issue no. 783

RECENTLY, I CAUGHT UP WITH A DEAR FRIEND. . .

Someone I’ve known for 25 years. So when we had to schedule and reschedule our phone date, I knew we would eventually connect. And when we finally spoke, she told me that she’d been signed up to this newsletter for years, but had never received one. Until a few months ago, that is, when we switched from our old email host to Substack.

But what she really wanted to tell me was how much time and effort clearly went into this weekly missive. She wanted to know…”Have you been doing this the whole time?”

To which I replied, “By ‘this whole time’, do you mean the last fifteen years?”

We had a good laugh, and I got to thinking about how you can be so connected to someone - like a friend you love but rarely speak to - and still miss things. That same week, looking up a book on a publisher’s website, I noticed a pop-up window calling out to enter my email and ‘never miss another book from…’ It was the kind of thing I see all the time, and often respond to, gladly giving my email to stay connected with something that matters to me. But it gave me pause.

Of all the things that matter to me, reading and writing are very high on the list. Sometimes I wonder why they matter so much, and I have a lot of reasons I could delve into…but for now I’ll simply share that the connection we make through story - whether it’s a poem, a memoir, a sci-fi novel, an interview in a magazine, or a comic book - seems as vital to me as blood and oxygen. What would we be, we humans wandering the earth, if we didn’t have stories in us? And, yes, that can be in a grand, timeless, Prize-Winning Story kind of way, but it occurs across the whole spectrum - everything from what you had for breakfast to the color of the flowers blooming on a stranger’s stoop.

I’m in the process of putting my first book out into the world. I am uniquely aware - sometimes uncomfortably aware - of the temptation of that sentiment to ‘never miss’ an update, a story, a chance to connect. Connection is, in fact, why I make an effort to share my work at all. And maybe it’s because I’m an amateur at publicity, but I do think there is something mysterious that we can’t orchestrate about those connections. As much as it’s worthwhile to publicize, to ‘put yourself out there,’ I have a hint of a suspicion that it’s actually impossible to ‘never miss’ anything. And I’m wary of the fact that the pressure to attempt to try feels defeating even before the moment of contact.

In my daily life, I sometimes imagine a little creature inside me - the one desperate for connection - crouching over my to-do list in the dark, hoping it will stave off disaster in the form of loneliness or failure. Thinking that if only there were just something I could do to make that sense of connection permanent. And it makes me notice how, when our cell phones give off a false source of light, it becomes even harder to notice that we are not actually in the light at all.

There may be no way to fully divest from these challenges. In fact, when we attempt to do things ‘never’ or ‘always’ - in other words, with a drive toward perfectionism - the side effect is that we put our connectivity in peril. Because the connection we seek often comes in very small, unpredictable, and unexpected packages.

When I hold on too tightly to something that is already a part of myself, I get tired more quickly, and it becomes easier to lose faith. Meanwhile, the truth is that knowing connection is as abundant as love, as abundant as creative energy, as abundant as spirit, is as simple as believing it to be so. It’s faith as a verb, instead of a noun. Our connections grow by design, and by default, but they are always growing.

As we made the shift over to Substack, we weighed pros and cons over many months. The wish that we could somehow make one perfectly right decision weighed on us. Meanwhile, someone I love was in the dark on the emails we were already sending. Thankfully, we connected with her, but I hesitate to say that it was through any intentional effort on our part. To me it feels more like a moment of mystery. A little bit of magic in the timing. I want to believe that’s how everyone finds our newsletter, one way or another: just when they needed to.

In Connection,

Dor + Tay

photo by Azra Sadr

tidbits...

resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we’re reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . .

Do One Small Thing . . . honor the tiny connections in your life this week. When the still, small voice says to act on a connection, and the voice of ‘better safe than sorry’ comes in to dissuade you, try overriding it. What small points of connection do you notice happening? We’d love to hear about them.

Dor’s first book, Imagine a Woman, is now available for pre-order. See a preview of the Table of Contents, and read a brand new poem from the book in the latest issue of What the Wolf Wore.

Not a Good Woman is the latest brilliant study group from one of the world’s most activating thinkers, Toi Smith. Learn more about how you can be a part of this transformative learning opportunity.

Looking for a summer weekend retreat in the New York area? How about one that’s hosted on an herb farm ? Check out Camp Wild from Sōlidago Wellness.

CHOW put together a resource folder for Mental Health Awareness Month.

What can YOU do about the Supreme Court’s blow to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act? According to Community Voices Heard, three things: register to vote, tell Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and urge your representatives to pass the Freedom to Vote Act.

It’s free to read and share the poet Richard Blanco’s “Mother Country,” from his book, How to Love a Country.

Next Tuesday, May 19, join Prentis Hemphill, Sonya Renee Taylor, adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs for the Imposing Beauty on Our Future salon.

Humans/Being is a new photo journal from the wonderful folks at The Bitter Southerner, with each quarterly issue focusing on one photographer and one body of work.

Stephanie Krzywonos writes on how Artificial intelligence overrides the mystery of how, and with what, we make meaning.

“Since 2021, a growing network of farmers’ groups and civil society organisations around the world have come together to oppose the corporate takeover of seed systems and demand the dismantling of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), an international treaty signed by 80 countries to protect private plant breeders’ rights.” - A Growing Culture on Who Keeps Seeds Alive.

View and share this free guide to How to Write a More Equitable Job Post, and stay tuned for new resources to deepen this work.

got a tidbit? drop it here for us and we’ll share it in next week’s newsletter.