I wonder sometimes just what so much reading has to do with visual practice. The two are inadvertently contrasted in one of the works I came back with: two brothers, both of whom go into medicine, one notes that medicine is a verbal curriculum while the other from an early age carries around a copy of Gray’s Anatomy and draws incessantly. You’ll have to read the book to see which one emerges as “special.”The purpose of the trip was to sit in on a Systems Thinking workshop conducted by my friend and mentor Jean Tully. We've been talking about how we might make her approach more visual without reverting to a dependency on causal loop diagrams. I left home with:
- Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows
- Inviting Everyone: Healing Healthcare through Positive Deviance by the Plexus Institute
- The First Captain: The Story of John Paul Jones, by Gerald W. Johnson
In RDU there is a used book store called 2nd Edition that I always visit if I can. Sometimes I take one away, but this time there were three: - Nelson in the Caribbean, by Joseph Callo (His Lordship is a hobby of mine)
- Billy Ruffian: The Bellerophon and the Downfall of Napoleon, by David Cordingly
- The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty, by K. C. Cole
In the Rock Ridge area I was pointed toward Pegasus New and Used Books. I like serendipity: in Greek mythology Pegasus was tamed by Bellerophon. Three more books went into the stack: - Shamans of the World, by Connor Kelly
- Six Thinking Hats, by Edward De Bono
- Magical Fabric Art, by Sandra McCraw Scarpa (for my quiltmaking spouse)
Jean and I stayed at the home of her friends Phil and Wendy where we talked about our reading. To my surprise and delight Wendy went out and bought me a copy of a book she had just read, Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghesse. That one was fascinating enough to be the only one opened on the trip back. "But then you also get...," as they say on TV, Wendy shared a stack of titles with me that she thought would help with things I'm working on: - Awareness to Action, by Geoge Tallon and Maria Sikora
- Mastery, by George Leonard
- Coaching: Evoking excellence in Others, by James Flaherty
- Fierce Conversations, by Susan Scott
Over the last 6 or 7 years my reading has been growing and growing. I can thank my friend Bob Thompson for that, and he's probably aware of the Edward Morgan quote on the card that Wendy gave me with the book: Reading is one of the few havens where your mind can get both provocation and privacy.
