Weekly Wide-Awake #60

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake #60

Travel. Elemental Gratitude. Summer.

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. — Walt Whitman

It is summer and I am thinking about travel.

Travel teaches me every atom belongs. What does that mean? It means we are deeply interconnected and interdependent — at a molecular level — and rely on one another and the health of everything and everyone around us to survive and thrive. It means we change, grow, and heal in hard, hidden, and broken places together. It means belonging reaches across, into, and beyond, like tree roots wrapping around our stories, making living in isolation, cruelty, and despair impossible. It means we experience next-level awe and wonder from altitudes, angles, and depths only our imaginations can fathom. It makes plain, as Ross Gay suggests, what we love in common.

I have a travelers heart. I have run out of gas around midnight 30 minutes outside of Missoula, Montana after seeing a Russian Circus. I have found the Southern Cross on the South Island of New Zealand. I have sat beneath the moon bow at Cumberland Falls in Kentucky. I have seen the fires as Ogoh-ogoh burn during Nyepi in Bali. I have kissed the Blarney Stone in Ireland. It’s all about atoms and elements.

In a world of atoms and elements, then the substance of gratitude is all that — the substance of gratitude becomes tangible, visceral, and deep. Travel does that. Travel breaks life down into atoms and elements — we are both in and of experience — making wonder, awe, delight, something we can breathe, hold, and understand. Travel allows our story — our most elemental selves — to mingle, dance, bounce, and become.

Living the Comma #33

Solitudes. Teachers. Parker Palmer.

“Love consists of this: that two [or more] solitudes border, protect and greet each other.” — Rilke

Dear Writer Friends,

A few weeks ago, theologian and writer Parker Palmer published an essay in his newsletter, Living the Questions, about his relationship to the work of Thomas Merton. (I have included the piece below — A Friendship, a Love, a Rescue.) I thought about the value of mentors who have shaped my life, the importance of intellectual and spiritual communities, and of how writing connects people across time and space.

It is not lost on me that his newsletter talks about living the questions and our work is about living the comma. Both the question and the comma are about breath and curiosity and learning and growth. Palmer quotes Rilke in the essay. Rilke talks about love as solitudes bordering, protecting, and greeting each other. That makes sense to me in the way writing (and the relationship we have with what we write and those we read and listen to) is ultimately a conversation not bound by time or space. Presence is quiet and sacred. Guidance is careful and shared. Creativity is generosity and love. Love is a symphony of solitudes acting in concert.

Read entire post here.

MONDAYS ARE FREE EXERCISES 236-240

Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato. Finger Food. Visiting. Turkey Soup.

EXERCISE 236: SMACK

all the noise

Eat a meal making as much noise as you can. Describe yourself eating that meal and all the noise you make. (This is inspired by my wife, who is an unapologetically, symphonically comparable noisy-eater.)

This meal is about juice and salt and anticipation. It gets caught in your teeth and happens best in the summer. Squishy bread with Wonder. Toasted. Because. Tomatoes so ripe a knife is not needed. A salt shake. A mayo dollop. An iceberg leaf. Bacon’s crunch. The unmistakable smell. Corn’s cob like a Silver Queen. Watermelon’s quench relieves a thirst that haunts all year long. Cheese in the macaroni. Vinegar (and more bacon) in the warm potato salad. Cherries in the pie. Sugar in the tea. The perfect time of it all. This meal sounds like the sunshine, the sip, the slow.

Read entire post here.

WANTED: Week Two

Thoughts On a French Rockstar

I imagine she sings about justice, peace, and love.

Slowly walking past a cubist black and white war story she sings inside a red velvet rope. Her hands carry grief. Her ears hear every cry. Her lips tell the story. Her eyes see the way. Her anger crashes through lyrics. Her sadness seeps through song. Her hope is why she sings. Every inch. Every brushstroke. Every breath.

Read entire post here.

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