What Lessons Did This Year Leave Me With?
Ripped from my notebook, straight to your inbox.
Instead of a year-end list of gifts of objects and things, I wanted to share with you some of the lessons I’ve been grateful for this year, scanned in from my notebook I carry with me all the time. Since my writing is never really meant to be legible to anyone but myself, I transcribed most of it.
Fear is designed to let you know there’s a decision to be made, but it shouldn’t make the decisions for you.
Resist the urge to get smaller! I’ll say it again:
Instead of operating from fear, when you can try, as a little experiment -operate from love, in the face of it. If it feels audacious, if it feels ridiculous, fantastical, naive, it is all the more necessary. It is an urgent demand, and it asks much of you. When you can build a moment for yourself where you can plant a seed of love and belief in something better, even in desperation, you sit there, you foster that thing as long as you can. Stay there, as long as you can.
"We all are made of these stories, even if we do not know them. People saved these seeds because they loved these seeds, and they thought we might love them, too, despite-and it's crucial we remember this--those people, sometimes, having just barely survived a drought or a famine or being rounded up on a forced march or put into the hold of a ship to hell. Whoever saved the seed loved us before they knew us. And some of them loved us as their world was ending. Our gardens archive that love."
Ross Gay, Inciting Joy
From Dub: Finding Ceremony, an incredible book of poems by Alexis Pauline Gumbs 
From my writing notes from the many classes I took this year: What is the movement between wholeness and fragmentation? Is it polarity, a spectrum, participatory? What created the fragment? What is in between the moments? What is missing? Sometimes what is missing is more important than what is included. Fragmentation allows us to understand what we cannot see. How do the fragments contribute to a whole that is different than any separate piece? Nature’s version of the question and answer keeps me up at night:
Do not compete with a perfect, unformed thing. Commit to showing up to your own imperfect curiosity, over and over again. Break down overwhelming ideas into something - many somethings - maybe something you can hold in your hands. My book, The House of Beauty, ultimately ended up as 8 essays, but it got there from being broken down in stages, into index cards, and cut lines-by-lines, with scissors to every page, pinned onto walls and taped to floors wherever hospitality led me. There are multiple POVs, spanning centuries and geographies - I would have been utterly overwhelmed if I tried to approach it all at once, uniformly. I had to obliterate it into the smallest scenes first and go from there. And then I had to learn how to reframe that shattering into accumulation instead - not a litany of loss but all the ways you live anyway, instead.
One of the guiding pages for my revision process:
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