GM! ☕️
Here are this fortnight’s 5 things to consider:
#1
This week I began training in movement chaplaincy. Truth be told, I feel out of my depth. But I know this comes with the territory; I’ve been here before. It’s a discomfort I need to hold space for, rather than shut down.1 Here are 3 things grounding me at present:
Perspective from Standing Together, an uncommonly brave community of Jewish and Palestinian peacemakers working together on the ground in Israel and Gaza: “Despair is a privilege,” they teach. “Hope is a lifeline.”2
Nadia Bolz-Weber’s advice for crisis work: “It is enough to do the thing that’s yours to do.”
A mantra from the movement chaplains at Enfleshed: “Braid me in.”
#2
RIP to N. Scott Momaday, Kiowa poet, artist, and Pulitzer-winning novelist. After reading his obit, I picked up Earth Keeper, a collection of poems and stories that evoke his environmental ethic and deep sense of place. Momaday’s place was the American West, but the invitation is open: We can each connect with the earth under our feet and the web of life to which we belong. “If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us.”
Related: Sharon Blackie on how myth and story can help us belong to our places.
#3
The grown-up fairy tales in Kelly Link’s White Cat, Black Dog are quite a ride. Cats growing weed! Mysterious space games! Romantic quests in the depths of hell! Link has observed that fairly tales thrive on rules and superstition—and that the trick to working with rules is to make them weird. Chuck Jones’s rules for Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote are a great example.3 Think guidelines that demand creativity, rather than conventions that choke it. Rules that gatekeep or idolize the status quo are meant to be broken.
#4
I love projects that make a cohesive statement through odd bits and pieces that somehow add up to more than the sum of their parts. Alex Morris’s The Planning & Strategy Scrapbook does exactly that. (His newsletter does too.) Scrapbook is wholly unique, especially among business books—kitschy, sarcastic, visually engaging, weird, and smart. One of its MANY curated gems is the Looney Tunes list above. Another is this graphic on the elements of organizational change:
#5
Ear candy: Fortune Feimster, Mae Martin, and Tig Notaro’s Handsome podcast has been cracking me up. It is lighthearted, clever, fairly wholesome, and more than a little ridiculous. Mostly, it reminds me of how joyful it feels to hang out and laugh with my friends. ✨
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. Happy Valentine’s Day, homies! Especially you, AJ🌹👇🏼
Expect me to do this imperfectly and awkwardly.
Katherine Turpin at Iliff School of Theology wrote an excellent paper on this: “Disrupting the Luxury of Despair: Justice and Peace Education in Contexts of Relative Privilege.” I’ve been on the teaching side and could have been a better teacher with this guide. However, I’m glad to have it as a learner today. Turpin outlines and proposes interventions for five “characteristic temptations,” which are “the temptation to run, the temptation to defensive anger, the temptation to neutralize conflict, the temptation to ‘fix it,’ [and] the temptation to despair.”
Also via Alex Morris.