I wasn’t actually planning on including a Mother’s* Day post in this email, but this one, unfortunately, slapped me so hard in the face with its opening lines that I really didn’t have a choice:

I would be shocked if anyone doing the work of caring for small humans right now — not just mothers, not even just parents, but teachers, nannies, nurses, guardians, caregivers of all kinds — doesn’t feel this kind of responsibility. It’s something I think about daily: How, in the midst of this terror and despair, do we not just get through the day, but also continue to teach these new human beings that there is still so much love and joy and beauty to found?

The shortest answer I have found is: We teach them by showing them. And if there is no immediate love and joy and beauty around us, we show them how to make it ourselves.

It’s something we see in movements everywhere, globally and here in the U.S. It’s work that needs to be done, constantly, individually and systematically. This article quotes a recent interview with Ashely Fairbanks, who helped start the Stand with Minnesota group: “We’re building a helper reflex where, instead of encountering a problem and saying that we can’t do anything, we’re just trying to do it.”

What (or who) are you caring for, and what does that work look like? What are the parts of caregiving that fill you with joy? What parts exhaust you, physically or emotionally or mentally or all of the above? What are the communities of care that sustain you in the work of caregiving, whatever or whoever it is you care for, even (especially!) if what you are caring for is your own precious soul? What has caretaking taught you about creativity — and vice versa?

Prompt: Think of a caretaker in your life who has shaped you into who you are as a person and as a creative. Write them a letter acknowledging three things you learned from them, even if you don’t or can’t send it. Create about it.

You didn’t really think I’d get through a whole newsletter without hating on AI, did you? Come on, besties, you know me better than that.

I have a lot of friends who work in education, and the exhaustion they tell me about when it comes to the pressure they’re under to allow, incorporate, and/or encourage the use of AI as a tool in their classrooms and lecture halls is palpably heavy.

What I wish we saw more of, and what I love so much about this piece, is the ways in which educators can bring the existence of AI into the classroom without bringing in its use — specifically, and intentionally, by showing what makes humanity so magical: Not just what we can do, creatively, but the legacy of creativity in all its forms. Reflecting on teaching a well-known Middle English lyric, Westron Wind, Turner writes,

She goes on,

Where do you find human-ness in your creative work? What are the mistakes, the anachronisms, the quirks, the little signatures that make your work unmistakably human? What would it feel like to treasure each of those things for what they are — fundamentally yours, in a way that is impossible to recreate?

Prompt: Take the three nearest books and open each to a random page. Write down the first full sentence from each page. What makes each one unique? What do they have in common? Would you have written them differently? How, why, or why not? Create about it.

This is a long interview and gets into a lot of historical and movement-related topics, and I recommend reading the whole thing. If you don’t, though, here’s the takeaway that stuck with me the most:

I think about this a lot, as I see more and more conversations (online and off) popping up about what obligations, if any, those of us who Did Not Vote For This Bullshit have for those who did, as more and more of them begin to realize that the emperor not only has no clothes, but has actually been burning everyone else’s clothes while they’re still wearing them. I think about this, because there is no universe in which we wake up one morning and find ourselves completely apart from those who would do — or have done — us harm, and even in the most Nuremberg of Nuremberg 2.0 scenarios, will need to learn to live with each other.

Which means that even the most discordant instruments, to use Solnit’s metaphor here, need to figure out how to be in the same orchestra.

That’s where hope comes in. Hope in the most actionable sense, the most disciplined, the most practiced. Because it would have to be, to imagine building communities where we have learned not from the worst of history but from the best of it, and chosen to follow those paths to the best possible ends.

At one point in this interview, paraphrasing theologian Walter Brueggemann, Solnit quotes, “memory breeds hope in the same way amnesia breeds despair.” What does this mean to you? (Compare it to that other oft-quoted motto, “those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.”) What does it mean to find hope in memory, when so much of the history we’re taught is full of violence and despair? Why do you think that is the history we’re taught, when there is so much more to our collective past and present? What would it be like to teach from a place of hope?

Prompt: Set a timer for five to ten minutes. On a blank piece of paper, write your own name in the middle. Around the page, write down as many of the people and communities you’re connected to as you can think of — online, offline, past, present, positively, negatively, within your household, a world or a generation or a history away. When the timer goes off, draw lines connecting as many of those other circles as you can to one another, not just to yourself. What do you discover? Create about it.

“If you were stranded on a desert island and already had the essentials of survival, what five other things would you bring?”

“If your house was on fire and you could only grab three things, what would you take?”

“What five things would someone put on the corners of a pentagram to summon you?”

We spend, as humans, a lot of time making up hypotheticals about what we would use to reconstruct our homes in the off chance that we suddenly had to leave our current homes behind. As climate change intensifies and its impact becomes increasingly visible on a global scale, these conversations become less and less hypothetical. Political violence, too, is escalating, adding another dimension to the question of what it would be like to suddenly need to flee. After the 2024 election, my partner sent me a list of things he wanted to put into an emergency bag on the chance that things escalated and we (a queer Jewish family with at least one queer child) needed to get out, fast.

His list was primarily practicalities: Documents, medications, clothing, cash, emergency supplies, solar batteries. Mine was primarily not: Family photos, our children’s favorite books, my favorite tarot deck. His father’s ring, my grandmother’s Shabbat candlesticks and the challah cover she embroidered us for our wedding, his grandfather’s kiddish cup.

I still remember the look he gave me at the idea of bundling Grandma’s brass candlesticks into the duffle next to backup meds and extra socks and plastic baggies of dog food. I shrugged right back, and said, “You’re thinking about surviving. I’m thinking about whatever comes after that.”

What does home become, when it can’t be a place? Poets have been asking that question — and answering it — again and again and again, but we keep asking it. Because there is something deeply human about the terror of losing our place in the world, losing the safety of having a place to call home even if that home is not safe at all. Home becomes people, becomes communities, becomes music and poetry and sex and laughter and food and connection. Home becomes anywhere we can still find love, even as the planet burns. And when (when, not if, I believe this to the deepest parts of my soul) we soothe the earth to safety, and we can put down roots again, home will still, always, be love.

How does the idea of “home” show up in your creative work? What has home meant to you, over the course of your life? Has it always been a place? If not, what else has it been? Have you ever found home in an unexpected place (or person, or experience, etc)? What did that feel like? What surprised you the most?

Prompt: Write yourself a hypothetical “go bag” packing list of sentimental items you would take with you in an emergency (assume, for this exercise, that your loved ones — human and otherwise — are safe, and don’t need to be packed). What would you pack? Why? Create about it.

Sir David Attenborough is one of those people whose name in a headline fills me with immediate terror until I’ve confirmed that it’s not about him dying. (In case you were wondering, other people in this category include Alan Alda, Jane Fonda, Ian McKellan, and George Takei. People in the opposite category include — well. You can guess.)

In my neck of the woods, yesterday was cold, rainy, and generally miserable, and I spent a bunch of it with my kids showing them Planet Earth II. Watching the two of them experience the very particular way Attenborough narrates the natural world — richly enough to entertain adults, accessibly enough to enchant children — was almost as lovely as actually watching the animals.

There’s something magical about watching children experience the natural world, and even more magical about watching them start to think genuinely about their place in it. I’m thinking, again, about the first article in this roundup, about the work of showing the next generation that this world is wondrous and beautiful and good.

It’s hard to imagine even the most indoor of indoor kids learning about the vastness of the wonders of the natural world and not being at least the tiniest bit curious to learn more. There is just so, so much — not just so much there, but so much still to discover. As much of the natural world as we’ve lost and destroyed (and it is so, so much of it), there is still so much here. Attenborough, at 100, has probably seen more of it than most of us ever will, and even still, he’s curious. Still wondering. Still excited to discover.

What would it be like, I wonder, if more of us were more like him?

What are the things that, no matter how old you get or how much you learn, still fill you with wonder and curiosity? What do you remember about the first time you learned about them? The most recent? What is it that keeps bringing you back, wanting to discover more? Do you think you can learn all there is to know? Would you want to? What would you do with that knowledge, if you did?

Prompt: The next time you’re outside in a familiar place — in your back yard, at your favorite park, the patio of your local coffee shop — spend five to ten minutes observing your surroundings as if you’ve never seen them before. What do you see? Hear? Smell? What has always been around you that you’ve never noticed? Create about it.

Beloveds, I’m going to be so fucking real with you: There is not a chance in hell that I can do this interview justice. It is so, so fucking good, and I simply need you to just. Listen to it. Because it is so good. It’s about performance and disability and activism and queerness and glowing up and growing up and music and joy and creativity and movement, and it’s just! So good. Please listen to it.

But if you really can’t (boo), here, I think, is one of the very best takeaways, and one that I have already written down to stick to my desk for the Bad Days:

How are you practicing being alive? What are the tangible, physical experiences that remind you that you are part of the world? What are the things that make you step away from your screens and tune yourself back into your environment, your body, your soul? What are the trees that fill you up with oxygen just by being in their presence, the way their image on a screen never could?

Prompt: The meditation teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote, “There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.” This week, choose any brief, everyday task — making coffee, washing dishes, getting dressed, brushing your teeth — and do it as if it were the most important thing in the world. What do notice? Create about it.