Sometimes you know ahead of time that your life is about to change. My mom told me about the day before I was born. She washed rugs in the backyard under the creamy Florida sun and thought about how things were about to change.

I think about this with big shifts. Going to college 2,300 miles away from home. Starting my first job in a small rural town where I knew zero people. In some ways, you can prepare your mind for feeling unprepared. You can grow comfortable with not knowing all the details. It’s part of the adventure, the filling in.

And sometimes your life transforms quicker than it takes to draw a breath. It can feel otherworldly. Everything will forever be different in a way that no one asked for, planned for. There are missing things or extra things. Side quests that become suddenly required. Side quests that end abruptly. The adventure forks into a distinct strangeness.

It’s too complex to gamify like this. It’s not a game, really, but you can still treat parts of it as a game. There’s no winning unless you say so. There’s no losing unless you say so. It’s not me against the world. This is important. I am part of the world.

Sometimes the change happens in a snap but you don’t know how much it will affect your experience. The time I split my forehead open was like this. I was scared not only for my well-being but also for my future. Would this be the first thing people saw when they saw my face from now on?

The body heals well. The nurse practitioner who stitched me up was an incredible sewer. We bonded over my hand-sewn ultimate bag at the foot of the hospital bed. Faced with the prospect of sewing my face back together, she knew that referencing her sewing skills would put me at ease. It did. And my face is still my face.

It’s so textured. The washing of the rugs. The layers upon layers of missing things and extra things. The worn and broken things. The way the details look different under the creamy Florida sun.

Someday, the world will certainly break my face.

I’m not sure if the way the world will break my face will be something I can think about ahead of time, or if it will happen within the span of a breath. I’m growing more comfortable with not knowing all the details.

Infrequent creative expression

There’s been a fair bit of opportunity outlining in our current mode of staying at home — we’re encouraged to improve our homes, our minds, our fitness, our creative skills. There’s been an equally compelling backlash to this pressure for greater personal productivity. I’ve been seeking to strike a balance between being good to myself and being good for myself. They’re not always the same.

I’ve found it easier when I lean into a whim — upon brainstorming potential activities, I’ll feel a flicker of interest in painting. I grab my paints quickly and get to work. This might be the equivalent of clicking play on the first film you’re interested in from The Top 1000 Movies on Netflix Right Now rather than using your entire movie night to pick one.

More trust, more patience

Similarly, I’ve been calling my grandparents more frequently, upon thinking to. My grandmother asked me why with all the knowledge we have in the world we don’t have control of this disease. I said I think sometimes even when we know what to do it still takes a fair bit of time. She said she wishes everyone had more patience.

My grandmother has the admirable quality of trusting, though still asking questions of, those who know more than she does about a particular topic.

Imagining strange diseases

I’ve been steadying myself with imagination. There are so many diseases that could be less predictable — more beyond the scope of our understanding — than this one. Can you imagine a disease that puts the young and fit at greatest risk? It would give us such unease. What good are push-ups and marathons if not to make us feel more invincible?

Imagine a disease that transfers when you think of someone, or say their name. It would be a bit like love. It hurts at times, but there’s something magical about it. Or one that transfers when you take a photo. It doesn’t steal your soul, but it does steal a little bit of your life. You’d trade the permanence of that memory for a little time. Or a disease that transfers when you laugh. We might grow acclimated to the lack of laughter in our lives. Or else we’d all be biting our tongues to hold our faces straight, trying not to burst.

With this imagining, I don’t mean to diminish the challenge of the pandemic. The work people like healthcare workers and food providers are doing to maintain life is baldly honorable. And it can be starkly confusing when I look at my daily life and find that one of the most impactful things I can offer in the near-term is passivity. I can take action by exercising that gentle muscle, patience, and indulging creative impulses that are safe to satisfy.

April 26th 2020 | Concrete • Creative Expression • More Patience • Imagined Diseases was originally published in The Witherspoon Witness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a young person, I was fond of the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion. Pygmalion was a sculptor who was disenchanted with women. He became more and more reclusive in his studio, carving away at a stand of marble, softening it into form.

The figure of a woman began to materialize, and his work took on inspiration and skill so exquisite that the stone seemed more and more like flesh each day. When at last he dropped his chisel, he was in love.

He adorned the sculpture with delicate robes and jewelry, arranged flowers and seashells at her feet. He talked with her as if she could hear. Alas, where he hoped there might be skin, there was but rock.

He prayed and made sacrifices to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She listened, recognizing the faith and intensity in his passion. When next he returned to his studio, Pygmalion stepped up on the plinth and touched his lips to the lips of his masterpiece and felt not stone but warmth and softness. She had been brought to life as a woman, Galatea.

The story of Galatea and Pygmalion resonated with me because I was an individualist. I wanted to believe that skill and success came from within and only from within. I wanted to believe that I deserved any beauty I could carve out of my life.

I remember sitting at the Thanksgiving table with family friends during my freshman year of college. We were reflecting on my generation’s expressed interest in applying our lives to improve the world. I believed we might succeed. One of my friends, tickled, said, “Don’t lose that. Don’t become jaded.” I promised I wouldn’t.

We teach mythology to our children because we believe that they need to learn how to distinguish between great good and great evil before they can distinguish between the frequent subtleties of today’s versions. Perhaps growing up is the process of us realizing that our value decisions in life, unlike those in myths, have complexity. And maybe jadedness is when we give up in the face of that complexity.

I’m reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, which is about a gorilla helping a man uncover the cultural underpinnings of the relationship between humans and the earth. It has me thinking about the stories we tell about our lives that we struggle to recognize as our own mythology.

“Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to [our] mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.”

- Daniel Quinn, in Ishmael

My mythology is not as simple as that of those born to be kings and gods and monsters and heroes. I am born to breathe, to eat, to grow. Anything else, I must carve out of my life. But I will not be carving it isolated in my studio. I will not become disenchanted with my fellow humans because, together, we must work out the complexities of our value decisions.

Mythology is mythology not only because it crosses a line of physical possibility, but also because it crosses a line into the oversimplification of values. With too much mythology, we remain children. With too little, we have trouble making out the patterns we are reaching for.

Myths often pit humans against their gods in an egotistical struggle — the young woman Arachne weaving a tapestry that eclipses Athena’s craftsmanship, the human Niobe boasting of the numerical abundance of her children — fourteen — against the goddess Leto’s mere two. The gods respond emotionally and destructively to these acts of disrespect. Humans, ever growing in skills and technologies yet ever flawed, must remain humble.

Humility might require that we start telling ourselves more subtle stories. Stories that question the mythologies we build for ourselves and our fellow humans. Stories that recognize the interplay between the individual choices we make and broader cultural tapestries.

One example of this complexity is the extent to which we trade value in the lives of those in the future for value in our own lives.

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives — and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it? — your captivity and the captivity of the world.”

- Daniel Quinn, in Ishmael

We are all captives of the incentive structures that have propelled us to scrape the Earth of resources. In rational terms, I have every reason to believe that my relatively luxurious way of life as an educated and employed citizen of the United States is putting me in great debt to the world. We are further captives of our circumstances, of our very bodies, of our existential crises.

Existential questions loom large. Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow, is one of the few books that has ever calmed my existential fright. In it, people develop the technology to upload computer models of their consciousness to the cloud and thus ensure that a model of their individuality exists indefinitely.

Freedom from the captivity of one’s body. I could easily see myself romanticizing either side of the argument — my body is my only means of experiencing the world, so how could being be valuable without it? But to know that a version of my consciousness would go on forging these connections in thought far past the time when my body happens to stop functioning also seems beautiful and fulfilling. A collection of synapses playing out infinite stories of love and randomness against the mineral tapestries of technology.

This kind of immortality hardly seems possible within my lifetime, which makes me deeply jealous of those who may live in the future. But then, too, I have no doubt that those in the future will look back with jealousy upon me — all these resources I have access to and on occasion appreciate, and yet am participating in eroding.

It’s mythology to think that, at my 29th birthday, I’ve already made the world a better place. There is a higher bar for that than merely claiming that desire as a value. There is a higher bar for that than working hard or being a kind person. There is a higher bar for that than conquering the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements.

We don’t yet know what our chisels are, nor even fully our values. But we sure try like heck to make every last stone love us.

Rethinking our favorite mythologies was originally published in The Coffeelicious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Janice Patricia Grosser Odom • February 3, 1937–June 21, 2018

She loves a life of rhythm — a dance step, the sturdy echo of a tennis ball, ice clacking in a double-walled cup.

Her way of talking is pleasant but honed — not quite so critical as a knife to cut through steak, but maybe a plastic dixie butter blade shaving off a pat.

[She tells me] All my shoes have pennies in them.

Intention, luck, and prosperity are intertwined in her story, as they are in all of ours. The rituals of graduation, of marriage, of giving birth, anniversaries, birthdays — it is becoming clearer to me that these ceremonies exist to eulogize us throughout our lives, so that the last word is not the only word.

From a magazine she trims out a chart that offers clever substitutes to common ingredients. It suggests using boxed eggs for eggs, dried mustard for mustard, dried onion for onion, and fresh tomatoes when canned ones are not to be had. I’m teasing her, but I think there’s something there.

Every morning, she reads the paper. Every evening, she falls asleep listening to the radio. I think this inhalation of words, ideas, and sounds makes her not only a gifted listener, but one who believes in the significance of what is said. We should spend more time conversing about things that matter than things that don’t — I see this most when I’m alone with her and she talks about values — be good to others and be good for yourself. The world needs her kind of person — a person who talks with and not across.

[She tells me] What my mother would make out of a can of corned beef and potatoes — a huge pot. A lot of times it was the homemade stuff. We’d be wearing clothes ’till they were practically — well, if it weren’t for the seafood…

She maintains a drawer full of broken watches, a mug with fake roach glued inside that emerges as you down your coffee, a couch brimming with cheap plastic singing toys, an old Tupperware that once held baby wipes now half-full with coins, “Yacht Fund” scrawled on the front with a rough Sharpie drawing of a boat. These are particles made meaningful when they light her face with laughter.

With her finger and some spit, she curls the baby hair near her ears. There is a dignity—and a yearning—in how she presents herself to the world.

[She tells me] I was skinny and scrawny and didn’t have a lot of hair and didn’t have a lot of boobs. And I really wasn’t too bad because I was afraid of Momma and Daddy — mostly Daddy, ’cause he had us on a pedestal. Just like you girls — you with all your laurels.

Pretzels from a plane. A horoscope, a quote, a birthday poem riffing on roses are red. She provides so much material to feed your body and your soul. They are simple things made special by her care.

I think everyone I’ve ever met has beautiful eyes. Her eyes are all the more magical for me because they are my mother’s eyes in a time machine, my eyes in a time machine. Looking at her, I can imagine what it is to look at myself from the outside, like history, like literature, like art.

But her eyes are also self-possessing — in them, I see her plainly — even when she is pretending not to be in the kind of existential ache that has, for the past decade, been levitating between her temples. Memory is like a projector, casting our lives onto the canvas of our minds. What projector doesn’t get stuck or lost or dusty? But what a treat to fill an afternoon curled up together, sorting through the treasure.

[She tells me] A loaf of bread was 10 cents; a cold drink was a nickel.

Ginger candy in a chalky paper wrapper. Pressed scarves. A chocolate orange in crinkle foil. These are the things she surrounds herself with — things that we might desire, that she seems not to anymore.

As the skin on her cheeks and forehead grows more diaphanous, so too does her will. She becomes innocent again, and I realize that innocence is the delicate experience of not being in control. I wonder if the difference between the innocence of a young girl and an old woman is that the old woman remembers the warmth with which control cloaks us.

She talks of one of her favorite trips — to Paris, with Billy — the soft glamour of a steaming croissant. I bake a batch, folding in the butter hour after hour, to nourish her openness in sharing these memories with me.

I find her remarkably easy to be around. She is generous, witty, sincere. She appreciates the gentle order of her life — a family, a house, a meal — while receptive to shifts in the fabric. She is wise to the freeing glory of shaping one’s own existence.

[She tells me] I’ve had this blouse for 25 years. Jenny says I’m a hoarder, but I have this and it means something to me.

I have wondered at the inflation of someone’s virtue at their death. Do our tributes represent their truth? For my grandmother, I ask myself — how often have I reflected this deeply on her character? How often have I taken the time and depth to recognize her exquisite and singular contributions to humanity?

In thinking about my grandmother’s death, I put forth that death offers this moment to contemplate her experience with newfound urgency. We eulogize our loved ones with magnified goodness because we have discovered goodness through looking for it.

A eulogy can tell us something about humanity, and it can tell us something about ourselves. I have this and it means something to me. I have her and she means something to me.

Don’t try to do both at once.

There are two kinds of creative meetings — the brainstorm and the critique. Don’t try to do both at once.

The purpose of the brainstorm is to create a million possibilities. The purpose of the critique is to refine ideas and sculpt them.

The Brainstorm

The brainstorm works best using improv philosophy — to everything that is said, you say, “Yes, and…”

There are no no’s in a brainstorm.

The brainstorm opens onto infinite alternatives, but infinite alternatives require elegant constraints. Unearthing infinite alternatives is next to impossible with vague questions like “What are your thoughts?” Instead, ask the question that gets to the heart of your objective. Ask for everything we know about a subject. Ask what our second cousins once removed would think. Ask for our wildest imaginations of what could be.

The Critique

The critique works best as a creative workshop — imagine an undergraduate seminar in architecture, photography, painting, creative writing. The creator offers up their piece and says nothing as introduction. We inhale the piece and exhale our experience of it. The creator listens as we talk about what works and what doesn’t work about the piece. This is not personal, this is about the work. This is about pushing the work to become the truest, most profound iteration of itself.

The critique is a place where we use the power of the collective to test our ideas by shining lights at them from our unique angles. By crashing our ideas up against against their weaknesses, we find ways to make them stronger. We grow stronger, too.

Best Practices

• The brainstorm and the critique cannot coexist in one meeting. Mixing them leads to the puncturing of ideas barely born before they have a chance to take flight and mean something real. Mixing them leads to endless black holes that validate and then revalidate a mediocre option without creating a pool of options against which you can measure it. Mixing the brainstorm and the critique is plain lazy.
• Decide before you schedule a creative meeting if it is a brainstorm or a critique.
• If you cannot figure out what kind of meeting you need, then you don’t need a meeting.
• And if you can figure out what kind of meeting you need, then you’re well on your way to a meeting that delivers.

There are two kinds of creative meetings — the brainstorm and the critique. was originally published in The Coffeelicious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is not about terrorism. This is about extreme weather.

3,432. That’s the number of people killed on American soil as a result of terrorism from 1975 through 2015.

4,053. That’s the number of people killed in the United States in the same time range as a result of flooding alone (lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat, cold, blizzards, rip currents, and wind add several thousands more on their own accounts).

According to a breaking Washington Post article, the Trump administration has designs to cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

These cuts would undermine our nation’s capacity to track and protect ourselves against extreme weather events, at a time when the frequency and potency of extreme weather events are increasing.

The Details

The Trump administration’s proposed slashes include:

• $126 million: NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (or 26% of its budget)
• $513 million: NOAA’s satellite division (or 22% of its budget)
  [Note that 90% of the information for weather forecasts comes from satellites.]
• $73 million: Sea Grant, a coastal research program affiliated with 33 universities nationwide (the cut would eliminate this program)

The Impact

These cuts would directly reduce the capacity of NOAA to keep citizens safe, according to Jane Lubchenco, former NOAA administrator. Impacts include:

• Compromising weather warnings for extreme weather events
• Harming the navigational capacity that guides commercial ships and other mariners to safety
• A decrease in private-sector jobs

In September 2016, 57% of registered voters said they believed that the U.S. government is not doing enough to prevent a future terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Yet the U.S. spends $16 billion annually on counter-terrorism intelligence.

NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research budget comes in at $500 million.

We devote less than 4% of the resources to a department that fights more than 10x the fatalities as counter-terrorism. We do indeed need a change, but that change should take a different trajectory—bolstering NOAA’s capabilities at a time when fatalities are likely to rise ever higher.

Read the article in the Washington Post for more details.

Trump’s proposed NOAA cuts threaten national security. was originally published in The Coffeelicious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The American fabric is stronger when it’s polychromatic.

As early as the Middle Ages, cultures understood the migration of birds across the seas. Through the 1700s and even into the mid 1800s, naturalists believed that swallows slept all winter in the beds of rivers, or flew on gifted wings to the moon. Today, we extend our understanding of this avian phenomenon as a seasonal pattern driven by the availability of food.

But to our human fellows we offer a fraught story of immigration, freckled with ascriptions of greed, impatience, and malevolence. In immigrating, we seek more than food and shelter — we seek a place in a community, a place in a culture that honors our value and takes into its folds our story. But what is our narrative of immigrants? That our ancestors fled to our golden shores with legitimacy and honesty. That today’s immigrants should follow suit. That we, born here, are here because of merit instead of circumstance.

Yet immigration is a long and winding road, a road that looks very different today than it did 100 years ago. Counter to several narratives, a higher proportion of today’s immigrants are positively selected, “generally those with high levels of skill and education.” And today’s economy favors high-skilled workers even more than it did 100 years ago. But this means less-skilled immigrants who 100 years ago needed only one generation to catch up to the native-born population today face a higher economic gap and an uphill battle that exacerbates their struggle.

How do we encourage the waves of change that begin to shift this narrative and support our immigrant brothers and sisters? We can normalize the human prerogative to find a welcoming community. We can herald our stories of success—the lives and endeavors that have made our culture richer and more vibrant. The United States is only as vivid as we paint it—so let us paint it in stripes that herald our prismatic heritage. Here are profiles of 12 immigrants who made their marks—big and small—on the American fabric.

Note: I highly recommend pairing this piece with a soundtrack—The Hamilton Mixtape on Spotify:

Peter Piper claimed he picked them he just underpaid Pablo / But there ain’t a paper trail when you living in the shadows / We’re America’s ghost writers the credit is only borrowed / It’s a matter of time before the checks all come.

Mrs. Bissie, from Poland, immigrated prior to 1909. She and her family, working on a farm in Baltimore, were featured in a photograph by Lewis Hine, noted photographer who wielded his camera as an instrument in the fight to outlaw child labor in the United States.

Bob Marley, from Jamaica, 1966. Following his mother to Delaware, Marley worked in a Chrysler factory and at Hotel DuPont in Wilmington, before returning to Jamaica to work on his music. “I’m sick of this place,” he wrote to his wife from Delaware. Marley died of cancer in 1981 at age 36.

Elizabeth Stern, from Canada, 1940. A pioneer in the epidemiology field, Stern studied cervical cancer, transforming the disease “from fatal to one of the most easily diagnosed and treatable”.

David Ho, from Taiwan, moved to the United States in 6th grade. Having published over 400 papers and contributed to the development of anti-retroviral therapies that allow the control of HIV replication in patients, Ho is currently leading a research team developing a vaccine for HIV.

Rita Rodriguez, from Cuba, moved to the United States at age 15. In 1969, Rodriguez became the first woman instructor at Harvard Business School, and went on to become a director of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, advancing international trade.

Kahlil Gibran, from the Ottoman Empire (now Lebanon), 1895 and 1902. After immigrating to Boston with his family at age 12 in response to political unrest in the Ottoman Empire, Gibran returned to Beirut for his studies. Re-immigrating through Ellis Island in 1902, Gibran’s artistic career, spanning drawing, watercolor, and writing, is characterized by a symbolist and romantic style, and considers themes of religion and mysticism.

Andrew Carnegie, from Scotland, 1848. After his family moved to Pennsylvania when Carnegie was 13, he worked as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill in Pittsburgh. By his death in 1919, he had amassed $309 billion in today’s dollars, invested in the U.S. railroad network, built a steel empire, written a cavalcade of books on travel, politics, and the philanthropic responsibility of businessmen, endowed 3000 public libraries across the U.S., and made great contributions to institutions of higher education.

Chinua Achebe, from Nigeria, 1990. Known worldwide for his novel Things Fall Apart, Achebe was a writer who explored the impacts of colonialism, the political landscape of Africa embroiled in corruption and elitism, and the confluence of African and colonial culture. A renowned professor of languages, literature, and Africana studies, Achebe taught at Bard College and Brown University.

Mother Jones, from Ireland, emigrated to Canada as a teenager, and the United States at age 23. When Jones was 30, her husband and four children died of yellow fever. When Jones was 34, her dress shop was ravaged by the Great Chicago Fire. By 1902, Jones was known as “the most dangerous woman in America,” for having become a key organizer in movements surrounding the working conditions of coal mines, the enforcement of child labor laws, and the organization of unions across the United States. She also inspired the progressive magazine Mother Jones.

Isabel Allende, born in Peru to Chilean parents, has lived in Chile, Belgium, Spain, and currently in California. Celebrated for a style that incorporates magical realism, unpacks themes of Latin American history and politics, and highlights the lives of women, Allende’s writing has been translated into more than 30 languages and garnered the readership of millions. She was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

John Muir, from Scotland, 1849. Immigrating to the United States at age 11 with his family, Muir is one of the most well-recognized environmentalists and conservationists of all time. Founder of the Sierra Club, glaciologist, botanist, geologist, philosopher, and writer, his work helped preserve Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park and establish a national dialogue around conservation and naturalism.

Igor Stravinsky, from Russia, lived in Ukraine, Switzerland, France, and then moved to the United States in 1939 at age 57. One of the most celebrated composers of the 20th Century, Stravinsky is known for his technical innovations in rhythm and harmony, with The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring as some of his most well-known symphonies.

Where are we today?

There are 41 million immigrants in the United States. In 2013, 83% of people deported from the United States were not given a hearing before a judge. The United States spends $1.84 billion annually detaining immigrants. (Source: ACLU)

Immigrants' Rights

Yet, we hope that the U.S. remains a place where “even orphan immigrants can leave their fingerprints and rise up.”

Before writing this, I didn’t know Andrew Carnegie was an immigrant, or John Muir, or Mother Jones. I hadn’t heard of Kahlil Gibran or Rita Rodriguez. But that’s what participating in this great unfolding of the American narrative means—learning about and learning to love our collective stories. The stories we should celebrate extend past those of the widely celebrated—Mrs. Bissie is one of millions of immigrants whose stories are seldom told and more seldom read. So I encourage all of us to learn about these people—our people—and their journeys.

Recommended reading: Stories from Immigrant Heritage Month.

Stories - IHM 2016

12 immigrants who got the job done was originally published in The Coffeelicious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After biking down to march on Trenton yesterday, I loved seeing the pastiche of marches in parallel made all across the earth. This is a watercolor composite of all of us, marching together.

Just as our voices and our words swam in a grand orchestra to say we are here and we are capable, I have the conviction that our actions in the days that come will make history say — they were here and they invested their breath and their sweat into a better future.

Thank you, Women’s March on Washington, Women’s March on New Jersey, and women’s marches everywhere.

Women from Every Women’s March in One Watercolor was originally published in The Coffeelicious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.