diogenes tries to forget by Mary Karr

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “The Lamp and the Bell,” published c. 1921

Victoria Chang

happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !

"anything worth doing is worth doing badly"............."not failing as he fell but just coming to the end of his triumph"......goodnight (it's noon)

BEE LB, from "friction polish"

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[“The reason to do repentance work is not because you are BAD BAD BAD until you DO THESE THINGS but because we should care about each other, about taking care of each other, about making sure we’re all OK. Taking seriously that I might have hurt you—even inadvertently! even because I wasn’t at my best!—is an act of love and care. It is an opportunity to open my heart wider than it has been, to let in more empathy, more curiosity about how my choices or knee-jerk reactions have impacted you, have impacted others. To care about others’ perspectives. To let your experience matter, deeply, to me. To look at another person—or a community, or a team of people—and say: Where are you? What are you feeling and experiencing now, and how might I have (even unwittingly) brought you pain or difficulty? And to care about making that as right as I can. It’s an act of concern. And facing the harm that I caused is an act of profound optimism. It is a choice to grow, to learn, to become someone who is more open and empathetic.

It’s also important to remember that sincere repentance work isn’t the same as self-flagellation—in fact, the latter can become a convenient way to stay stuck in inaction. We probably all know at least one person who, when told they have done something harmful, will go deep into their feelings and their reasons and the ways they were acting out of their pain, and they feel so bad and they know that it’s so not OK and on and on. And yet—they don’t focus on the needs of the person they hurt, and they don’t do the work to change.

It’s also useful to note that accountability and punishment are not the same thing. (Sometimes being accountable involves facing significant consequences, to be sure, but they are two distinct concepts.) As Danielle Sered notes in her powerful book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, “Forms of punishment that do not include the human reckoning of accountability and the human grappling of remorse rely exclusively on extrinsic motivation—a threat from outside. One of the effects of accountability is to help foster people’s intrinsic motivation, which manifests in part as remorse.” That is to say, we can think of punishment as coming only from the outside, and accountability as inviting or pushing people to do the work from within.

Accountability can feel vulnerable, scary, and even painful, but it has integrity and allows us to move forward. It moves us out of avoidance, blame, and denial, and into the reality of what we’ve done—we finally face it bravely and begin to learn and grow from the experience. It’s not always easy or comfortable, but it’s crucially important—for us, for those we’ve hurt, and for anyone we meet in the future.”]

rabbi danya ruttenberg, from on repentance and repair: making amends in an unapologetic world, 2022

not doing something wrong isn’t the same as doing something right by cristin o'keefe aptowicz

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

as we discuss the circumstances that can lead to acts of protest such as self-immolation, let us not forget that many gazans (such as ehab abu nada and fathi harb) in years past have also self immolated in protest of the israeli blockade on gaza. this has also been a form of protest among palestinians in the occupied west bank as well.

Mary Oliver, from “Hum Hum”, A Thousand Mornings

Andrea Gibson, Birthday

Summer Morning

by Mary Oliver

Heart, I implore you, it’s time to come back from the dark, it’s morning, the hills are pink and the roses whatever they felt in the valley of night are opening now their soft dresses, their leaves are shining. Why are you laggard? Sure you have seen this a thousand times, which isn’t half enough. Let the world have its way with you, luminous as it is with mystery and pain– graced as it is with the ordinary.

This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!

my girlfriend has been talking about this since ancestry kits became A Thing

Natalie Wee, from "Asami Writes to Korra for Three Years"

Bryce Emley, from "A List of Waters"

emmy winners