Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson

Elizabeth Catlett, Portfolio Cover, 1970s

(February 3)

Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe, Laura Lynne Jackson

Roelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967

(January 17) Heard about this on Goop and read it mostly to see how it lined up with Abraham-Hicks philosophies. At first it didn't look too correlated at all: it was like Jackson believed the thing we need to know the most is that we are not alone, that loved ones who have passed on are not gone for good, that we are being helped from beyond the grave by individuals that we once knew.

Their help, according to her examples, is usually not of a practical nature, but rather is in the form of signs that affirm an event or decision. An example was a stack of oranges Jackson was presented with after a talk went well, which, because of peculiar associations with deceased loved ones, had a lot of significance for her.

A disconcerting element was that most of the examples of people having experiences with signs from the Other Side seem to be Jackson's long-time personal friends, and a great deal of the advice coming from the Other Side seems to be about whether or not to have a child (the Other Side wants people to have the child 100 per cent of the time, interestingly).

So the book follows this trajectory for quite a while, kind of trying to prove anecdotally that there's an afterlife, when, suddenly, it switches to a discussion of energy shifting (vibrational life, in other words) and goes into what is all very much an Abrahams-Hicks vein... how gratitude leads to manifesting and so on and so on. So surprising!