Book Nourishment
This year Jacqueline and I chose "Nourish" as our Word of the Year. Selecting a word to return to, guide us, and build around has proven immensely supportive in staying both focused and grounded. We sit with it individually and process together, often bringing it up when we find ourselves at crossroads or feeling unmoored.
In these first weeks of 2025, I've experienced two serendipitous intersections. I returned to bell hooks' "All About Love" in audiobook form—a format that offered an unexpected gift of hearing hooks' words as a soothing nervous system experience. (I've been in deep NRE [new relationship energy] with audiobooks this year. Highly recommend!) Additionally, I connected with Stacey Diane Arañez Litam as she celebrated the publication of "Patterns That Remain: A Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants," just as I was exploring ways to embody "Nourish" in my year.
For those unfamiliar, hooks' "love ethic" views love not merely as emotion, but as an active practice combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. She challenges us to move beyond seeing love as purely sentimental, positioning it as a force for personal and social transformation. Through this lens, practicing self-love becomes a radical act of self-affirmation and growth.
I'm excited to pair Litam's work with hooks' love ethic to inform my personal word-of-the-year practice. Her approach centers cultural wisdom as a Filipina/Chinese American alongside her work as an academic and clinician. This form of sharing knowledge through storytelling is both effective and radical in its balance—honoring lived experience while challenging the inevitability of intergenerational trauma. Indeed, it is not only possible but imperative that we hold compassionate validation for our survival patterns even as we break from those no longer serving us.
So, in a year that has already brought so much activation, here's to nourishing our systems so that this can ripple out into our communities. How are you all nourishing yourselves?
