Words I Needed Last Week 9/26

Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Words I saved, read, wrote down, and savored last week. From finding our work and doing it to life being about feeling, to re-identifying ourselves to ourselves, to giving into joy and the rewards of risk.

Photo taken by Nneka Julia in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca on 35mm film.

Happy Monday, friends.
—Nneka

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To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.
—Audre Lorde

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I don’t believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.
—Gloria Naylor

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I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why.
—Nina Simone

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Don't Hesitate
by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

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The depths of our being are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there.”
—Miriam Simos

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As a culture, we focus on results, not on the rewards of risk. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, but we don’t tell ourselves that. Instead, we indulge in a litany of self-abusive mantras, all designed to keep us squarely at step one, or before it.

Without the freedom to fail, real creative success is impossible. The work that avoids failure avoids risk, and safe work is dull by definition.
—Julia Cameron

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for imperfect daughters
for those who do not
bow to tradition

for imperfect daughters
still trying each day
not to call themselves failures

you are here. you are becoming.
isn’t that enough?
—Ijeoma Umebinyuo