My world on the web
I recently figured out that software like Zoom lets you select different cameras and microphones on your computer, so it’s possible without much effort to quickly switch between my MacBook Pro camera, which is pointed at me, and my document camera, which is pointed at my desk, all while continuing to speak into my nice microphone.
Quite amazing what can be done now on the fly.
As I wrote in Keep Going, visiting this place is not about sticking your head in the sand. It’s about finding the quiet strength every day to center yourself so that you can do your work.
What will we look like when we emerge from our own meltdowns?
I am trying to remember: Beautiful things grow out of shit.
You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.
Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts.
A list, an assemblage, a word collage, and, in some ways, a piece of conceptual art: You don’t have to read it to feel its impact.
“Every time we make a thing, it’s a tiny triumph” is a line somebody wrote me in a letter. It’s the truth.
What if school, in fact, isn’t the best place for your kids to learn? What if you didn’t try to replicate school at home? What if you had the opportunity, now, to try something else? What if we saw this time as a radical opportunity to let our kids learn and explore their interests unfettered by the demands of the classroom? What would happen if you stopped worrying about teaching them and gave your kids the time, space, and materials to lead their own learning? What would happen if you let them in on your working life, let them see you working, involved them more deeply in the work of keeping up a house?
One of the great disconnects between me and my evangelical dad is that he wants so badly for me to believe, and if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that belief is overrated.
What I believe in is the practice, the rituals, the things to do. I know my dad fears for me and my salvation, but here I am, doing the things I learned from his example and our religion: loving my family and my neighbors as best as I can, working, saying thanks, devoting myself daily to connecting to something larger than myself, etc.
With all the talk of educational technology in the era of social distancing floating around these days, I am reminded of Neil Postman, who said, “The act of reading a book is the best example of ‘distance learning’ ever invented.”
I know lots of parents are stuck at home with kiddos right now, so I thought I’d put together a big list of my favorite resources for drawing with kids.
Along with Mo Willems’ videos, he provides a number of resources and recommendations. It is a reminder that technology is more than just a computer.
Thread by @austinkleon: Suddenly faced with not sending your kids to school? Consider NOT trying to replicate school at home right now. One ogs that good homeschooling books talk about is how there’s a “detox” period in which kids & parents re-adjust…
I’d been so focus-driven for the last few years that I hadn’t bothered to plot a point beyond the one I was focused on, and for a person with my particular brain, that is a very dangerous place to be. My brain has two drivers. And when I’m not at the wheel, depression decides to do a little driving.
It’s time to plot a new destination. And, and, and… here’s the good news: I think I’ve got one. So stay tuned because we’re going to drive there together.
If the state of politics is wearing you out as much as it is wearing me out, here are some books that have helped me keep my head in the past few years (many of them come straight from the reading list in the back of Keep Going): Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death (written 35 years ago, this seems to me to be an absolutely essential text for understanding how we got to this moment in our culture); Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing; Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching; Alan Jacobs, How To Think; Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology and Pacifism as a Map; Stefan Zweig, Montaigne; E.H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World; and Henry David Thoreau’s journals.
Sticking clippings in your books turns them into little surprises for whoever opens them next.
Shared with Dropbox
How many things that blossom and bear fruit in one year were planted as seeds years before…
That’s really what we hope for … plant a few seeds and then we go. We are all just drawing in the dirt with a stick.
No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around.
Liberty Hyde Bailey’s thoughts on gardening and how they relate to creative work.
I know poets who do not write poetry, artists who do not paint, architects who do not build. I know gardeners who do not garden.
It makes me wonder about teachers who do not teach and the importance of first and foremost caring.
