Becca Anderson, author of You Are An Awesome Woman, has written a new blog post on the life and career of author, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit.
Not only is Rebecca Solnit the author of over twenty books, she is also a historian and activist. Her books range in subject across the realms of “feminism, Western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster.” They include a trilogy of atlases plus such titles as The Mother of All Questions, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, and The Faraway Nearby, as well as A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which received the Guggenheim Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award. She is also a columnist at Harper’s Magazine.
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
You Are an Awesome Woman
Affirmations and Inspired Ideas for Self-Care, Success and a Truly Happy Life
Master the art of thinking happy: You know what they say about happiness—it’s an “inside job”—which is 100 percent true. Use the affirmations, quotes, and ideas in this book as a set of tools for your own self-development. They are for “inner work.” Much has to do with adjusting your attitude. Depending on the day, it might be a slight adjustment or a major overhaul, but the more you practice daily affirmations, the fewer adjustments you’ll need. One day you will realize you have mastered the art of “thinking happy” and are looking at the bright side of life, every day. Incorporating positive thoughts as a daily practice will build mental muscle and help you achieve the all-important optimistic way of thinking.