GM! ☕️
Here are this fortnight’s 5 things to consider:
#1
I’ve been listening to Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner’s The Remarkable Ordinary. It’s a nice complement to last week’s question. His advice? Tune in to your own life and pay sacred attention to everything (and everyone) you encounter:
Stop thinking. Stop expecting. Stop living in the past. Stop living in the future. Stop doing anything and just pay attention to this. —Frederich Buechner
Bonus: Buechner noted that the only commandment Emily Dickinson ever obeyed was to “consider the lilies.” As poets do.
#2
Helen Macdonald’s nature writing captures both the essence of wildness and a keen awareness of the human gaze. It’s a powerful style that creates space for complexity, honest reckoning, and even a little magic. In H Is for Hawk, a memoir of grief and falconry, Macdonald explores her desire for (and the danger of) escaping into wildness. Her essays in Vesper Flights are fantastic without exception, and I’m curious to try her recent sci-fi debut.
#3
Not-a-psychiatrist Kate Schapira set up a climate anxiety counseling booth, a la Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt. While of course I value and advise seeking help from trained mental health professionals, I also celebrate mutual aid where climate is uncertain, systems are troubled, and collective needs outpace formal support:
The truth about meeting the overlapping, multiplying, escalating challenges of the climate-changed future is that nobody is qualified for it. But all people have elements of what they're good at and what they understand, what they think about, where their courage is, where their skill is, that does qualify them to meet this situation in combination with other people. —Kate Schapira
Related: LaUra Schmidt on how to respond when a loved one expresses climate distress and Deepa Iyer’s social change ecosystem map.
#4
Aging can be an uneasy process; I understand this much at mid-life. As my face begins to reveal her lines, I find kindred spirits in Jody Day’s shock at noticing her changed body in the mirror and Lyn Slater’s (a.k.a. Accidental Icon’s) conflicted experience of aspirational aging. I also loved Parker Palmer’s On the Brink of Everything—and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal is essential. 🖤
#5
New favorite June Jordan poem.1 “There are no parts,” gah!
There is no chance that we will fall apart.
There is no chance.
There are no parts.—June Jordan
(But this poem, of all these poems, will always be my first love.)
Thank you for reading! This newsletter is a labor of love. 💌 To support it, you can upgrade to a paid subscription (coming soon), share this post, or engage my services. You can learn more about my work at jenniferlphillips.com.
Jenny
P.S. have at it👇
Via Manjula Martin.