Seeds ->
Sprouts ->
Shoots ->
Blooms
“As artists, we're always practising alternative realities, we're always exploring beyond our current paradigm. Is there something about what it is to be an artist in the first place that we can harness, that we can sort of convene and use that as a power to say, how do we want to reimagine the world?”
“Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone’ else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”
Individualism is leading us to the path of exhaustion and death. Community care will save us, and we can dream up all the ways to manifest and strategize the care of communities. (Location 1862)
Imagine a life outside of grind culture right now. You can create it because you are more powerful than you believe. We are more powerful than we believe. What liberation can you craft outside of grind culture? What information can you exchange with yourself and others to find rest? Are you ready to begin slowly by imagining what it would feel like to have everything you need? Are you curious enough to try rest? (Location 1351)
'If you change, the countenance of the world changes' (2009: 273). —Jung
(Jung, 2009) The Red Book
“Perhaps my indescribable suffering at being unable to produce is my most accurate response to the present situation + I would sooner submit to that suffering than make any concession in the essential.”
An objective perspective might be thought of as looking at reality as made up of solid objects that can be measured and tested, and which exist even when we are not directly perceiving or experiencing them. In particular, an objective perspective would allow that something as simple as measuring your height would result in the same answer, regardless of who does the measuring. In more complex settings, we might aspire that our objectivity allows us to make the judgements necessary to decide upon the guilt of a defendant in a court of law. In contrast, a subjective perspective looks at reality as made up of the perceptions and interactions of living subjects. For instance, our response to a particular piece of music varies such that we might find something delightful whilst our friends find the same piece entirely unlistenable. Source
“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)
Thoreau: “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.”
“I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.” —Thoreau, journal, Dec. 5, 1856
“Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible, the definitive utterance of this singularity.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke famously wrote, “So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
Rilke
“The creative moment of a writer comes with the autumn,” wrote Cyril Connelly in An Unquiet Grave. “The winter is the time for reading, revision, preparation of the soil; the spring for thawing back to life; the summer is for the open air, for satiating the body with health and action, but from October to Christmas for the release of mental energy, the hard crown of the year.” (View Highlight)
Austin Kleon’s newsletter
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)
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