The Power of Positive Thoughts

The Power of Positive Thoughts

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 8 seconds

Embracing Tomorrow with JanI have lived one day at a time most of my life, and since Jan died, living one hour at a time for the early part of my grief journey, I woke up not fully rested but very positive.

The arrival of the sandman has always been fleeting at best.

But I have always awakened to positive thoughts, albeit many of late have been dim and difficult to articulate.

Today my morning thoughts were decisive, specific, and effortless to implement.

With days left in the year, my thoughts as I lay in bed focused on what can I do to invest in the charities that mattered to Jan and me.

The short-term focus was on where to make the end-of-the-year donations.

In the long term, I focused on planning to distribute the modest estate Jan created.

Hopefully, these early morning dreams will resonate in the world and assist in repairing the globe.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Grief is a Great Teacher

As I pray every week at Temple Sha'arey Shalom, when we remember those we lost in this passage, one of our readings is: "Grief is a great teacher when it sends us back to serve and bless the living. We learn how to counsel and comfort those who, like ourselves, are bowed with sorrow. We learn when to keep silent in their presence and when a word will assure them of our love and concern."

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The Power of Positive Thoughts
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A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism

Read: February 2019

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A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism

by Carol Berkin

A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor American Colonial and Revolutionary History; Women’s History Professor at Baruch College, focuses on four crises in the first decade. Most historians view these are part of the early partisan debates in America.

Professor Berkin takes a different perspective. She focuses on how the Whiskey Rebellion, the Genet Affair, the XYZ Affair, and the Alien and Sedition Acts helped build nationalism. Despite the partisan divisions, both sides could find solutions that helped America survive its first decade. The failure to resolve anyone of these could have doomed America to failure.

The Federalists – Washington, Hamilton, and Adams – were the leaders of that first decade and managed the successive crisis of sovereignty.

A Sovereign People is one of four books from my first One Day University class.

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My Friend, I Care

Read: August 2021

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My Friend, I Care: The Grief Experience

by Barbara Karnes RN

My journey from the Island of Grief back to the Land of Love is long and arduous. Friends, especially those who have also lost a loved one, are the guideposts on this journey. One of these friends, Sue Gramacy, sent this book to me during the early phases of my grief journey.

My Friend, I Care: The Grief Experience may be one of the shortest books I have ever read, but it is also one that has been most helpful. Barbara Karnes, RN, provides a concise understanding of grief, and she includes a list of dos and don’ts that are very helpful to someone who has recently lost the love of their life.

She provides a compelling explanation of the new life that we all must strive to achieve.

Our inability to further enjoy life does not measure our loss. The quality of our relationship with the person who has died is found in our strength, our resilience and our ability to create a new and meaningful life.

The endpoint of my journey is a new and meaningful life. This book has helped remind me that it is an achievable goal.

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Salvation

Read: March 2026

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Salvation: A Novel

by C. William Lanksfield

Salvation by C. William Lanksfield is a remarkable debut novel that explores profound themes through evocative prose and a compelling plot, all set against the breathtaking yet often intimidating backdrop of the Rocky Mountain West. This emotionally charged Western noir examines father-son relationships, masculinity, and spirituality, centering around a shocking event: the murder of one man’s best friend by another.

A small rural Colorado town is in crisis at the height of winter. Tom Horak has just murdered his best friend, Rust Hawkins. Morris Green, the town’s Lutheran pastor, is experiencing a profound crisis of faith, questioning the very existence of God. And Marshal Thomlison, the local peace officer, looking forward to retirement, is now thrown into the middle of a murder investigation.

Following his violent act, Tom retreats to a cabin in the hills, remembering the events of his hardscrabble childhood—a rural upbringing on a ranch with a distant mother and abusive father.

Pastor Green takes in Rust Hawkins’s son, since the boy has nowhere else to go. Thomlison’s murder investigation acts as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the various threads of this moving novel: What could cause a man to commit such a violent act? What does this isolated community owe to one another? Can Tom find the peace he is searching for, even with blood on his hands? Can Pastor Green find enough faith in our human condition to help Rust’s orphaned son, and can their growing bond perhaps offer the family life each sorely lacks?


C. William Langsfeld lives in a small town on the Western Slope of Colorado.



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The Liberators

Read: November 2023

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The Liberators

by E. J. Koh

I started reading The Liberators by E. J. Koh today. The book is a debut novel about Insuk, a 24-year-old Daejeon, a South Korean college student who falls in love with her classmate, Sungho. They get married with her father’s blessing. Still, things take a turn for the worse as the military dictatorship, martial law, and nationwide protests bring the country to the brink of collapse, and Insuk’s father mysteriously disappears.

After her father’s disappearance, Insuk escapes to California with Sungho, their son Henry, and his overbearing mother. Struggling to adapt to their new life, Insuk mourns the loss of her past and her homeland, only to find solace in an illicit affair that sets in motion a chain of events that will reverberate for generations.

The Liberators is a powerful family saga that spans four generations and two continents. E. J. Koh expertly captures the lives of two Korean families as they navigate love, war, trauma, and empathy. This debut novel is a gripping testament to the consequences of inheritance and the power of memory.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Regarding gifts made this month, I will match dollar for dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.



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Sea of Tranquility

Read: September 2022

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Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel has been on my reading list for months. I recommend the book without reservations. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. It was a page-turner from page one.

With the delay of Artemis I, I have been thinking a lot about the Sea of Tranquility, the original lunar landing site. Sea of Tranquility reminded me of the days of my youth when we believed that NASA would colonize the moon as it is in the novel.

One of the passages that moved me was when Olive Llewellyn asked, “What if it always is the end of the world.” A second profound passage asks, “A life lived in a simulation is still a life.

The Goodreads summary provides a good overview,

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

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The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Read: April 2024

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The Cemetery of Untold Stories

by Julia Alvarez

Today, I began reading Julia Alvarez‘s novel “The Cemetery of Untold Stories.” The book explores whose stories deserve to be told and whose should remain buried. In the end, Alma, the main character, finds meaning in the power of storytelling. Julia Alvarez reminds us that our stories are never truly finished, even at the end.

Alma Cruz, a famous writer, doesn’t want to suffer the same fate as her friend, who became mentally unstable after struggling to finish a book. So, when Alma inherits a small plot of land in her native Dominican Republic, she turns it into a cemetery for her unfinished stories. She hopes her characters will finally be able to rest in peace.

However, they have other ideas and soon begin to rewrite and revise themselves, even talking and interacting with one another. Fortunately, Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a listener to Alma’s characters’ secret tales. These tales include those of Bienvenida, the abandoned wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, who was erased from official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

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