[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!
Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.
In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.
I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.
When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never – ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.
Amanda Gorman — “The Hill We Climb”
Because of the millions of years passed in recent months, I have chosen to revisit and resurrect my gratitude project. On the weekiversary of an inauguration I did not watch. It is the exact perfect time to begin again my gratitude journey.
Over the next few weeks and months, I will share transcripts of gratitude conversations and essays published on my blog and elsewhere to join the gratitude chorus.
Today, darkness has metastasized into something culturally and globally recognizable. (I could elaborate on the darkness, but why? We know it. We see it. We feel it.) The election result — having slogged brokenheartedly through much of the last 8 years, catching my breath intermittently to ask how we got here while trying to understand what we do now — broke my heart. I am not alone with a broken heart.
In the wake of last week’s inauguration, in which the closest thing to poetry I could see was a call for mercy from the pulpit of the National Cathedral, I want to revisit poems from past presidential inaugurations. Knowing my gratitude project began in the throes of the 2016 election cycle, grounding this project in presidential poetry feels like an aspirational, historic, and artistic place to start.
Looking across the texts, they say something about gratitude in this moment. Each poet shares the hope that words can heal. Each poet communicates our flawed, scarred, and fearful history as the connective tissue that just might save us. Each poet speaks about promise and journey as an inclusive experiment in which we all must engage. I am grateful for the experiment we are. The experiment — the possibility of repair — must be a North Star forward. Each poem speaks in terms of a collective we. I am grateful for the unique and beautiful we we are.
Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”explains that we are a nation that is not broken but simply unfinished. Things feel very broken right now. It seems right to continue a discussion of gratitude by celebrating our unfinishedness. I am grateful for our unfinishedness in the way that I am grateful for learning from failures and starting again. I am grateful for our unfinishedness in the way that I am grateful for freedom and knowing that with freedom comes choice and power. I am grateful for our unfinishedness because it speaks to the fact our history does not bind us, we are committed to our tomorrows, and we are the powerful not yet.
I muster the strength to dust off my gratitude glasses and look at our country and world as they are and the promise of what they must become. I am energized. My task is to study gratitude and weave the threads of an almost decade-long search into a useful, hopeful, loving whole.
What will the next week, year, or decade bring? What I know for sure is that gratitude — real gratitude, the stuff of generosity, kindness, grace, story, reflection, and love — has never been more important. I am also sure that the work of gratitude is the long game. It starts now and is bigger than a writing project goal that has puttered along for years, elections that fire us up and require collective follow through, or singular, consequential, earth-shattering moments on which the future depends.
