Friday, September 29, 2023

My Brother



My brother is sharing his life story as it relates to work on a substack that explores how to move people and their wealth in order to effect positive social change.

The beauty and power of his story, as well as his capacity to be vulnerable and share it so widely as an act of service to the greater good, is a testament to the life Mike has led up to this point.

I am one proud and inspired sister.

Thursday, September 28, 2023

A Triumphant Finale


The culmination of this series is tremendous-- wise, tender, funny, painful and full of love:



What began as sex education became a master class on family and relationships.


With a magnificent soundtrack to boot.

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Time Between The Fingertips



Informed by these podcasts, my thoughts have been circling the concept of time. I want to capture some of this language while it is fresh for me...

The Greeks spoke of chronos and kairos. Chronos is ordinary time, calendar and clock time, measured and organizing, progressive and chronic. It is the time of our 2pm self. Kairos is extraordinary time, moments of disruption and inroading that can last an instant or centuries, liminal and acute, timeless and mystical. It is the time of our 2am self. 

The Greeks also spoke of apocalypse by which they meant uncovering, veil lifting, revealing, the bright clarity born of approximate endings. Apocalyptic time is thus a form of kairos time-- when there is a collective or personal experience of before/after. A pivot. An opportune time for rash decisions and plot twists. 

Time is fundamentally transformation and we cannot grow or change without feeling our own breaking. Tragic time. No creation without destruction. So we are born anew in times of vulnerability and vulnerable in times of rebirth-- when we have a keen and newly awakened sense of our own fragility.

And yet, as any BrenĂ© Brown fan knows, vulnerability is the gateway to love. Thus our breaking open is a great softening. A surrender to universal and specific, mundane love. 

Mortality entwined with love. Both core to the human condition. A condition that comes with the capacity to go in and out of our bodies. Our leavings, a grace granted by the push of suffering. Our returns, a grace granted by the pull of connection.

No self composed.


Saturday, September 23, 2023

Old Art

 

These life-sized giraffes carved into rock in the desert of Niger-- gah! I still remember when I saw images of them for the first time in a National Geographic Magazine as a kid.

I can only imagine what it would be like to marvel at this neolithic masterpiece in person.

It is estimated that the petroglyphs are between 6,000 and 8,000 years old. A Taureg community living nearby is now tasked with protecting the remote site's historical legacy from vandalism.


Monday, September 18, 2023

Kickflip



Am I

I am

Saturday, September 2, 2023

Energy Makes Time

 


I often find myself listening as someone talks about being out of time. I don’t want to demean any time-management tactics out there. My philosophy is to accept any and all tools, to tuck them into the toolbox until such time as they seem fit. Most of the recommended habits will work, at least some of the time. Sometimes blocking off some time on your calendar is exactly what you need. Sometimes shifting your schedule or skipping some meetings or putting yourself to bed on time does the trick. Knowing which trick you need now—and which one you’ll need next time—comes with experience and the kind of situational awareness that can be cultivated with (wait for iiiiit…) time.

But there’s something else I want to suggest here, and it’s to stop thinking about time entirely. Or, at least, to stop thinking about time as something consistent. We all know that time can be stretchy or compressed—we’ve experienced hours that plodded along interminably and those that whisked by in a few breaths. We’ve had days in which we got so much done we surprised ourselves and days where we got into a staring contest with the to-do list and the to-do list didn’t blink. And we’ve also had days that left us puddled on the floor and days that left us pumped up, practically leaping out of our chairs. What differentiates these experiences isn’t the number of hours in the day but the energy we get from the work. Energy makes time.

Here’s a concrete example, and perhaps a familiar one: someone is so busy with work and caretaking that they don’t make time for their art. At the end of the day they’re too tired to write or paint or make music or whathaveyou. So they don’t. Days, then weeks go by. They are more and more tired. They are getting less and less done. They take a mental health day and catch up on sleep but the exhaustion persists. Their overwhelm grows larger, becomes intolerable. The usual tactics don’t work.

Then one day they say fuck it all. They eat leftover pasta over the sink, drop mom off at her mahjongg game, and go sit in the park to draw. They draw for hours, until the sun goes down and they’re squinting under the street lights. And, lo and behold, the next day they plow through all those lingering to-dos. They see clearly that half of them were unnecessary when before they all seemed critical. They recognize a few others as things better handed off to their peers. They suddenly find time for attending to that one project they’d been procrastinating on for weeks. They sleep better. Their skin looks great. (Okay I might be exaggerating on that last one, but only mildly.)

It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.

I’m using art here, because in my experience, most people have something shaped like that in their lives—some thing that when neglected siphons time and energy away but when attended to delivers it in droves. But you can substitute art for whatever activity or habit leaves you more energized, gives you that time back: puzzle night with your BFFs, organizing your colleagues, working a shift at the community garden, baking cookies for the block party, going to the woods, touching grass and all that.

The question to ask with all those things isn’t, “how do I make time for this?” The answer to that question always disappoints, because that view of time has it forever speeding away from you. The better question is, how does doing what I need make time for everything else?

-- from an essay by Mandy Brown