It’s not officially Spring, but the weather has shifted. The morning bats its eyes into wakefulness. Slow. Rested. Ready to rise. Sunlight flares through the windows. The grass seeds we scattered in January are now haphazard tufts of green, like lillypads across the yard. A soft breeze turns a barefoot walk to the mailbox into a little vacation. A sloshing jar of ice water proves a steady companion.
For the first time since 2021 I’ve felt pulled to revisit the nonprofit I started (called CREA, pronounced Kray-ah) in 2019 and closed in 2022. Since Harper’s birth in 2021, I could barely bring myself to give a shit. The business puttered along until last May, but I was hardly maintaining partnerships and stopped all community programming. I attribute this to burnout, overwhelm, maybe a nihilism that unknowingly grew in me over the course of the pandemic. Something about making a thing - even if it was social-impact minded - and then trying to sell it - even if it was subsidized by fundraising dollars!?! Gross. Something about the task of promoting a curriculum or a program or a learning tool amidst all the sad realities of schooling felt impossible, dark, like a silly, self-aggrandizing pursuit. Maybe this was cultural (did you all feel it too?), or maybe it was personal. But with the virus, the political polarization, racism, gun violence, police brutality, antisemitic picketers outside my children’s daycare, disputes in my own family about vaccination and masking…I guess I see why I couldn’t bring myself to get on a Zoom call to talk about something I made.
I am not undermining the work I did at CREA. Actually, as I write this, I see CREA as especially important amidst all the things listed above! I just see its importance differently. In fact, I see importance…as a concept differently. I think one of the consequences of the events and the climate we all lived (and are living) through is that it shook up my view of impact, and it’s just now reconfiguring.
What I mean is for a while everything felt too big to move or too small to matter.
We saw all sorts of cultural responses to this unsettling feeling - virtue signaling, quiet quitting, romanticizing our daily lives, “rotting in bed” memes. All of which - in their unique ways, seem to signal collective disillusion with the grandeur of a single person’s impact, purpose, legacy, and control of their future…our future. We couldn’t control much, so we looked for meaning in sourdough, a hot girl walk, reposting activist infographics. And I’m not saying these things are frivolous. Actually, that’s maybe the opposite of what I’m saying. Everything matters and nothing does.
We oscillate endlessly between the profound and the prosaic, and maybe that’s a false dichotomy, too. They are one and the same.
The big is small. The small is big.
Promote your business. Make your art, or sourdough, or a microwaved meal. The importance is that it is. The importance is in the sip of coffee and the win at work. It’s in the staying, its in the quitting, its in the stagnation. It’s in the wedding, the birth, the funeral, and the bills, the grocery receipts, the laundry lint.
Yesterday, I took my kids to story time at the Library. We go every Thursday. This time I tucked a card deck I’d designed into my purse. I recently rediscovered this deck, which I’d made with a local artist in 2021. Aligned with the mission of CREA, the deck was meant to inspire creative project ideas. With three categories: materials, art form, and tone, kids would pull a card from each category and be presented with something like - COLLECTED OBJECTS / ADVENTUROUS / SELF-PORTRAIT. They could keep pulling, mix and match, until something sparked an idea and they felt compelled to create. For this first time in over a year, I flipped through the deck. I saw its beauty, intention, potential. I felt inspired!
So, I gave one to the Librarian! I didn’t make a meeting with a nonprofit program manager, or a school principal, or the buyer for the children’s museum gift shop, all things I did in another season of my life. All things that were good and decently fruitful, but also didn’t lead to the big response I’d envisioned. I just gave it to the Librarian. She said thank you. We moved on. It mattered and it didn’t!
With love,
Stephanie
Four Things I loved this week:
This podcast inspired me to start morning pages again. Loving the practice. So many good nuggets in here that also reinvigorated my own belief in the importance of creatively expressing — especially in school spaces!
This poem from the podcast linked above.
“This is a great happiness. The air is silk. There is milk in the looks that come from strangers. I could not be happier if I were bread and you could eat me. Joy is dangerous. It fills me with secrets. Yes. Kisses in my veins. The pains I take to hide myself are sheer as glass. Surely this will pass. The wind like kisses. The music in the soup. The group of trees laughing as I say their names, it is all Hosanna. It is all prayer. Jerusalem is walking in this world. Jerusalem is walking in this world.” - Julia Cameron
This article, especially the bell hooks quote included in the excerpt below.
Black Archives conveys the idea that family snapshots and portraits can serve as a respite from the outside world and its gaze. Whether it’s a shirtless father holding his newborn, couples leaning into each other, or children frolicking in winter’s first snowfall, the subjects are all seemingly comfortable in their skin. The vulnerability that each photo telegraphs connotes trust between the photographer and the subject. Of this sort of documentary, bell hooks once wrote, “To enter black homes in my childhood was to enter a world that valued the visual, that asserted our collective will to participate in a noninstitutionalized curatorial process … Photographs taken in everyday life, snapshots in particular, rebelled against all those photographic practices that reinscribed colonial ways of looking and capturing the images of the black ‘other.’” As a result, these depictions reflect family members with a softness and whimsy.