You survive what happened to you, then you survive your survival, and then the gift you’re given is that you fall in love with your whole life, inextricable from the bad thing that happened to you.
The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
She has long followed the mantra “meet your students where they are.” But she says if she meets them any further down, she’ll feel like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard. (View Highlight)
“When you use Covid as the excuse or the reason, then you almost don’t have to come up with a solution, because you just acknowledge that this was something that globally impacted everyone,” (View Highlight)
Groundwork is the practice of asking: What are the rituals and practices that help me feel more grounded, connected, and expansive? Groundwork is engaging with those rituals and practices before you decide whether or not you are “in the mood” to be creative. Groundwork is how you show the muse that you are dedicated to showing up. (View Highlight)
Jocelyn Glei
He wanted to understand a seeming paradox: Even though we live in a relatively safe time — with life expectancies steadily increasing — young people are consumed with worry and see risks and existential danger all around them. (View Highlight)
The essence of making art is having play and rigor in pretty much equal balance or child and adult in pretty much equal balance. It’s so hard. It’s so hard to get the equilibrium right. You’re too childish, and you can make a glorious mess, but it has no structure to it. It becomes unintelligible to another human being. Too much adult and the thing has no fire. There’s nothing animating it. So this crazy middle ground in all of these cases that we’re talking about is somehow where you have to live. And it’s very hard to be there. (View Highlight)
Adam Moss
Tessa Hulls wrote a graphic novel called 'Feeding Ghosts' but found the process challenging. Despite its success, she doesn't plan to write another graphic novel and is now focusing on promoting her book. The novel delves into her family's history, blending personal stories with cultural exploration. But she never wanted to be a graphic novelist. And though she does draw comics, she’s never really had passion for the form. “This was the only way I could tell this story, and so I learned for this,” she said. (View Highlight)
“If you know exactly what you are going to say in a poem,” he continued, “that poem will be a failure. Besides, there is no interest or fun, in saying what you already know.” ”[A poet] follows the language, and sees where it might lead him, which is usually a very different place from what he thought at the onset.”
Art takes you where it wants you to go - Austin Kleon
Crafting connects the mind and the body in what amounts to a deeply therapeutic process. By establishing mindfulness and 'craftfullness' techniques, we allow ourselves to experience intense or challenging emotions without the accompanying self judgment or the need to censor painful memories. Page 44
Craftfulness by Rosemary Davidson
I wasn’t “chatting.” I was spending hundreds of hours putting together FAQ pages to refute the conventional narratives. If someone repeated a rage-inducing simplification about criminal law, I sent them to this page. If someone offered a rage-inducing simplification about the DOJ investigation, I sent them to this page. I can tell you from experience that if you dare go against the collective thinking, you’d better come with receipts because people will be furious. Recipts look like this.
Teri Kanefield
In beginning such work we take endings into our own hands, perhaps for the first time. And this is exactly what I see students doing; acknowledging the despair and rage of countless unchosen endings, and asking again and again “what life must become going forward.” It is an empowering and world-making shift.
Jessica Dore on student protests
“Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus – these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify… Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors. Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.” (View Highlight)
from The Gift, by Lewis Hyde
Potts’ notion of forgiveness as mourning, which is struggling “with and through and in a loss we cannot redeem” and showing us how to live in the wake of that loss.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
I read “Facing Apocalypse” by theologian Catherine Keller. In it, she notes the meaning of the word apocalypsos as “unveiling, thus revelation.” For Keller, apocalypse is “disclosure, not closure. Not a closing down of the world, but an opening up.”
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Facing Apocalypse” by theologian Catherine Keller
In accepting “that what has been lost cannot be restored,” forgiveness “aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong.”
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
For Potts, forgiveness is “paradoxically forward facing” in that it both “addresses the past so unflinchingly” and “sets itself honestly toward whatever future can actually come to be in the wake of that past.” Rather than ease or peace or closure, the promise of forgiveness may be that it makes livable what can’t be undone.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
Theologian Matthew Ichihashi Potts has called forgiveness more akin to “mourning than miracle.¹” Forgiveness is not about feelings. But if it were, it might be more closely related to lament than relief.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024; quoting “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account” by Matthew Ichihashi Potts
To the degree that forgiveness means finding closure or redemption or a way to feel better about this reality it is not just a pointless, but a violent idea. If, on the other hand, forgiveness involves looking unflinchingly at the harms done and imagining “what a wronged life lived well might be,” it comes with clear work to do and an invitation to make life otherwise. It comes with practices and habits and ways to take up, alongside pain that will not go away.
Jessica Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024
Counter-apocalyptic thinking is a reminder that endings are both inherent to reality and “the only thing in this world that is worth beginning.” And for Savransky, “to suggest that the end of the world must be begun is to affirm that the otherwise must be made, and to proffer an invitation…for an ongoing and unfinished experimentation with divergent modes of inhabiting the Earth.”
Dore’s Offering: May 5, 2024, quoting Savransky