Whatever is good.

3 good things sustaining me right now.

I could list seven ways I’ve had to fight hard recently to get my needs met in healthcare and in work. It’s made it imperative to find nourishment to sustain me through the struggle.

If you’d like to practically help with one of my important medical fights, you can share this post on IG in which I’ve had to resort to public outcry to try to get my health insurance provider, Cigna, to approve treatment for one of my life-threatening conditions.

kjramseywrites

A post shared by @kjramseywrites

A lot of my treatment has been unstable for months now, which means life has been pretty damn painful. I start each day struggling to move. I am spending large amounts of my limited energy fighting to get treatments approved and coordinating with my doctors to get into a better place physically, precious energy that I’d love to be directing into my work here on Substack and into the publishing process for my next book.

I know I am far from the only one fighting hard to be well in a country that seems bent on leaving the most vulnerable among us behind.

Here are three good things that have been sustaining me these days:

1. Adoring beautiful sentences. (PS: want to join my book club??)

You know I love to read, but I hope you know that I consider literature sustenance. It’s something I hope to cultivate in our community even more in the coming months, starting with an Embodied Book Club (!!) in July for paid subscribers. I’ve never done something like this before, but I believe now more than ever that the strength we need to survive fascism and recreate a society of interdependence is found in our sustained attention toward goodness. Literacy and love for story can sustain us in ways we desperately need.

So, you’re invited to a little Embodied Book Club! In July, we’ll be reading

Jeff Chu 朱天慧

’s gorgeous memoir, Good Soil: The Education of An Accidental Farmhand. Jeff’s book was immensely healing for me spiritually, and next month I plan to write a post or two on why, including some room for conversation in the comment section amongst ourselves. And at the end of July, Jeff will be joining us for a video call! We’ll get to ask him questions and gather in conversation together, and I think it will be lovely. If you’d like to join, all you need to do is 1) buy a copy or borrow a copy of Good Soil, 2) start reading! and 3) join Embodied as a paid subscriber for the next month. (You can cancel afterwards! Though, I do hope this is just the first book club gathering of many to come. 🙌🏼💃🏻)

Good Soil is an accessible memoir that reflects on faith in ways I think will feel inviting to many of you, and I’m excited to create some space for us to dialogue as a community around that.

Now, with that announcement aside…

This past week I read a book with sentences so stunning they made me cry.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey was last year’s Booker Prize Winner, and I can see why. Ooof. The slim novel is set on the International Space Station and roughly follows one day in the life of six astronauts from Japan, the US, Britain, Italy, and Russia. In one day, they orbit the earth 16 times. Sixteen sunrises. Sixteen sunsets. Harvey’s book is a meditation on the illusion of borders and the reality of our interdependence, the beauty of existence, and the small place we hold in an ever-expanding universe. It stoked my sense of amazement at the beauty of this world and the love that connects us.

Here are some of my favorite sentences. Be advised: Orbital is not so much a plot-driven novel as it is a gloriously crafted immersion into observation and contemplation:

“Her country is a dream she remembers once having.”¹

“The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.”²

“Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.”³

“So they sometimes think it would be easier to unwind the heliocentric centuries and go back to the years of a divine and hulking earth around which all things orbited – the sun, the planets, the universe itself. You’d need far more distance from the earth than they have to find it insignificant and small; to really understand its cosmic place. Yet it’s clearly not that kingly earth of old, a God-given clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness.⁴

The other novel I was so captivated by is On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) by Solvej Balle. You might recall that I mentioned it in my last essay here.

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