Reading is Psychedelic

I know, I know. I really don’t want to become the crazy mushroom lady who sees everything through the prism of her passion for psychedelic medicine.

crocheted mushroom-headed woman face down in a book

But hear me out: the word psychedelic literally means “mind manifesting.” That is: what the mind can make visible. And what is more mind-manifesting than sitting down with a good book? Accepting the handoff from the author of their ideas, the worlds and characters they have made, and using your noodle to add your own color palette, embellishments, furniture, every little detail?

I was a comp lit major in college, and while I was not as smart as I pretended to be in my Lit Crit class, I did get the basic premise of the ‘infinitely open sign’ that poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida proposed.

Jacques Derrida with effortless French cool

Meaning: what an author intends to say is not what we necessarily hear/interpret. They surrender their intended meaning as soon as we, the readers, pick up the text.

Because readers make our own meaning. We make our own worlds. We construct our own reality. What an author gives us is raw material for our own imaginations to continue to fabricate. Which is work, but beautiful work.

In the current media age, we do so little of the kind of reading that requires actual effort. We read all the time, of course –captions, signs, social media posts – but it’s like a Shibuya Crossing in our brains.

Iconic Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo

There’s so much demanding our attention all the time, so many inputs and so little opportunity to actually interpret, in our own way, all these transmissions. I won’t get into the perils of the attention economy here. So many people have written brilliantly about it, and if you want to read more about it (heh heh) I’d start with the wondrous How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

But we all get the basic premise: the world as it is, is making us dumber and more distracted.

So not only is reading psychedelic – revving our brains up to actually think deeply, create meaning and magic and worlds – reading is also resistance. It’s a profound martial arts practice for the mind. Sustained attention to a work of literature or nonfiction is strength-training against all the assaults, political, emotional, spiritual, particularly the fascistic ones that want to oversimplify, colonize, make our thinking binary, or worst of all, nil – just accept every premise “they” offer us with no critical thinking necessary at all.

I fully admit, even as a working pastor who has for decades had not only permission but actual encouragement to spend hours at a time reading, I’ve lost the habit. Not entirely, but enough that it scares me how hard it is to, say, sit down in a nook and read 100 pages at a stretch, or even 50.

I will assign some blame to what has happened to culture and media since the invention of the smartphone and social media. Yes, I watched The Social Dilemma, the tech lords who won’t let their kids have a phone. [and ugh, weirdly, moments after I wrote these words, I navigated over to Instagram to look up a thing and this was the first post. Is Google data-mining every word I write now? Am I going to have to go longhand and start leaving my posts yarn-tied to trees now?!?]

Add to that, we’re deep into the age of AI, which is making us even dumber ever faster. We’re delegating more and more of our thinking to large language models (I could and probably should write a whole Substack about this, and I know I’m ignoring a lot of nuance, but I literally argue with my techie husband almost every day about whether AI will make life better for humanity or a whole lot worse).

And to what end? Are we actually doing something beautiful and artistic and nourishing with brainspace freed up by pouring our mental loads into ChatGPT, or are we just escalating how much stuff we think we can get done, most of it to feed the monster of extractive capitalism? This piece from the Matriarchy Report asks the question of a Black woman entrepreneur who is working on MotherAI, and she admits:

“These technologies seek to delegate tasks and make things easier. And they do, in a way, but then we use that time that we supposedly get back by doing more things.

My visual for the mental load is that it’s like a sea of icebergs, and the pieces on the top are seemingly like innocuous tasks like RSVPing for a birthday party.

But yes or no to a birthday party invitation unleashes six or seven other tasks that need to be done. The decision matrix that happens underneath is so large and looming that all the tools and technology in the world don’t actually take away from those decisions that need to be made.

For all of the strides we’ve made with this technology, the task list seems to have gotten bigger instead of shrinking.”

I lean Luddite, myself. I might be the happiest I’ve ever been in my life right now, for lots of reasons. And when I look back to other peak life moments from my current mountaintop, hollering and waving to former Mollies, I love locking on pre-braces, bucktoothed übernerd 5th-grade Molly.

When real life was really hard and frightening, as it often was, she could always and easily port herself to other worlds. Supercharged by a library card and $10 in food stamps, her joy was electric. She’d arrive home from the library with fat stacks, often hitting the 20 book limit, a second bag full of Lemonheads and Red Hots dangling from her arm, and settle down for hours with her books. She loved sci fi and magic (Asimov and Edward Eager), turn of the century rags to riches stories (Daddy Long Legs), and child abuse stories (learning resiliency and warning signs in real time?).

Somewhere along the way, that Molly got buried under high school homework, college senior theses, endless grad school cramming, then decades of reading for lifelong learning (and all the aforementioned attention-stealing tech gremlins).

I do still love non-fiction, and never stopped reading it. I want to stretch my brain, make new neural connections, understand what God is up to in a dozen dialects, including science.

But now I have the freedom to read more broadly, read more fiction, read more PERIOD. I’m going back to the fat stacks that have always lived by my bed, and practicing becoming a bookworm again.

Here are a few guidelines I’ve come up with as I teach myself how to really read all over again:

• My ratio of fiction-to-nonfiction has tipped from about 10/90 to 70/30

• I have to read the first 25 pages of each book. If I don’t like it, I can abandon it. Even if I like it but not enough to keep going with real engagement and delight, I thank it for the aperture it opened, and set it aside

• The ratio of highbrow to lowbrow fiction has shifted from about 80/20 to 65/35. I’ve stopped denigrating anything I read as “chick lit” or “good trash.” A book is a book is a book. Even if it is full-on smut, someone wrote it, a whole book, which is no mean feat, and I’m still actually reading a real book. My imagination is engaged, I’m not doomscrolling, binge-watching, otherwise letting content creators spoon-feed me entertainment. I am part of the process.

• Book acquisition: I’m using my library card a lot more. If they’re missing a book I want, or I suspect I’ll want to own it, I buy it from Thriftbooks used or possibly new. I stop at every little free library I walk by, and sometimes even when I’m driving by. I’m restocking the saddest Little Free Libraries I pass (you know, the ones full of ancient Popular Mechanics manuals and grad students’ abandoned textbooks) with actual books people might want to actually read – paying the reading joy forward.

• I reorganize my book stacks/real estate often, to juice my brain into wanting to pick up a book instead of do something else. I separated out my non-fiction and fiction stacks (except for the mixed-breed stack right next to my bed); this makes the stacks new and exciting even if a book has been in there for months

• I asked friends who came to my retirement party to bring a favorite book of theirs for me, and a second copy to put into a Yankee swap so everyone could go home with a new book, and maybe make a new friend. Here’s a partial list of what they came up with!

So good, right?

I’m not going to report on what I’ve been reading lately because that feels like work and I have as much work as I want to do right now. Maybe in the future. In the meantime, I highly recommend following my UU pastor friend Claire Feingold Thoryn on FB or Instagram; she does epic short book reviews (lots of truth telling!) and I’ve gotten many a good rec from her. Her feed is one of my new churches <3

Oh and: one of the little jobs that I hope to do going forward is as a book doula! I had my first meeting this week to explore if a friend would like my support in bringing her book idea fully into the world. You can reply to this email anytime you might have an inkling of working with me, or fill out the form on this page.

Ecclesiastes may have said, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” but I just *know* he didn’t mean YOUR book. And certainly not chick lit/various genres of smut, which (ahem) does something quite different to the flesh.

Anyhow. I have some questions for you! If you are a bookworm, or want to be one again, or become one for the first time, answer any or all below in the comments!

What are your hacks to get yourself to read more? (me: leaving my phone in the other room)

What is a book you’ve read 12 times in your life? (me: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, all of the Chronicles of Narnia)

What is a book you just can’t seem to finish even though you really want to? (me: Jung’s The Red Book)

What is your favorite spot to read in? (my top 3: on my cobwebby front porch in the ugly rocking chair I pulled off the street years ago; bed; a café I’ve never been to before)

Back to this current stack! See you at the café, where we can read together in companionable silence.

Oh and: YES reading is resistance but tomorrow let’s all go to No Kings!!! Yahoo!!

Much love,

Molly

Still life with bedside stack.

Share