When you are expecting nothing
a letter arrives
and someone decides for you.
Your arms fall to your sides,
your hands open.

You dress for the weather
in your gold moccasins
and prepare for long journeys
to distant countries.
​
-Message for the Disheartened, Patricia Fargnoli

In a week it would be Thanksgiving, 
and we would each sit with our respective 
families, counting our blessings and blessing 
the hearts of family members as only family 
does best. Oh, bless us all, yes, bless us, please
bless us and bless our crummy little hearts.
​
-Richard Newman, Bless Their Hearts

And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
​
-Wendell Berry

​​Over the past couple of years, I've been spending a fair bit of time reflecting on my internalized biases and my responsibilities toward groups I'm not part of, whether by intention or accident. In part, this was brought about by the murder of Michael Brown in 2014 and the deep and unsettling knowledge that Ferguson, Missouri is very, very close to the town where I was born and where much of my family still resides. The white people of Ferguson and the St. Louis area are, in many ways, my people. 

​The last five years have left me with a very complicated relationship with compensation-for-work. From a field where internship culture is overwhelming (politics) to one where unpaid practica and volunteerism are part of what sustains the system (public libraries) to working for myself in a caring profession (doula) right on down through my last "job" in which I was really an expenses-reimbursed volunteer and my current creative pursuits, I'm acutely aware that unpaid or underpaid labor keeps a lot of important doors open and a great many fundamental wheels turning.