One of the books I’ve been recommending to people left and right over the past few months is Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis. Edited by Kelly Hayes (who I quote all the time in this newsletter), the book is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of letters from seasoned organizers and activists offering lessons, advice, wisdom, and hope to all of us trying to figure out what the fuck we’re supposed to be doing in this moment.

This article is a letter excerpted from the book, and it’s one I particularly like because while it’s aimed toward young people, but its lessons are just as important for those of us who are older and more jaded. Specifically, it offers some deeply valuable reminders to the “fuck it, just burn it down” crowd (primarily able-bodied white men with some level of privilege, let’s be real) that things are, in fact, already burning — but that doesn’t mean we should feed the flames.

One of the questions I hear all the time in conversations about dismantling our existing systems of privilege and violence is, “well, what would you do instead?” as if it’s some kind of gotcha to not have an immediate answer ready to go. There’s an incredible lack of cultural ability, especially in mainstream circles, to lean into the not-knowing, and to give space for creative ideation. Showing up in this moment isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about having an idea of the arc we want our future to take, and doing whatever we can to set that world in motion. Or, as Kaba says much more eloquently:

How comfortable are you with uncertainty? What does it feel like to be confronted with a sense of not-knowing — whether that’s not knowing what to expect, not knowing what’s happening next, or not knowing the answer to a question? How do you respond? What role does uncertainty (or not play) in your creative work, and in the way you show up?

Prompt: This week, make an effort to experiment with uncertainty. Take a walk without a planned route, flipping a coin at each corner to determine your next turn. Use something like the “What’s for Dinner Wheel” to decide your next meal. Go on a blind date with a book. However you experiment, pay attention not to the outcome, but to those in-between moments when you don’t know what will happen next: when the coin is up in the air, while the wheel is spinning, as you pull away the paper covering the title. What do you notice? Create about it.

Conversations about censorship in schools right now are primarily focusing on book bans, bathroom bans, and forced-outing bills — all of which are horrendous and terrible and need both attention and to be stopped.

But something that doesn’t get nearly as much coverage is the censorship of music.

Arts programs in schools are a lifeline for queer and trans kids everywhere. The creative fields have always been more inclusive and open than the mainstream, and often, that starts in middle and high school. How many of us weird queer kids spent our lunch periods hanging out with the band director or in the theater instead of in the cafeteria? I’m going to guess many.

(Shout out to Mr. Rizzo, thanks for the cookie dough from your mini fridge! Sorry we were supposed to use that for the fundraiser, but. Well. Cookie dough.)

For better or worse, these days, censorship happening in schools is less newsworthy than the response it receives. In this particular case, after a school board in Watertown, Wisconsin voted 7-1 to block the high school wind symphony from performing “A Mother of A Revolution” (an instrumental piece honoring Marsha P. Johnson), the response was an outpouring of solidarity and community care. High school students staged a walkout. So did middle school students. A community organization worked with a local church to host a space for the band to perform the piece.

More than five hundred people turned up to listen — including the original composer, who didn’t just attend the production but actually conducted the student musicians.

There’s a fairly well-known protest slogan that goes, “the power of the people is stronger than the people in power.” Moments like this are a reminder of just how true that is. Watch the concert recording — and if you have the time, go read the comments. For once, I promise, it’s worth it.

What does defiance mean to you? Is it a trait? An action? A state of mind? Is it transient, or permanent? Innate, or able to be cultivated? How comfortable are you with defying rules, norms, expectations? Does defiance show up in your creative work? How?

Prompt: This week, make an effort to say “no” at least three times when someone asks something of you. It could be a gentle refusal to take on more work, a firm setting of a boundary, a hard snap against an order — wherever the opportunities arise and are safe to take. What does it feel like to draw that line? To do something (or not do something) other than what someone else wants? Create about it.

For many people, losing a pet is their first real, personal experience with grief. When my family’s first cat died, I don’t remember whether I was in first grade or second, or what I was wearing, but I do remember that it was the first time I saw my mom cry, and the first time I had to wrap my head around something significant changing in my family in a way that wasn’t joyful.

I also remember that my mom — who had had that particular cat for almost 20 years — went right back to work.

In contrast, when my dog Sammi died just over a year ago, I took almost the full week off work. It wasn’t paid time off, because I’m a self-employed freelancer, but I didn’t have to ask permission, and I knew I wouldn’t do good work anyway. But more importantly, everyone who I worked with understood, immediately, that this was a loss, and it mattered, and that it was human and normal to need time and space to grieve.

There were about thirty years between those two pet deaths. But I think the bigger difference is that where my mom worked for a giant law firm, I work primarily with (cis and trans) women, nonbinary and gender-expansive people, queer people, and people of color — aka, all people who are not just often up close and personal with grief, but also with caring for others through it.

s.e. smith’s new book, All My Dead Cats, uses the framing of pet deaths as an entry point into how we talk about grief — culturally, politically, communally. “The circumstances of a death, how people react to it — all of that interacts with society and culture,” they said in this interview.

smith is a particularly insightful culture critic, and this book is no exception to that — it’s been on my radar since it was announced. Learning to understand and process grief not as an individual experience but as a cultural phenomenon and grieving as an expression of what a culture values is only going to get more important. Certainly it will get more important before it becomes less so.

It’s not just that we all deserve to mourn, if we need to. It’s that we all deserve to be mourned. Every loved life — which is every life, to someone — is deserving of that.

How do you relate to grief as a cultural phenomenon? How do your own personal values and experiences impact how you understand grief, how you respond to grief in others, how you’ve offered support to mourners? What experiences have you had with collective or communal grief, and how have others responded to you in moments when you are grieving? How have those experiences impacted your creative work? How do you show up for others — individuals or communities —when they are grieving?

Prompt: Take some time this week to explore grief and mourning rituals for a culture or community other than your own — or to go deeper into learning about your own culture’s grief and mourning practices, if you’ve never learned about them before. What do you discover? Create about it.

Okay, well, that was heavy! Let’s close out with some whimsy, shall we?

Presented utterly without context or apology, this was a lovely virtual nature walk, and a reminder that everything can be a source of wonder and delight and joy if we pay it enough attention. In a loud, busy world with constant competition for our attention, that’s harder than it sounds — but that’s what makes it worth it.

When was the last time you acknowledged the loveliness of ordinary things? What did you see that made you pay attention, and why did it draw you in? How did it feel to look (or listen, or smell, or touch) with intention and wonder? How long were you able to carry that feeling with you? What are the tiny, ordinary details in your creative works that you hope others will greet with that same wonder, and why?

Prompt: In her poem “instructions for living a life,” Mary Oliver wrote three simple lines: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” This week, make time to follow those instructions, and one more: Create about it.