu, who were annoyed by politicians or burdened by work, or who were juggling jobs and children. I wanted to scream: “BUT YOU ARE ALIVE! Alive!” Each day should be a glory, especially if you are upright and able to move with ease, without pain.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 206). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


I also know how hard and important it is to do as Wendell Berry said: “Be joyful even though you have considered all the facts.” “Yes, the worst might happen,” my friend Briony said to me when I lapsed into worrying about the future one day, while watching my dog Charlie bounce on a lush green hill pocked with rabbit holes, “but it might not.”

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (pp. 215-216). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


Every minute life begins over again. Amen.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 216). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


...faith and power rarely mix well. Jesus did not come to Earth and tell church leaders to amass large followings, obtain corporate sponsorship and political influence; instead he called those who parroted laws without practicing love vipers and hypocrites. He condemned leaders who were hypocritical and power hungry. He dined with sex workers, not CEOs. As American author Rachel Held Evans put it so well, “The kingdom, Jesus taught...belongs to the poor, the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, and those who hunger and thirst for God. It advances not through power and might, but through missions of mercy, kindness, and humility....The rich don't usually get it, Jesus said, but children always do. This is a kingdom whose savior arrives not on a warhorse, but a donkey.”

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 218). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


God is light, the ultimate source of phosphorescence, the light we can absorb to later emit...

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 219). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


The greatest spiritual practice, she says, is “just showing up,” being present and attentive.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 228). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


Jesus could have hung out in the high-end religious scene of his day, but instead he scoffed at all that, choosing instead to laugh at the powerful, befriend whores, kiss sinners, and eat with all the wrong people. He spent his time with people for whom life was not easy. And there, amid those who were suffering, he was the embodiment of perfect love.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 229). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


When in doubt, reach for experts, as well as those with lived experience, and those who have not been heard; ask whose story and truth is being told; probe the gaps in the evidence; go to original sources; burrow into footnotes; coax the shadows into the light; and perhaps even “follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought,” as Alfred Tennyson tried to do.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 240). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


The deeper you go, Adams told radio host Richard Fidler of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the more you discard: “The trivia of everyday life falls away.”

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 244). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


As American author Robert Fulghum wrote, “If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire—then you've got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy....A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are not the same kind of lump. One should learn the difference.” It's true: We need to resist complaining about experiencing inconvenience. That is what it means to live.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 246). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


I wrote this book in the hope that it might be a salve for the weary, as well as a reminder of the mental rafts we can build to keep ourselves afloat, the scraps of beauty that should comfort us, the practices that might sustain us, especially in times of grief, illness, pain, and darkness. I understand, though, that stillness, kindness, the sea, and ancient trees can hardly be a universal panacea for all the suffering on this planet.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 249). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


How do we endure when suffering becomes unbearable and our obstacles seem monstrous? How do we continue to glow when the lights turn out?—are there, right in front of us, all the time. All we can do, really, is keep placing one foot on the earth, then the other, to seek out ancient paths and forests, certain in the knowledge that others have endured before us. We must love. And we must look outward and upward at all times, caring for others, seeking wonder and stalking awe, every day, to find the magic that will sustain us and fuel the light within—our own phosphorescence. And we must always, always pay attention to the world as we live our one wild and precious life, even when we're floating in the Bardo, about to return to the surface, bursting for air.

Baird, Julia. Phosphorescence (p. 256). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.