The books that chose me

Over the years, I’ve come to recognise that my general state seems to be connected to the amount I’m reading. The most fertile, creative periods of my life have definitely been those times when I’m reading voraciously. Not having the motivation to read or just not finding the time are definitely indications that all is not right with me. So it was pleasing to recognise how, amidst the turmoil of last year, I slowly started to read more than I have done for several years. By the end of 2025, looking back, it had actually become a year of profound reading - so I thought I’d share the five books that chose me and changed me in 2025.

Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

Active Hope was definitely the book that jump-started this renewed energy for reading. Recommended to me by my coach, Heather, I devoured it in a few days. Developed over 25 years of practice, Macy and Johnstone open the book in how our stories of ‘business as usual’ are starting to crumble, and how we are seeing the beginning of a ‘great unravelling’. They describe ‘active hope’ as a practice of how we show up in a world that’s unravelling. They suggest that active hope is not about optimism or wishful thinking, it’s about choosing how to be and what to do.

When my old friend, George, who I chat with weekly, suggested the idea of going on a Buddhist retreat in Scotland, I was curious but unconvinced. When I looked at the programme at the retreat centre he recommended and saw an ‘Active Hope retreat’, I felt I had to go. And that week on retreat in late June was transformative for me, in ways I have written about elsewhere.

I was so grateful to this book for having given voice to the way I was feeling about the world. I had been living for so long inside the world of ‘service reform’ – where people are just trying to find the right tweak that will make all the difference – but feeling increasingly out of step with that world. I had lost faith in tweaks. The book also describes a ‘spiral’ practice known as ‘the work that reconnects’. We followed the spiral on retreat and I found to be incredibly nourishing. I was especially moved by the ‘Honouring our pain for the world’ phase with the level of honesty and openness that was shared. It felt like connecting on a level that so rarely happens.

So Far From Home by Margaret Wheatley

Having finished Active Hope, I was hungry for more, so I went to the ‘unread’ section of my bookshelves (which is pretty substantial) and there So Far From Home leapt out at me. I took it off the shelf to read the back. It was like the book was speaking to me directly:

I wrote this book for you if you offer your work as a contribution to others, whatever that work might be, and if now you find yourself feeing exhausted, overwhelmed, and sometimes despairing even as you paradoxically experience moments of joy, belonging, and greater resolve to do your work.

OK, Meg, I hear you. Let’s see what you have to offer.

So Far From Home has a lot in common with Active Hope. It discusses how we ended up in a world nobody wanted, overtaken by greed, self-interest, and oppressive power. Both books invoke ‘the myth of Shambhala’. And while Wheatley says something similar to Macy about reframing hope, the way she chooses to express it is noticeably different: “Hope is such a dangerous source of motivation. It’s an ambush, because what lies in wait is hope’s ever-present companion, fear.”

Wheatley says – very directly - that we need to give up our belief that we can save the world – even just our small part of it: “My great teachers these days are people who no longer need hope in order to do their work, even thought their projects and organizations began with bright, hope-filled dreams.”

One such teacher is Tibetan Buddhist master Chögam Trungpa, who says, “We cannot change the world as it is, but by opening ourselves to the world as it is, we may find that gentleness, decency and bravery are available – not only to us but to all human beings.”

This idea of ‘opening ourselves to the world’ would become a major theme for me.

At Work In The Ruins: finding our place in the time of climate crises and other emergencies by Dougald Hine

Around the time I was going on the Active Hope retreat, I couple of different European friends got in touch with me to invite me to run a session with them at ‘Rotterdam Change Days’ in November. I’d never heard of the event, nor of the book that was to be the theme of the event – At Work In The Ruins – but I took a look at both. Around the same time, I shared the script I’d written for a workshop on ‘learning differently’ with a friend. She responded saying it reminded her a lot of Dougald Hine’s book, At Work In The Ruins. I thought – OK, I’d better read this book now too.

As an aside, I’m experiencing more and more of these things that Tyson Yunkaporta calls ‘a something’ - like when he and a friend were talking about emus and he returned home to find an emu in his garden. We might be tempted to call them mere coincidences, but these are coincidences that feel pregnant with meaning – the Active Hope ‘coincidence’, the book waiting for me on my shelf, the three people nudging me towards At Work In The Ruins. The more I’ve been opening myself to the world, the more ‘somethings’ I’ve been experiencing. Take from that what you will.

I read At Work In The Ruins. Loved it. I went to Rotterdam, met Dougald, and listened to him speak. Loved that too. The book is about many things, but one of those things is about the limits of science to make sense of the world. Science is of course tremendously important, but Dougald argues our modern culture has put science on a pedestal where we believe it can answer everything, and it cannot. This has led to a branch of techno-optimistic thinking about the future wherein what we need to do is simply invent some as-of-yet impossible technology that will allow us to sustain our current way of life. This branch of thinking avoids thinking deeply about whether we should try to sustain our current way of life. It avoids looking at the sins of our culture, built on violence and control – which of course are not scientific questions.

One of Dougald’s closing questions is ‘What work makes sense in The Ruins?’. When I saw him speak, he said that it is some people’s fate to live in times when a civilisation is coming to an end (for none last forever). He says this is one such time – so how should we spend our energy? What activities have value in times of ending? He has four suggestions, intended very much as the start of a longer list: salvaging the good that we can take with us into whatever comes next; mourning the good that we cannot take with us; discerning the things that were never as good as we thought they were; and picking up dropped threads from earlier times that might help us into the future. I have been ruminating a lot on this list – especially the work of mourning - and what else I would add to it.

Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

I was lucky enough to get to know Paddy Loughman and Ruth Taylor over the last couple of years, two warm, exceptional people trying so hard to bring about a better future. When I saw they were organising an online book club to read the newly-published Outgrowing Modernity (the sequel to 2021’s Hospicing Modernity, only with less sugar-coating), I signed right up. Meeting every two weeks, we’d talk through the weighty (in every sense of the word) section we’d just read. To help describe what the book is about, I’ve just opened to a random page and picked one of the many sentences I’d underlined:

…our task is not to resist collapse as though we could hold back its tide but to meet it as an opening – a chance to compost the remnants of outdated systems into something fertile, generative, and alive.

There is a great unravelling. We can’t save the world. We’re at work in the ruins. We’re navigating collapse and composting outdated systems. There has definitely been a common thread through all these books.

What was lovely about reading this book in the company of a book club was the chance to engage with some really challenging ideas with others. Vanessa doesn’t hold back: “violence and unsustainability are necessary conditions for modernity-coloniality to exist…our modern livelihoods are dependent on the continuation of this violence.” Just as it was so nourishing to spend a few days in Rotterdam with a group of folks engaging deeply with what it meant, what it feels like, to be at work in the ruins, so it was nourishing to be part of a group over several months exploring what it feels like to be outgrowing modernity. I think we all found it to be personally and collectively challenging. As someone in the group said, “Composting is the work of our time.”

The Different Drum by M. Scott Peck

The Different Drum found its way to me through a slightly different route. I was chatting with a friend, Bhav, who was with me in Rotterdam. In passing, Bhav said, “You know those books that you read in your twenties that you probably didn’t understand at the time, like ‘The Different Drum’ for me.” He didn’t even recommend the book, but Bhav is one of the most open-to-the-world people I’ve ever met, so that description was enough to make me to buy the book.

For me, The Different Drum adds an answer to Dougald’s question, ‘What work makes sense in The Ruins?’. It is all about making community, how most of us have never experienced true community, how healing only happens in community, and the phases groups need to go to in order to become true communities. (I’ve written more about it here.) It was written in an earlier time (it was the eighties!), so there’s less of a focus on collapse than in the other books but there’s an intimacy to what it says and how it’s written that is quite beautiful. Peck says that we are social creatures who need to (re)learn how to be community creatures:

[A group comes into community] once its members began looking at each other and themselves through “soft eyes,” seeing through lenses of respect. It may seem strange in our culture of rugged individualism that this transformation begins to occur precisely when we begin to “break down.” But as the masks drop and we see the suffering and courage and brokenness and deeper dignity underneath, we truly start to respect each other as fellow human beings.

As I continue to reflect on what work makes sense to me and for me in these wild times where it feels like things are starting to crumble, I know that making community needs to be a big part. I’m very grateful for the books that chose me last year – and for the people who helped them to do so.