“Sunset Gratitude: 365 Hopeful Meditations For Peaceful And Reflective Evenings All Year Long”

For Chico State grad Emily Silva Hockstra, the natural world is replete with wisdom in how to weather loss. Sunsets, for example, “symbolize an ending. When things end, it can feel hard to accept and surrender to what is. Letting go is rarely easy….” So, in a book of short daily thoughts, about “finding hope after a period of grief,” “I wanted these passages to be gentle reminders that it’s okay to take your time.” 

Thus comes “Sunset Gratitude: 365 Hopeful Meditations For Peaceful And Reflective Evenings All Year Long” ($19.99 in hardcover from Rock Point; also for Amazon Kindle). As a life coach (soulsadventures.com) living in San Diego with her husband, she found in 2020 “that my dream of having a child would never come true…. Although this book was born through the grief of infertility, it addresses many of life struggles” through patient inner explorations.

Suffused with Zen Buddhist and Daoist sensibilities, the author’s short meditations will strike a chord with many readers. Take the entry for June 3: “Not all plans will work out, but trying something new will create change within. Bravery blooms in the trying. Resilience takes root when things don’t work out. Confidence shows up the more we try to get back up. Your dreams are yours for a reason.”

The first day of each month offers an affirmation, such as for October: “As I notice hope sprouting once again in my heart, I recognize the growth that is taking place in what was once an empty space with deep gratitude.”

The inward journey should not be lonely: “Allow the tears to fall, call out for support, communicate as loudly as you need to. Grief needs a witness as it honors the ending of something significant.” 

She tips the hat to friends expressing the qualities of all twelve signs of the Zodiac. “Each moment of marvel reminds us that we are part of an infinite universe and connected to the flow of life. The next time you look up at the sky, remember that you contribute to the interconnectedness of the universe. Then pause and breathe in gratitude.”

“Love Your Brain: The 7 Habits Of Brain Health To Recharge & Surge”

Chico ophthalmologist David Woods faced many losses. His Paradise ophthalmology practice was destroyed in the Camp Fire. Rebuilt, the new office “sat nearly empty for months” due to Covid-19. Then, in 2021, “my world shifted in a way I had never really had preparation. My beloved and wonderful mother, Sharron, passed away. I felt as if the ground beneath me crumbled.” 

Though the practice began to thrive, and his family offered support, Woods struggled through “the fog of grief.” He started to research the brain and its response to loss. “I began to see, especially after the age of 40, how our lifestyle choices … have a monumental impact on the health and vitality of our brain cells.”

Teaming with Chico State grad Rory Ferguson, who will be pursuing her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Lehigh University, Woods provides an encouraging guide for how to “Love Your Brain: The 7 Habits Of Brain Health To Recharge & Surge” ($12.15 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle).

The book begins with charts for a 15-week “transformation plan” and a weekly “brain health check-in” on the seven habits: good diet; optimal sleep; cardio and exercise; “connecting and caring”; “the power of supplements for brain nutrition”; “meditation, faith, spirituality”; and “the power of learning” (“You want a brain that’s always growing? Then learn something every day. Creation and imagination are the seeds of success, and they begin with a curious mind.”)

Woods markets supplements under the names Nutrua and the trademark Brain Health 360, but he is careful to note that it’s important not to “overlook interactions between supplements and medications, which can lead to unintended side effects.” An appendix provides research on each ingredient; there’s also a section on how seasonal allergies affect brain health.

We need to be honest with ourselves, he writes, and develop healthy rituals that move the brain away from constant “survival mode” (doomscrolling, anyone?). One key is journaling. “Whatever challenge you face in your life of stress, you will unlock ideas and personal change when you write, clarify, and put words on the issues in your mind. You will zoom!” 

“Right Place, Write Time: A Lifetime Of Memories With Sports Legends”

Tiger Woods “won nine times in 2000,” Chico State grad Mark Soltau writes, “a year many consider the best stretch in golf history. He won three majors and returned to Pebble Beach in June to capture the U.S. Open by a record 15 strokes.” 

A longtime sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner, who worked for Tigerwoods.com from 1997 through 2018, Soltau says that “at most tournaments, I would spend time with Tiger … and wish him well. The first time I said, ‘Good luck,’ he glared at me. ‘It’s not luck,’ he said. From then on, I have always said, ‘Play well.’” 

Tiger “did a surprise video when I was inducted into the Chico State Athletics Hall of Fame in 2007.”

Soltau covers his five decades in sports writing with an exuberant memoir, “Right Place, Write Time: A Lifetime Of Memories With Sports Legends” ($19.95 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). No stranger to football (“I covered the NFL for almost 25 years”), Soltau “spent much of my childhood attending games with my mother at Kezar Stadium…. My father, Gordy, was an all-pro end and place kicker for the San Francisco 49ers (1950-58) and led the NFL in scoring in 1952 and 1953.”

Soltau’s book, loaded with photographs, includes chapters on Bill Walsh, Steve Young, John McEnroe, Barry Bonds, Walter Payton (at Laguna Seca Raceway), and Joe Montana (who used the sideline phone, meant to connect with coaches, to call his wife: “I’m just sitting here on the sideline and thought I’d call and tell you I Love You”).

In 1977, as a Chico State senior, Soltau’s father gifted him two tickets to Super Bowl XI, pitting the Oakland Raiders against the Minnesota Vikings at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. He and a buddy managed to get there and found their seats “were on the 50-yard line on the press box side in the middle of American Football Conference owner’s section.” The Raiders won, 32-14. The two made it back to Chico the next day, “tired and euphoric.”

The book is not a tell-all, but a “let me tell you about my friends.” Well played, Mark.

“Doko: Trails, Teahouses, And Turmoil At The Top Of The World”

Toby is sixteen. Three months after his birthday celebration “in our Northern California town,” he and his father are enroute to Nepal for what turns out to be the adventure of a lifetime and a young boy’s life or death decision.

Chico novelist Kristi Davids, a world traveler herself, tells the story in Toby’s voice, one that wonders at first what his dad is up to with this surprise trip. “Doko: Trails, Teahouses, And Turmoil At The Top Of The World” ($16.99 in paperback from Palmetto Publishing) finds a somewhat self-centered and resentful Toby discovering the meaning of fatherly love and the crucial importance of looking out for others. It’s a young adult novel with a big heart and a heart-pounding conclusion.

A doko is a basket “to carry things from one town to the next on our backs….” It’s also a metaphor for what Toby must discover about himself. There are times he must be carried—and times he must carry others. Good leaders do that, Toby’s dad tells him.

The family lived in Nepal a decade earlier while Toby’s father “worked on a project with USAID” to help farmers “create more productive and sustainable methods for food production.” Then six-year-old Toby made friends with another boy the same age. He and Prem were buddies and are destined to meet again on Toby’s birthday trip.

The goal is to trek the “Annapurna Circuit” in the Himalayas, taking two weeks to ascend to Thorong La Pass at 17,800 feet and then descend back into an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The hike encompasses daunting cliff trails and many small villages along the way. Unexpected blizzards are constant threats.

Toby and his father, along with the guide Kumar, and, as porters, Prem and a boy Toby befriends named Pratik, work as a team for each leg of the journey. Yet, for Toby, something seems off. Indeed so, and the consequences will be disastrous.

Chiya tea is present at every stop. Ah, the smells: “Cinnamon, cardamon, nutmeg, and cloves….” But as the trek continues, young Toby must put comfort aside and find wisdom deep within his soul. Readers will be enthralled.

“The Virtue Of Loyalty”

How far should loyalty extend? As Chico State philosophy professor Troy Jollimore writes, “The very notion of being on some side or other, and being ‘true’ to that side through thick and thin, seems in tension with the idea that one should always strive to be on the right side, to join and support those whose actions are morally justifiable and supportable.”

Being loyal—to a spouse or country—would seem to be a virtue, contributing “to the goodness of human life or the functioning of human societies.” But, as Jollimore points out in his introduction to a series of essays on the subject, it’s a “contested topic.” What would it mean to stay loyal to a family member or political figure caught up in wrongdoing?

“The Virtue Of Loyalty” ($35.00 in paperback from Oxford University Press; also for Amazon Kindle), edited by Jollimore, includes ten chapters, by philosophers and others, which consider how family loyalty arises, the sting of betrayal, love and loyalty, and more. The writers, Jollimore notes, address “whether loyalty can motivate and justify actions which have horrific consequences or which are inherently morally awful….”

A key chapter by Jollimore, one of recipients of the University’s Professional Achievement Honors “as a philosopher, teacher, and poet,” asks whether loyalty is indeed a virtue, whether it actually gives us reasons for acting. 

Loyalty (too often?) would seem to lead to pernicious behavior: If a soldier is ordered to massacre women and children out of “patriotic duty” loyalty plays no role in determining the morally right thing to do; it impedes it. And if a soldier is ordered to save women and children, loyalty is irrelevant to knowing that’s the right thing to do.

Jollimore pushes back against these objections in a thoughtful and accessible essay, pointing out that loyalty doesn’t exist in a vacuum: “A loyal friend need not always overlook your imperfections, but they will not seize immediately upon them as a reason for abandoning you and ending their relationship with you.” As for political loyalties, he writes, the greatest “expression of patriotism” might lie in refusing “blind devotion or unconditional subservience.” 

Loyalty is a virtue, but a profoundly complex one.

 

“Box One Of Two”

Chico, 1984. Gorgeous Heather Fields, 22, works at Serenity Falls, “apartments for seniors who just want a community and an easier life.” One of those she cares for is the aging and quirky Violet Merryweather, who in the 1930s and beyond appeared as an extra in dozens of well-known films, like “Casablanca.” Only don’t call her “Violet.” The V is silent; she is “Iolet.” See? Quirky.

When Iolet dies, Heather, who has not been much out of Chico and has never seen the ocean, will find herself caught up in a bonkers murder mystery in Hollywood and will meet an incredibly handsome young man there, Vince DeLuca, 24, who works Hugh’s Auto Body, named after his now ailing father. Vince mowed Iolet’s lawn back when he was a teenager.

An attorney contacts Vince to say that Iolet has willed him a mysterious, taped-up box, labeled “Box Two of Two.” Guess who’s been willed the other one? “Box One Of Two” ($14.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) is by Chicoan Pamela Dean, set in the same universe as her first novel, “And I Love Her Still,” but otherwise unrelated.

Heather and Vince tell the story in alternating chapters, with plenty of  good-natured f-bombs, and it’s clear from the start, when Heather flies to Southern California with Box One and first meets Vince, that hot sex will eventually break out. Dean keeps things smoldering throughout the novel’s first half. 

As the duo finds out more about Iolet’s time in New York and Hollywood, it’s clear that she’s convinced a certain someone murdered her beau, Albert, decades ago. The stuff inside the two boxes leads them to movie props, a cold-case agent, Frank Sinatra, a chicken foot’s meaning, a 1940 Buick, family revelations by both Heather and Vince--and to love.

Vince despairs that his dream of playing baseball for the majors is gone forever, the wound made worse by his pal Gio who went to Chico State and “got picked up by the Dodgers.” Heather realizes “there really isn’t anything for me in Chico” with her dysfunctional family.

But readers can be consoled that that is not the end of the story.

“A Place For Weakness: Preparing Yourself For Suffering”

Near as I can tell, Paradise High School student Mike Horton, born in 1964, found himself embracing the Christianity of the Protestant Reformation, which emphasizes God’s sovereignty. Many years later, as Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics, he taught at Westminster Seminary in California and has published or edited more than forty books. 

In 2006 he wrote a Bible study called “Too Good To Be True: Finding Hope In A World Of Hype.” It was not a theoretical treatise, but included deeply personal accounts of pain and grief, and so the publisher renamed it. “A Place For Weakness: Preparing Yourself For Suffering” ($22.99 in paperback from Zondervan; also for Amazon Kindle), by Michael S. Horton, is a thoughtful companion for the Christian church’s experience of Eastertide.

As Wikipedia puts it, “Traditionally lasting 40 days to commemorate the time the resurrected Jesus remained on earth before his Ascension, in some western churches Eastertide lasts 50 days to conclude on the day of Pentecost….” For Christians, Eastertide is a paradoxical celebration of the “already” and the “not yet.” The book is divided into two sections, exploring the “God of the cross” and the “God of the empty tomb.”

Horton warns against  a “theology of glory” which “presumes to ascend self-confidently to God by means of experience, rational speculation, and merit.” Instead, believers are called to a “theology of the cross” that “sees God only where God has revealed himself, particularly in the weakness and mercy of the suffering.” The proper theology, he writes, is really a “theology for losers.”

In pastoral ministry Horton has dealt often with suffering. He recounts the story of a pastor friend who took his own life, and, closer to home, his wife’s multiple miscarriages, subsequent difficult births (“premature triplets”) and “hormone-induced depression.” His aging father suffers a brain tumor which causes unimaginable anguish.

“We cannot climb up to God,” he writes, “but he has descended to us. This is the gospel in a nutshell, and it sustains us in suffering.” Bottom line: “It is death’s victory, not its reality, which is overcome in Christ’s resurrection.” 

One day all will be made whole. But not just yet.