Speaking of culling items, one of the more difficult ones for me…personally, emotionally, existentially…is going through my books.

I have a lot of books. And I could easily have more. I can’t pass a book without having to at least steal a glance.

I read books in two ways: First as entertainment. Typically fiction, though some nonfiction also; think Biography of John Adams or something like that. These books are easier to let go. I might associate them with some specific time or event in life, like where I bought them, or what was going on at the time, but I don’t get particularly attached. They are easier for me to part with. Some of them we like to call “airport books” and are easy give away (and often with relish).

The second kind of books are the ones I read to learn, to grow, to figure things out. These I read with commitment and revisit regularly over the years, and they are much harder to let go. Currently, these roughly break down into writing, language, grammar; environmental history and well-written life and earth science narratives; “nature writing”; well-written and resonant travel writing; hard-to-find or obscure but indispensable history books about San Miguel or Mexico. Basically, books that I continue to draw and learn from, that are part of how I think, what I reference, how I process the world. These are difficult to let go of because it’s like letting go of a part of myself.

As I go through them, I thought I’d highlight some that have mattered as I have time (and interest).

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One book I really connected with is Lavinia Spalding’s Writing Away.

It’s always hard for me to say why I connect with a particular book and not others. I don’t think I’m unique in this. I always wanted to be a travel writer. Or I should say, I always wanted to travel and I always wanted to write. When I was a kid, I used to devour the “International” section of the Washington Post, imagining myself in those distant countries, writing in those “faraway” lands. I read National Geographic and always imagined what it must be like to be one of the writers or photographers going on assignments to all those locations, meeting all those interesting people, experiencing all those adventures around the world. I always read Outside magazine back in the 1980s back when it was good, publishing cutting-edge, thought-provoking, sometimes radical stories of adventure and travel. I’m thinking of writers like Tim Cahill or David Quammen, among others.

So when we left Portland, back in 2014, I thought now is the time. I can finally do that kind of writing.

What I didn’t expect was just how difficult that would turn out to be. The inertia of the previous 20 years of adult life—career changes, adulthood, parenthood—didn’t just stop. And the adjustment to and keeping up with our new chosen life, including being a present homeschooling father on the road, was overwhelming. In hindsight, I should have written about all that. But there’s hindsight for you.

When I found Writing Away, it was the first book that I connected with, offering how to actually accomplish the kind of writing I wanted to do. Some reasons I think it resonated because it started at the beginnin—not with things like pitching articles or building a brand. But with seeing the world and listening to myself and writing that down in my journal. Regularly capturing my experiences raw, unedited, unfiltered. Getting into the habit of writing not for publication, but for presence.

It took me a long time to learn why I liked the book. It was a combination of voice. She uses first person “we” instead of the removed “you” or even worse, the distanced third-person. It was storytelling; the concrete examples; the sometimes intimate, sometime humorous but always astute reflections; and the rich, versatile prompts, among other things.

My copy is filled with underlines, highlights, and margin notes. One I just came across reads:

“But in the beginning, grandiose aspirations can be an obstacle leading to self-criticism, self-loathing, self-sabotage, and eventually utter paralysis of the will to write.”

Remove the “will to write” and this could be said about idealism and idealists in any walk of life. And it definitely applies to me. I have felt and continue to feel every bit of this spiral. Eventually, sometime between arriving in San Miguel and before the pandemic, I just started journaling. Anything and everything or nothing, but no filter, no self-censoring. Just letting it vomit onto the page. For my mental health, it was essential.

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I have many favorite writers: Gretel Ehrlich, Annie Dillard, Tim Cahill, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Mann, John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, Beryl Markham. The list goes on.

Usually very evocative, sometimes lyrical prose. It is hard not to be sucked into the trap of comparing myself to those I admire. But isn’t that a universal trap for many in life?

The brings me to a second favorite book, West with the Night, by Beryl Markham. Some of her stories of adventure on the Kenyan savannah in the early 1900s are powerful. I feel myself there, lost as a child being hunted by a lion. Or learning to fly and her early flights in the pioneering days of aviation. Learning to fly when flight itself was barely understood. In remote Africa. Or taking of on her pioneering transatlantic flight from London, crashing into a marsh in Nova Scotia.

How does one compare to that?

The answer is, I don’t. And I shouldn’t.

It is hard not to compare. And I realize now that she was given a life circumstance; she didn’t choose to grow up in Africa. That was the choice of her father, who had his own issues. And she had many of her own issues. But what she did have was the spirit to learn, grow, adapt, persist, and thrive. And that’s something we can all learn from, wherever and whenever we are.