Words I Needed Last Week 3/24
Everything is on fire.
Hey Friends,
A brief but necessary “words I needed” intermission while I edit the next letter.
You’ll find a few words I read, wrote down, and savored last week: from everything being on fire to playing your own way to always going to funerals and answering the call to creative work.
Last week I was in the throws of shooting my largest project to date, Passing Through: The Highlands, a short film premiering at Camp Film Festival this April (before I take it on a lil’ tour this spring).
I feel nervous. excited. exhausted. grateful. anxious. overwhelmed. overcommitted. overstretched. and ALIVE.
I feel alive.
Post-production begins, my friends. Wish me luck!
Sharing some bts stills from the shoot week, by Jac Martinez, as well :)
—Nneka
“Everything is on fire,
but everyone I love is doing beautiful things
and trying to make life worth living,
and I know I don’t have to believe in everything,
but I believe in that.”
—Nikita Gill
“Understand me…I do not have time for things that have no soul.”
—Charles Bukowski
“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”
—Robert Brault
“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don’t really have to and I definitely don’t want to. I’m talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex’s uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.”
—Deirdre Sullivan
"Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing...even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."
—Thelonious Monk
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
—Wendell Berry
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
―Mary Oliver
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
—Albert Camus
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everything is on fire 😮💨😩
This one lit a fire under my chest. “Doing good vs. doing nothing” is the realest kind of daily war—and you captured the ache, the resistance, and the beauty of answering the call anyway. Thank you for sharing the words you needed. I needed them too.