StoryMusings
My Sankofa Seed Moment
It’s kind of like that joke about the the two young fish that run into the old fish, and the old fish says, Hey, boys, how’s the water? And the young fish say, What’s water? Storytelling was the water that was all around me.
The Story of Our Stuff
As I have slept on hospital recliners, created calendars for coordinating treatment transportation and meal drop-offs, and called on networks for everything from emotional support to equipment donations, one clarion call keeps echoing in my ear. We are not doing elderhood the right way around here. It is terrifying, isolating. It can break your back and your bank.
Stranded at the Drive-In
A few years ago, I started letting go of many films in my ritual because, as someone pointed out to me, I ostensibly wanted to bring change into my life and perhaps doing the same thing over and over again was not serving that purpose. And, hello, watching He’s Just Not That Into You on Valentine’s Day was perhaps not the most efficacious way to find my semi-permanent dance partner.
Recalculating
I used to know some of this when I led orienteering activities back in my camp days. We guided kids through fun exercises in how to read maps and find posts in the woods where they would mark their papers with unique nail prints to prove they’d found their goal. This was the OG geocaching.
Dry It Up
The symptoms of suppressed rage and grief are still there, whether we acknowledge them or not. I’ve come to appreciate this as an inexorable truth. As I rankle with my own experience of whiteness, I’ve been paying particular attention to my internalized scripts around conflict. Picture a child holding her fingers in her ears, going, “Lalalalalala, I can’t hear you.” That’s pretty much how I’ve dealt with conflict…
ChatGPT, Our Stories, and The Clash
Having recently participated in a webinar about ChatGPT for nonprofits, I plugged in the parameters for a blog post on this topic. In less than 60 seconds, it spit out a fully articulated (if bland) exploration of the topic, including a laundry list of things to do to encourage or invite balance into our lives. If you don’t like it, you can hit refresh and it will do it again!!