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| ISSUE NO. 710 |
| IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK . . . the leaves are turning. Autumn is a shared favorite season for Tay and I. It always brings nostalgia with it - that sharp, so-painful-it-feels-good trigger of memories and kitchen cravings. Whether it's the weather, or the tightrope walk of world events, I've been reflecting on how fourteen years of GFJ represents all that we (you, me, and all of us) have been through together. Running GFJ has always been an exercise in friendship, collective risk-taking, and a deep, heart-centered trust in what brings us joy, inspiration, and wisdom. Seeing that reflected back to us in this community of job posters, job seekers, readers, and lifelong learners, is truly the reason that GFJ exists today. In fourteen years, we have held one another's hand through quite a lot. Welcoming babies, making mistakes, seeing beloved friends and family out of their physical selves, saying goodbye to old homes and hello to new ones, changing our minds, passing on recipes, crying without knowing why, apologizing, experimenting, and reaching out to you, again and again, week after week, to speak our minds. If I had to put GFJ away in an attic in the trunk right at this moment, the legacy I would name for all we've learned here would be: say it. Name your dreams and wishes and hopes, and make them real in the naming. Distill your truth and values and faith in the world, and speak them out loud. In the words of Audre Lorde, "For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us." It may feel to you like we are drawing closer and closer toward an unknowable, unspeakable darkness - or that we have been in that darkness for some time. When one of our team members recently shared that she is anticipating the darkness of the coming season as a gift, something to curl into and savor, I remembered that beneath the intense fear of all that darkness is the promise of how we may come out of it. Here is Mark Nepo, from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What is Sacred: "In nature, we are quietly offered countless models of how to give ourselves over to what appears dark and hopeless, but which ultimately is an awakening beyond our imagining. All around us, everything small and buried surrenders to a process that none of the buried parts can see. We call this process seeding and this innate surrender allows everything edible and fragrant to break ground into a life of light that we call Spring. As a seed buried in earth can't imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt or a mind filmed over with despair imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that, once cracking, it cracks all the way. To move through the dark into blossom is the work of the soul." As we wrote last week, a major overhaul of our behind-the-scenes website framework and programming has taken place over the last year, and we continually welcome your feedback about things that may not be working right just yet. But this week's reflection also has us thinking about what you want to see from us in the coming years. What do you miss about GFJ's past? What is working, or not working, in our present? If you could design our future, what would it include? We are here to listen - and to imagine and create a more abundant world with you.
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tidbits...resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we're reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . . 65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics, on what they saw in Gaza (NYT gift article). |
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