things more of life and larger pictures
Starting a local movement. I know at least one woman living in my area who has many FB people who don't like Australia's current stance on refugees.
Job prospects for 2017.
Working out how to minister more to people-who-are-not-like-me and people-who-don't-have-my-opportunities.
Spending more time in contact with my cousin's wife, who is just starting out writing.
George Michael. Carrie Fisher. Vera Rubin.
Death is part of the cycle of life, but it's saddening, too. We miss what we lose, and sometimes only realise what we've lost once it's gone.
I think that, at a time and place in history when we see the rise of people whose purpose appears only to make our lives harder and whose nastiness - small and large - enables the personal and collective cruelty and inconsideration of others, it's hard not to watch heroes and standout leaders dying or stepping back and fearing that the age of heroes and grace and better humanity is gone.
Yes, the superhero genre is bigger than ever, but these heroes are material heroes, fighting "big wars" against "tyranny" and "injustice" - not the smaller wars against immaterial injury: casual dismissal of concern or even humanity, snideness that considers difference the same as inferiority, and microaggressions to wear people down.
And so the people who fought back against these little wars - who took what many people considered their pain and their shame and turned it around to become their strength, to own who they were and what they did, to fight back against systems that didn't want to acknowledge them as worthy people - when they are gone, the world seems a little darker, a little more lost.
I'd like to believe that such heroes will rise again: people who don't just mouth platitudes about courage and strength and truth, but who will act with grace and a touch of snark - and act in ways that stretch our acceptances by subverting norms, not so that they're normal, but that the 'norms' see and respect the people who deal with things that lie outside their realm.
Job prospects for 2017.
Working out how to minister more to people-who-are-not-like-me and people-who-don't-have-my-opportunities.
Spending more time in contact with my cousin's wife, who is just starting out writing.
George Michael. Carrie Fisher. Vera Rubin.
Death is part of the cycle of life, but it's saddening, too. We miss what we lose, and sometimes only realise what we've lost once it's gone.
I think that, at a time and place in history when we see the rise of people whose purpose appears only to make our lives harder and whose nastiness - small and large - enables the personal and collective cruelty and inconsideration of others, it's hard not to watch heroes and standout leaders dying or stepping back and fearing that the age of heroes and grace and better humanity is gone.
Yes, the superhero genre is bigger than ever, but these heroes are material heroes, fighting "big wars" against "tyranny" and "injustice" - not the smaller wars against immaterial injury: casual dismissal of concern or even humanity, snideness that considers difference the same as inferiority, and microaggressions to wear people down.
And so the people who fought back against these little wars - who took what many people considered their pain and their shame and turned it around to become their strength, to own who they were and what they did, to fight back against systems that didn't want to acknowledge them as worthy people - when they are gone, the world seems a little darker, a little more lost.
I'd like to believe that such heroes will rise again: people who don't just mouth platitudes about courage and strength and truth, but who will act with grace and a touch of snark - and act in ways that stretch our acceptances by subverting norms, not so that they're normal, but that the 'norms' see and respect the people who deal with things that lie outside their realm.