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(Short Essays, Nonfiction)
"...a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves."

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"Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things-the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this-joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy."

"I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that's really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what's too high, or what's been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always."

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"Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things-the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this-joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away.

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(TV)
"Teens Charlie and Nick discover their unlikely friendship might be something more as they navigate school and young love in this coming-of-age series."

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Hi, gay here! To all of us, children from the 90s who went through hell in school this still seems like twilight zone or something but it is coming, finally teachers are paying attention, and that behaviour is not accepted, not ignored (aka accepted) anymore.

It was really lovely, not woke, not preachy, a really, very down to earth story about acceptance, coming to terms about what, and who you are, and the person you love.

I'm already waiting for season 2.

PS: Niiiiiiiiiiice that finally directors and such stopped portratying us basically doing drugs, sleeping with almost everyone, being half drags, overly feminine, etc. And all that other awful places gay people were portrayed for decades. More of this, please. A story of love, we truly need more of those. :)

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Hi, gay here! To all of us, children from the 90s who went through hell in school this still seems like twilight zone or something but it is coming, finally teachers are paying attention, and that behaviour is not accepted, not ignored (aka accepted) anymore.

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"FAVIANNA RODRIGUEZ is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom"

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Dinner Party - Freeze Tag (feat. Phoelix)

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Leon Bridges - Don't Worry (Official Audio) ft. Ink

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(Graphic Novel)
"Charlie, a highly-strung, openly gay over-thinker, and Nick, a cheerful, soft-hearted rugby player, meet at a British all-boys grammar school. Friendship blooms quickly, but could there be something more...?"

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i went into this expecting a heart-skipping-a-beat level of adorable.

and much as it hurts my hateful heart to admit it...i'd call this a success.

i hate writing graphic novel reviews, so here's a sentence:

this was cute and nice and i liked the art even if it felt like the shortest thing ever. and if the emotional aspect didn't always hit.

(bonus half sentence so i can be a grump.)

---------------

reading all books with LGBTQ+ rep for pride this month!

book 1: the gravity of us
book 2: the great americ...more

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i went into this expecting a heart-skipping-a-beat level of adorable. and much as it hurts my hateful heart to admit it...i'd call this a success. i hate writing graphic novel reviews, so here's a sentence: this was cute and nice and i liked the art even if it felt like the shortest thing ever.

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(Nonfiction)
"As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. "

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Read 10.9k reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the …

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(Graphic Novel, Memoir)
"Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere."

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A memoir by someone so much like me, yet at the same time so unlike me.

A few times I had to set it down and cry. Be forewarned that I can't even pretend to aspire to objectivity, and brace yourselves for a review that's going to be more about me than about the book. Or move along if that (understandably) doesn't appeal to you.

The graphic novel format lends itself well to Maia Kobabe's story, perhaps because it adds a playful element that complements the sheer quirkiness of eir life experience.

T...more

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A memoir by someone so much like me, yet at the same time so unlike me. A few times I had to set it down and cry. Be forewarned that I can't even pretend to aspire to objectivity, and brace yourselves for a review that's going to be more about me than about the book.

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(Poetry)
"Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things"

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I began my time with these poems while in the high hills, in a sunny meadow brimming with daisies and birdsong and surrounded by deodars stretching out to meet the sky-so you see how I felt these verses, completely entangled in the way in which Mary Oliver wrote, her unsophisticated but ecstatic dispensing of hope like a clear and sweet stream set never to run out.

Poetry can describe many a feeling with astounding accuracy, but there is no describing poetry. Instead, I will attach here one of m...more

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I began my time with these poems while in the high hills, in a sunny meadow brimming with daisies and birdsong and surrounded by deodars stretching out to meet the sky-so you see how I felt these verses, completely entangled in the way in which Mary Oliver wrote, her unsophisticated but ecstatic dispensing of hope like a clear and sweet stream set never to run out.

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(Nonfiction)
Bicycle/Race paints an unforgettable picture of Los Angeles—and the United States—from the perspective of two wheels. This is a book of borderlands and intersections, a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting infrastructure before culture, and a coming-of-age story about power and identity.

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I started reading this book expecting to learn about the best practices in bike advocacy but was pleasantly surprised to read a memoir of a bike advocate. Adonia E. Lugo writes about her experience working on racial equity in bike advocacy as a mixed race Chicanx anthropologist. Bike advocacy, and transportation in general, is dominated by White engineers in the US, and focuses on solutions that disproportionately hurt racially and economically disadvantaged communities.

Focusing on urban des
...more

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I started reading this book expecting to learn about the best practices in bike advocacy but was pleasantly surprised to read a memoir of a bike advocate. Adonia E. Lugo writes about her experience working on racial equity in bike advocacy as a mixed race Chicanx anthropologist.

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Nonbinary Memoirs of Gender and Identity

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Nonbinary Memoirs of Gender and Identity

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(Short Stories, Memoir)
"The powerful first-person narratives of this collection show us a world where gender exists along a spectrum, a web, a multidimensional space. Nuanced storytellers break away from mainstream portrayals of gender diversity, cutting across lines of age, race, ethnicity, ability, class, religion, family, and relationships."

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Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity

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Read 112 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. What happens when your gender doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of male or female? Ev…

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(Memoir)
"A self-described “amateur” at masculinity, McBee embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of gender in society, examining sexism, toxic masculinity, and privilege. As he questions the limitations of gender roles and the roots of masculine aggression, he finds intimacy, hope, and even love in the experience of boxing and in his role as a man in the world."

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"Sarah DiMuccio, an American researcher and PhD student at New York University, published a paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinity that offered a simple, cultural definition of that type of manhood that stuck with me. Comparing the Danish idea of masculinity with the American one, she found that the major difference between them was that in Denmark, men said to 'be a man' meant not being a boy.

American men said that to 'be a man' was to not be a woman.

That is, Niobe Way says, where all the trouble starts. If being 'feminine' is the opposite of being a man, then many qualities that Americans associate with women (such as empathy, which shows up in boys as well as girls) are not just frowned upon, but destroyed in boyhood. 'You're only a man by not being a woman,' Way told me. 'That's basing someone's humanness on someone else's dehumanization."

"The next time I found myself behind a woman running alone, I thought, I would do what I wished men had done for me: I would announce myself. 'Passing on your right!' I'd call. I would be careful to give her a wide berth. I would be aware that my body was, for much of the world, a weapon until proven otherwise. People sometimes think that being trans means I live 'between' worlds, but that's not exactly true. If anything, it has just created within me a potential for empathy that I must work every day, like a muscle, to grow."

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"Sarah DiMuccio, an American researcher and PhD student at New York University, published a paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinity that offered a simple, cultural definition of that type of manhood that stuck with me.

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(Poetry, Spoken Word)
"You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection. The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between."

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Poetry is fascinating. Of all the forms of writing, it seems the most inward-looking and narcissistic. Yet when done right, it can also achieve a universality that speaks to the lived experience of many different people. You don't have to know anything about the poet in question, but so often their pain, grace, love, mistakes, tenderness, humour, and thoughts and musings on the vicissitudes of life that buffet us all not only transcends the poet's own existence, it gains a life all of its own.

I...more

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Poetry is fascinating. Of all the forms of writing, it seems the most inward-looking and narcissistic. Yet when done right, it can also achieve a universality that speaks to the lived experience of many different people.

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(Movie)
"A frustrated son tries to determine the fact from fiction in his dying father's life."

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Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 68 nominations. See more awards "

Storyline

United Press International journalist Will Bloom and his French freelance photojournalist wife Josephine Bloom, who is pregnant with their first child, leave their Paris base to return to Will's hometown of Ashton, Alabama on the news that his father, Edward Bloom, stricken with cancer, will soon die, he being taken off chemotherapy treatment. Although connected indirectly through Will's mother/Edward's wife, Sandra Bloom, Will has been estranged from his father for three years since his and Josephine's wedding. Will's issue with his father is the fanciful tales Edward has told of his life all his life, not only to Will but the whole world. As a child when Edward was largely absent as a traveling salesman, Will believed those stories, but now realizes that he does not know his father, who, as he continues to tell these stories, he will never get to know unless Edward comes clean with the truth before he dies. On the brink of his own family life beginning, Will does not want to be the ... Written by Huggo

Taglines:

An adventure as big as life itself.

Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for a fight scene, some images of nudity and a suggestive reference | See all certifications "

Did You Know?

Trivia

At 1:17 the commercial on the TV is a real commercial for an actual car dealership in Alabama. Though the name is never clearly shown, Alabamans who saw the film reportedly recognized it immediately. See more "

Goofs

When Edward is picked up by the scary tree in the woods, the key to the city falls to the ground. In a close-up, the key is still around his neck. Returning to the long shot, the key is again on the ground. See more "

Quotes

[first lines]
Young Ed Bloom : There are some fish that cannot be caught. It's not that they are faster or stronger than other fish, they're just touched by something extra.
See more "

Crazy Credits

The Columbia logo runs in reverse. See more "

Soundtracks

User Reviews

Details

Release Date:

9 January 2004 (USA)

Box Office

Budget:

$70,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$207,377, 14 December 2003

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$123,218,424

Company Credits

Technical Specs

See full technical specs "

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Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 68 nominations. See more awards " United Press International journalist Will Bloom and his French freelance photojournalist wife Josephine Bloom, who is pregnant with their first child, leave their Paris base to return to Will's hometown of Ashton, Alabama on the news that his father, Edward Bloom, stricken with cancer, will soon die, he being taken off chemotherapy treatment.

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(TV)
"Sam, an 18-year-old on the autism spectrum, decides it's time to find a girlfriend, which sets Sam's mom on her own life-changing path as her son seeks more independence."

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Created by Robia Rashid. With Jennifer Jason Leigh, Keir Gilchrist, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Michael Rapaport. Sam, an 18-year-old on the autism spectrum, decides it's time to find a girlfriend, a journey that sets Sam's mom on her own life-changing path as her son seeks more independence.

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(TV)
"On a journey to find the cure for a Tatarigami's curse, Ashitaka finds himself in the middle of a war between the forest gods and Tatara, a mining colony."

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While protecting his village from rampaging boar-god/demon, a confident young warrior, Ashitaka, is stricken by a deadly curse. To save his life, he must journey to the forests of the west. Once there, he's embroiled in a fierce campaign that humans were waging on the forest. The ambitious Lady Eboshi and her loyal clan use their guns against the gods of the forest and a brave young woman, Princess Mononoke, who was raised by a wolf-god. Ashitaka sees the good in both sides and tries to stem the flood of blood. This is met by animosity by both sides as they each see him as supporting the enemy. Written by Christopher Taguchi

Taglines:

The Fate Of The World Rests On The Courage Of One Warrior.

Trivia

Japanese mythology tells that dogs/wolves are always male-voiced, and cats are always female-voiced, regardless of sex. For this reason, a man, Akihiro Miwa provides the voice of Moro the mother wolf in the Japanese version. His casting is perhaps an in-joke to his career as a female impersonator. In the English dub, however, Moro is voiced by a woman ( Gillian Anderson). See more "

Goofs

When Ashitaka spots San for the first time at the river spitting out a mouthful of Moro no Kimi's blood from the bullet wound in her chest, the number of large wolf teeth on San's necklace changes from four, to three, back to four. See more "

Quotes

[first lines]
: In ancient times, the land lay covered in forests, where, from ages long past, dwelt the spirits of the gods. Back then, man and beast lived in harmony, but as time went by, most of the great forests were destroyed. Those that remained were guarded by gigantic beasts who owed their allegiances to the Great Forest Spirit. For those were the days of gods and of demons...
See more "

Crazy Credits

There are no opening credits. See more "

Alternate Versions

Extra dialog was inserted in the English-dubbed version to explain that Ashitaka was dead to his village when he cuts off his top knot. See more "

Soundtracks

Princess Mononoke Theme Song (Mononoke-Hime)
(English language version)
Adaptation by Neil Gaiman
Translated By Steve Alpert
Vocals by Sasha Lazard
Lyrics By Hayao Miyazaki
Music composed by Joe Hisaishi
See more "

Release Date:

19 December 1997 (USA)

Also Known As:

Princess Mononoke

Budget:

JPY2,400,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$144,446, 31 October 1999

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$162,112,497

See full technical specs "

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Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. With Yôji Matsuda, Yuriko Ishida, Yûko Tanaka, Billy Crudup. On a journey to find the cure for a Tatarigami's curse, Ashitaka finds himself in the middle of a war between the forest gods and Tatara, a mining colony. In this quest he also meets San, the Mononoke Hime.

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(Movie)
"Tending the Wild" shines light on the environmental knowledge of indigenous peoples across California by exploring how they have actively shaped and tended the land for millennia, in the process developing a deep understanding of plant and animal life."

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Tending the Wild: Complete Broadcast Special

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(Movie)
"A look at the people involved with various political campaigns during the 2018 U.S. congressional election."

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The difficulty with this content is that people will be divided emotionally because of their politics however if you look at the how the pure content was created the inspirational advance thinking and camera techniques combined with the producing approach to filming that tries to incorporate a true understanding of the characters in this documentary you will see this is worthy of a high review and not just partisan political comments

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The difficulty with this content is that people will be divided emotionally because of their politics however if you look at the how the pure content was created the inspirational advance thinking and camera techniques combined with the producing approach to filming that tries to incorporate a true understanding of the characters in this documentary you will see this is worthy of a high review and not just partisan political comments

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(TV)
"American college football coach Ted Lasso heads to London to manage AFC Richmond, a struggling English Premier League football team."

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On the surface, this show seemed goofy and fun. But then a few episodes in, once I had my guard down, I suddenly realized what a beautiful thing the show's creators are trying to accomplish here. And I was nearly in tears. Almost like whenever I'm under the weather and a sentimental commercial makes me want to start bawling, except in a more inspired way.

Ted Lasso is exactly what we needed, exactly when we needed him. Easily one of the best new series I've seen in a long while.

This is what comedy should be. This.

10/10

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Ted Lasso: Created by Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis. With Jason Sudeikis, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt, Nick Mohammed. American college football coach Ted Lasso heads to London to manage AFC Richmond, a struggling English Premier League football team.

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(Podcast)
"In this episode, Prentis sits down with podcast host, doula, pleasure-activist, and writer, adrienne maree brown (she/her), to discuss the moment in which we find ourselves, the futures that we can make possible, and the gift of satisfaction. Take a listen as these two friends look both inward and outward at the potential for a more just reality."

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In this episode, Prentis sits down with podcast host, doula, pleasure-activist, and writer, adrienne maree brown (she/her), to discuss the moment in which we find ourselves, the futures that we can make possible, and the gift of satisfaction. Take a listen as these two friends look both inward and outward at the potential for a more just reality.

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Visioning with adrienne maree brown - Finding Our Way Podcast

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In this episode, Prentis sits down with podcast host, doula, pleasure-activist, and writer, adrienne maree brown (she/her), to discuss the moment in which we find ourselves, the futures that we can make possible, and the gift of satisfaction. Take a listen as these two friends look both inward and outward at the potential for a more just reality.

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(Podcast)
"Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful Ocean Vuong right on the cusp of that turning, in March 2020, in a joyful and crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. Yet what’s most stunning is how presciently and exquisitely Ocean spoke, and continues to speak, to the world we have since come to inhabit — its heartbreak and its poetry, its possibilities for loss and for finding new life."

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Krista Tippett, host: I interviewed the wise and wonderful writer Ocean Vuong on March 8, 2020, in a joyful, crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. A state of emergency had just been declared in New York around a new virus. But none of us guessed that within a handful of days, such an event would become unimaginable. So, for me, this conversation has become a last memory before the world shifted on its axis. What's most stunning is how exquisitely this conversation speaks to the world we have since come to inhabit - its heartbreak, its poetry, and its possibilities of both destroying and saving.

Tippett: It's such an honor to be invited to be part of the On Air Fest and to do a show here. I'm really excited. I love this room, and I love the energy in it that you all are bringing. And what an honor and a delight to be up here with Ocean Vuong ...

... who I want to describe as a writer and wise person who, at a young age, has made a singular contribution to American letters, as a writer of poetry and essays and this novel that you may have heard of. The word "gorgeous" that occurs in the title, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous , is a word that's also often used to describe your writing and your voice, your literary voice.

And also, Ocean, I want to say I'm aware that when people write about you and introduce you and describe you, they often speak about how your work is shaped by themes of violence and survival, in the context of the immigrant experience, in the context of life and displacement in the aftermath of war, in the context of growing up Asian American and queer in this society. And that is true, and we're going to talk about violence, but I'd also say that the sweep of your work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy, while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what has been carried and what has been survived.

So let's start. Oh, I didn't mention that you're a MacArthur genius.

Ocean Vuong: I have no proof.

Tippett: You were born in Saigon, and when you were two years old, in 1990, your family came to the U.S. I have this question that I ask at the beginning of most of my conversations: an inquiry about the religious or spiritual background of someone's childhood, or however they would define that now. I wonder how you - if there are aspects of your childhood to which you would attach that language of "spiritual," "religious."

Vuong: My family is traditionally Buddhist, but they were also illiterate, and so the extent of their Buddhism was rooted in rituals and care. And so every day before school, my mother would get me to the altar, and we would start to name this sort of roll call, the people in our family, and try to bless them and think about them and tend to them and to ourselves. And so spirituality began with care, rooted in physical bodies. It didn't extend beyond the household. There was no mythical presence to it. It was almost like this abracadabra that we did before we stepped out of the house into the rest of the world, and thereby, the rest of America. And I think, for me, whatever my mother presented to me those early mornings in front of the altar is still true.

And I think I embrace that in everything I do - writing, sitting with you now - how do I do it with care. And even in the temples - in many Asian American households, when you enter the house, you take off your shoes. Now, we're not obsessed with cleanliness any more than anyone else, but the act is an act of respect. I'm going to take off my shoes to enter something important. I'm going to give you my best self. And I think, even consciously, when I read or give lectures or when I teach, I lower my voice. I want to make my words deliberate. I want to enter - I want to take off the shoes of my voice so that I can enter a place with care, so that I can do the work that I need to do.

Tippett: In a number of places, you told a story, also, about a Baptist church in your neighborhood that you would visit on Sundays, partly because they had ice cream ...

... but also that you became really taken with the story of Noah's Ark, in a way that is really - that says a lot about how you approach your art and your life.

Vuong: I think that myth - I would sleep over at a friend's house, and I grew up in Hartford, a predominantly Black and Brown neighborhood. And the next morning, my friends would give me their clothes, their church clothes, and we would just go. So I would end up attending, throughout my childhood, hundreds of church services in the Baptist church. And the preacher kept talking about Noah's Ark. And I was so infatuated. I think it embedded into my psyche in really everything that I do, even to this day. What an incredible mythos to work and live by, which is that when the apocalypse comes, what will you put into the vessel for the future?

Tippett: It's also such an image of - it's preparing for the apocalypse and getting beyond it, which is also an experience that many people have, even in our world right now. It's an immigrant experience - a migrant experience, as we've started to call it.

Getting ready to interview you made me ponder, also, the particular strangeness and singularity of what it is to be Vietnamese American. Your family - and in your case, your family was not just fleeing a war, and in the aftermath of war, and surviving that, but it was our war. You are Vietnamese American, and both sides of that equation were at war. And you were literally born because of that war. Your mother was the daughter of a ...

Vuong: An American soldier.

Tippett: ... an American soldier who fell in love with a Vietnamese girl, and then the whole family was blasted apart, just as the country was blasted apart.

Vuong: It's a strange epic.

Tippett: You wrote somewhere, "No bombs = no family = no me. Yikes."

But I think so much of American life is a product of war. You know, we're standing on stolen ground.

Tippett: It's just very literal in your story. It's really concentrated.

Vuong: Well, I'm a first generation. I think this is why the work of Toni Morrison's was so important to me, because I saw in a first-generation testimony, in the character, Sethe, leaving the South and creating Beloved, her daughter, to save her daughter. And never before have I seen a parallel close enough to the story of my own mother, who comes out of her own epicenter, and I'm, being her son, also my own Beloved. To see American literature hold the testimony of the first generation's survival - to live on both sides of death and life in one short period of time, half of one's life - felt so powerful to me, and I learned so much from that book.

Tippett: I want to talk about the power of words and language, which, given the beginnings of your life - as you've said, your family was illiterate; your mother never spoke English and really only, I think you've said, could read and write Vietnamese at about a fifth-grade level. There's a lot of dyslexia in your family; you also struggled with that. And how old were you when you actually learned to read?

Vuong: A lot of the magazines say 11. I mean, you don't wake up at 11 -

Tippett: Let's set the story straight here.

Tippett: Was there a moment where you can look back and where you started to feel in your body the power of words, which you now work with?

Vuong: Right away. I mean, I was surrounded by storytellers, by survivors and storytellers. And so my grandmother and my mother and my aunt would tell stories to recalibrate their past, to make sense of their past. And my root in the narrative and literary techniques and embodiment begins way before I entered a classroom.

And when you think about how people tell stories, stories are carried in the body, and it's edited each time the person tells it. And so what you have, by the time someone tells a story, is a masterclass of form, technique, concision, imagery - even how to pause, which you don't really get on the page. Arguably you do in poetry, with the line break. And this is what these women were giving me. I didn't know how valuable that gift was.

It's also very moving and interesting to me, the way you - and you've started talking about this. You write about how Vietnamese culture that you were immersed in, how language is so embodied. Someplace you said, "a lot of love is communicated in Vietnamese culture through service": "We cook, we massage, we scratch each other's back." There's not a lot of saying "I love you," but it's communicated in those ways.

Vuong: The body is the ultimate witness to love. And I learned that right away. We don't say, "I love you." If we do, we say it in English, as a sort of goodbye.

Tippett: Really? That's so interesting.

Vuong: Yeah, it's almost like a cultural thing, just - we almost say it in lieu of goodbye. We don't know how to say goodbye, either. It's just ...

... we say, "Bye-bye."

And I think - because what happens is that through the body and through service, you articulate it through paying attention. Nothing can say "I love you" more than feeling it from somebody. And I think this relationship is how I started to see words. I looked at them as if they were things I could move and care for.

Tippett: The language of energy - and you use a lot of energy metaphors and imagery, for how you work with words and how words work in us.

Vuong: As a species, as life on Earth, we've been dying for millennia, but I don't think energy dies. It's transformed. And when you're using language, you can create it, use it to divide people and build walls, or you can turn it into something where we can see each other more clearly, as a bridge. And that notion that you are a participant in the future of language is something I think our American education failed us.

Tippett: Say some more about that, "you are a participant in the future of language."

Vuong: Well, we're taught, particularly in elementary school, to learn a standardized language. And when you ask, Why is it this way?, Why is this the standard?, you arrive at a very arbitrary answer, and an answer which actually excludes, often, people of color: Your English is wrong. This English is right.

But in fact, language is always changing. And I think it's the poets, the writers, and even the youth - they're using language to cast new meaning, in the same way Chaucer just winged English spelling. There was no standardized spelling.

Vuong: He was like, "Spring? S-p-r-y-u-g? Sure."

And I think the way language exists is similar to when I was in Hartford, we were surrounded by these abandoned buildings, these old factories. The Colt gun factory was in Hartford, and it sold weapons to both sides during the Civil War. And we would go into these abandoned warehouses just to play and explore, and I remember seeing these old, warped windows, the glass just melting, and looking through at my city, the city I thought I knew so well, through this glass. It was so surreal. Everything changed. Everything was warped.

And to me, that's what language is: the glass. You think it's fixed. You think it's clear pane of glass. But in fact, through years, it starts to drip and melt and change.

Tippett: Right. Even that notion that language is clear, even this presumption that we walk around making - that what we mean when we use any word transmits perfectly to another - it's always imperfect, which is also what makes art so exciting and creative.

Vuong: Right. We often tell our students, The future's in your hands. But I think the future is actually in your mouth.

You have to articulate the world you want to live in, first. We pride ourselves as a country that's very technologically advanced. We have strong, good sciences, good schools; very advanced weaponry, for sure. But I think we're still very primitive in the way we use language and speak, particularly in how we celebrate ourselves - "You're killing it."

Tippett: You're so acute about the violence of the American lexicon.

Vuong: We have to ask - I'm not saying it's wrong, per se. I use it too, being a product of this country. But one has to wonder, what is it about a culture that can only value itself through the lexicon of death? I grew up in New England, and I heard boys talk about pleasure as conquest. "I bagged her. She's in the bag. I owned it. I owned that place. I knocked it out of the park. I went in there, guns blazing. Go knock 'em dead. Drop dead gorgeous. Slay - I slayed them. I slew them." What happens to our imagination, when we can only celebrate ourselves through our very vanishing?

Tippett: I mean, even you as a poet have said people say to you, "You're killing it."

Vuong: What does it do to the brain? We know language matters.

Tippett: What is it doing to us?

Vuong: We know language matters. They did a control where they were trying to get these lab mice to move through a maze. And they labeled one mouse the smart, intelligent mouse. And the other mouse was the control, just a normal mouse. The reality was that they were both normal mice. There was nothing special about them. But the one labeled the superior mouse always went through the maze faster. And that phenomenon is actually something that's still studied, but one theory is that it was the human beings who attended them. The ones that had the "good" label, the "promising" label, were tended to with more care - "special."

Tippett: And I suppose a lot of that was subconscious. But it's in a way in which even the words we are thinking is shaping the way we're interacting.

Vuong: Absolutely, at the subconscious level. And so I think, what happens if we alter our language? Where would our future be? Where will we grow towards, if we start to think differently about how the world is? "This is a battleground state."

Vuong: I thought the Civil War was over.

But we're in "battleground states." "Target audience."

Tippett: Something I started to notice after 9/11 was this language of "hunting down" - "hunting down" terrorists. But that's language you use for animals. And that coarsens us.

Vuong: I grew up right in the shadow of 9/11. It created something very interesting, because we were essentially the last generation to play outside thoroughly. Things like tag and manhunt, those things were gone overnight. I saw it with my own eyes. Our nation became a nation that dictated fear through colors: today is red; tomorrow is orange; "yellow alert."

Tippett: So you mentioned the Buddhist practice that was part of your childhood, that you then rediscover and make your own, as an adult. It feels to me like this space you inhabit, what you see so clearly, and insisting on holding the complexity of that - it seems to me that you do have ways - and I think, also, the implications of what you're saying, because what you're saying is that these are - this is a rigor of how we use our words and how we understand the power we have to move through time and through ordinary experiences of our day; that we all have it in ourselves to claim right now. But you have ways of making that more possible in yourself. I read - is it true? Do you still live across from a cemetery? Is that right?

Tippett: And that you perform this Zen Buddhist death meditation?

Vuong: I go out, and I walk around the cemetery, and even without it, I sit down and I do a death meditation. And it sounds very morbid, but the practice is actually supposed to bring yourself into the inevitable. The conditions of our lives will be vanquished through death. And then all the pettiness - the little angers that you have with those you love, with those you don't love, and your neighbor, the little things - falls away. It's so small, when the ultimate, lasting reality is death.

And I think it goes back to Noah's Ark, too. Noah was also doing death meditation.

Tippett: He was a Zen Buddhist without knowing it.

Vuong: I think so. But I think all religions have this - outside of all of the orthodoxy and the rigor of ceremonies, at the center of it is trying to remind us that we will die, and how do we live a life worthwhile of our breath? And I think thinking about death and thinking about what we do towards it, around it, helps me center myself in such a chaotic space. And I do think it's part of my own nurturing of my own mental health.

Tippett: After a short break, more with Ocean Vuong.

Tippett: There's so much I wanted to talk to you about, and it's beautiful, actually, what's emerging here. And it feels like - you've described how your method of creating is that you walk a lot, right? Again, it's embodied practice. And you walk and you walk, and things build up in you. And there's a way in which I feel like words and meaning flow out of you, which is also an experience one has in reading your work. And as we're hearing, it's consonant with the way you understand reality and help other people understand reality.

Vuong: It's kind of like - a lot of things flow, but not all of them are good, so ...

Tippett: OK. I didn't want to suggest that ...

Vuong: Three cups of rice for that photo. We were in a refugee camp, and we got rations. And each day, each family got three cups of rice. And there was a photographer who went around - even in a refugee camp, it's a microcosm of the world. Somebody's going to try to make a business.

Vuong: And I was thinking about the cover for my first book - that was my first book. And we had several ideas. But I think part of my education with the history of Vietnam and America's involvement in it became something very different from what was given to me in the textbooks. The textbook says, "Well, first of all, here's five chapters on George Washington ... "

" ... what he ate, what kind of teeth he had ... "

" ... what kind of tree he chopped down."

And by the way, if somebody chops down a fruit tree, that's a red flag, for me.

But the myth - I realized the myth of America was so strong. And it's very interesting, because when we got to the Vietnam War, it was like two pages. There's a photo of Kennedy, then there's a photo of Nixon.

Vuong: Right? "Something bad happened over there; anyway, it's over; then we went on to the Gulf War, when we were heroes again." Right?

So I thought - by the time I was in college, I was like, I gotta figure this out. So I started to do my own research, and I realized right away that one's research with the Vietnam War - something I was not prepared for was to see upwards of - hundreds of dead bodies. Asian bodies. Bodies that look like me. So when you are most recognizable in your research as a corpse, it does something to you. Sometimes the bodies were so mangled, you didn't know where one began and ended. And so I wanted for my first book to have Vietnamese bodies on the cover that were living.

And so that photo was a moment of salvaging and preserving bodies in transit. What was it about these women, I thought, that would surrender their very sustenance, in order to preserve their image?

Tippett: Right. And even when you came here - somewhere I think you said that you had to pay for that picture, you had to pay to be seen. And even what you're saying about how even in that moment - and I was a child, but the fact of being able to see those bodies is actually what ended the war. And then, after that, we never saw bodies come home from war again.

Vuong: They learned. They learned.

Tippett: But even when you came here - and this is about the immigrant experience, but it's also about being Vietnamese - your mother would say to you, "Remember, child - don't get noticed. You're already Vietnamese."

Vuong: It's interesting that wisdom often arrives as a warning. I think it's often something that those in the center, those in power, never know; that before you leave the house, in order to achieve yourself - one sends one's children to school in order to fulfill their dreams. And in order to do that, you have to be warned that "there is a strike against you, by the way, so sink in. Fade away."

And I think that's the great crisis of the first and second generation. The first generation made it here, and to live at all is such a privilege that they're happy, and even encourage you to put your head down, work, fade away, get your meals, and live a quiet life. And I think the second generation, the great conundrum there, the great paradox, is that they want to be seen. They want to make something. And what a better way to make something and fill yourself with agency than to be an artist? So: so many of us immigrant children end up betraying our parents in order to subversively achieve our parents' dreams.

Your mother worked in a nail salon all of your life and her life, and you worked there, and members of your family worked there. And I love it that you were eventually able to buy her a house - and she always wanted a garden - because you are now seen. She watched you.

I love the story - I wonder if you would tell it - about the experience she had when she first came to hear you read. And of course, she couldn't understand the English, but her reaction to you.

And I thought it was interesting, because, I said, I'll try to understand what that means; what it means; what kind of validation is that. It's not necessarily one that I share myself. So I almost had this arrogant gaze to it. I said, "That doesn't seem like victory to me, just because a bunch of White folks clapped. Victory is something else, to me, something more."

Audience Member: I have to say that probably I've been listening to Krista for as long as I can remember, and this has to be one of the most moving, tender, beyond words conversations I've heard. And I'm so glad that I got to see the embodiment of your language. So along those lines, I was interested to know about some of the body practices that you do. I completely hear what you're saying about the potential for language and the care that each word uttered. There also is some preparatory practices that come with that responsibility, and I was wondering if you could share any thoughts on that.

Vuong: I do think it does begin and end in the body. Language is something we carry. I always bring this back to my students, as well. I said, You're working on a poem or a story, when you're hitting a dead end, when it's not going, take it with you. Get away from the desk. Now you have to work with your body. Maybe there's questions you're not asking. Maybe you have to recite this poem and walk with it. This is what we've always been doing. we've been telling stories as we walked; we've been telling stories as we work, side-by-side. This idea that language is a private, isolated act is so new that I think we still haven't figured out if it's useful or not.

And so I think it's valuable to open up that debate again and not to say that it has to be like this or like that, for anybody, but to say, if it's not working, we can do something different, an alternative route. And in this sense, having the words in the air - I feel like the voice in the air is like a second page, the way you can articulate - the pauses, the cadences. I learned this, mostly, from watching Whitney Houston. If you listen to Whitney Houston's songs, they start like a whisper. And then how do we get to the pinnacles, the bright-lit room of her peaks? But the power and the mastery in her performance is the oscillation, and the respect of how a word, which is static on the page, can be lifted and amplified through using the whole range of human emotion in the voice. So I'm an apprentice of that.

Tippett: I would not have traded the experience of being with you, physically, but I really love - most of my interviews are remote, and I'm in a studio; somebody is coming in through my headphones, basically. But there's often an assumption, in people who don't work in this medium, that that makes it less intimate. But to have the human voice to work with, and to get everything that the human voice carries - it is the body - is really magical, to really be able to completely focus on that.

Speaking of the body and walking and movement, I want to close - you wrote this beautiful essay in The Rumpus, in 2014, called " The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation ." Part of the context of that piece was your uncle's death by suicide. He was three years older than you, and you'd grown up together. And that wove into you reflecting, on these walks you do through New York City, on fire escapes. I'm going to read a little bit, and then I want you just to say more.

"All that richness and drama sealed away in a fortress whose walls echoed with communication of elemental and exquisite language" - you're looking at all the buildings - "and yet only the fire escape, a clinging extremity, inanimate and often rusting, spoke - in its hardened, exiled silence with the most visible human honesty: We are capable of disaster. And we are scared."

Vuong: It was such a blow. Anyone who has lost anybody to suicide - I lost my uncle; I lost a few friends. The great mystery and the great violence of taking oneself out of the picture - I've been grappling with that for so long. And I think one of the things that lead us to that is that you start to feel that you are always out of the picture - this loneliness that language does not allow us to access. The way we say hello to each other - Hi, how are you? Oh, good, good, good, good, good. So the "how are you" is now defunct. It doesn't access. It fills. It's fluff.

And so what happens to our language, this great, advanced technology that we've had, when it starts to fail at its function, and it starts to obscure, rather than open? And I think the crisis that my uncle went through, and a lot of my friends, was a crisis of communication - that they couldn't say, "I'm hurt."

And looking at - I remember when I heard of his suicide, I was a student at Brooklyn College in New York. I went for the longest walk. And I kept seeing these fire escapes. And I said, what happens if we had that? What is the linguistic existence of a fire escape, that we can give ourselves permission to say, Are you really OK? I know we're talking, but you want to step out on the fire escape, and you can tell me the truth?

And I think we've built shame into vulnerability, and we've sealed it off in our culture - Not at the table, not at the dinner table, don't say this here, don't say that there, don't talk about this, this is not cocktail conversation, what have you. We police access to ourselves. And the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet still not know who they are. Our "how are you" has failed us. And we have to find something else.

And I thought about that. What if literature, my participation in it - that's my field, if you will - what if the poem, the story, the novel, at its best can serve as a fire escape? Because on the page, you don't have the awkward reality of a body bumping into someone in the supermarket. You don't have to say, How 'bout them Patriots? You don't have to talk about the weather. You can go right in, deep. And I really have been - it changed the way I thought about writing and literature, in that if we have the fire escape as a reality in our buildings, what does it look like in the reality of our communication, in our language? What does that look like?

And I'm still figuring that out. I'm still - every book, every poem, I think, is my attempt at articulating a fire escape. But I think it was a great reckoning for me, because here I am, supposedly a writer, and then my uncle dies, and I've lost so much. We talk all the time, we say all these things, and yet I never knew what was happening. And if that's the case, language, this field that I chose, this thing that I feel so much hope for, failed me. And it was a reckoning, I think, existentially, with myself as an artist.

Tippett: I wonder if, to close this incredible time together, if you would read - I just copied out a paragraph from the end of this essay from 2014, "The Weight of Our Living."

Vuong: "The poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. A place where I can be as honest as I need to - because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions - and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone. I will never know exactly why. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night - we can live. And we will."

Tippett: Ocean Vuong, thank you so much.

Tippett: Ocean Vuong's new collection of poetry is Time Is a Mother . His other, celebrated books are On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Night Sky with Exit Wounds .

Special thanks this week to Jemma Brown, Scott Newman, Sam Bair, and all of the wonderful staff at On Air Fest, the great gathering of podcast and audio makers.

The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Laurén Drommerhausen, Erin Colasacco, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, Jhaleh Akhavan, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Gautam Srikishan, April Adamson, Ashley Her, Matt Martinez, Amy Chatelaine, Cameron Mussar, and Kayla Edwards.

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

is an independent, nonprofit production of The On Being Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I created this show at American Public Media.

Our funding partners include:

The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org;

Kalliopeia Foundation, dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality, supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn more at kalliopeia.org;

The George Family Foundation, in support of the Civil Conversations Project;

The Osprey Foundation, a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives;

And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation, dedicated to its founders' interests in religion, community development, and education.

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Ocean Vuong - A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project

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The exquisite writer, with language for the world we now inhabit - its heartbreak and its poetry, its possibilities for loss and for finding new life.

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Climate change. We know. It can feel too overwhelming. But what if there was a show about climate change that left you feeling... energized? One so filled with possibility that you actually wanted to listen? Join us, journalist Alex Blumberg and a crew of climate nerds, as we bring you smart, inspiring stories about the mess we're in and how we can get ourselves out of it.

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How to Save a Planet is reported and produced by Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz, Anna Ladd, Daniel Ackerman, and Hannah Chinn. Our intern is Nicole Welch. Our supervising producers are Katelyn Bogucki and Lauren Silverman. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music from Peter Leonard and Emma Munger.

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"An extraordinary conversation with the late congressman John Lewis, taped in Montgomery, Alabama, during a pilgrimage 50 years after the March on Washington. It offers a special look inside his wisdom, the civil rights leaders’ spiritual confrontation within themselves, and the intricate art of nonviolence as “love in action.”"

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Rep. John Lewis: When we were sitting in, it was love in action. When we went on the freedom ride, it was love in action. The march from Selma to Montgomery was love in action. We do it not simply because it's the right thing to do, but it's love in action. That we love our country, we love a democratic society, and so we have to move our feet.

[ music: "Precious Lord/Oh Freedom" by Betty Mae Fikes and the Congressional Delegation]

Krista Tippett, host: Spending time with John Lewis, who died last week, was one of the great experiences of my life. He was a United States congressman, and a core leader - one of the "Big Six" - of the civil rights movement. He led the first Selma march on what became known as Bloody Sunday. I had the honor to take part in a civil rights pilgrimage led by this man and attended by 30 members of the House and Senate from both parties. We stood on holy ground of the movement in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma. It was a journey into history I thought I knew, but didn't really - into the civil rights leaders' spiritual confrontation within themselves - and into their intricate art and work of successful nonviolence.

This is Betty Mae Fikes, leading song on the pilgrimage - a half-century after she was a teenaged freedom singer of the civil rights movement.

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett. This is On Being.

[ music: "Precious Lord/Oh Freedom" by Betty Mae Fikes and the Congressional Delegation]

Tippett: I spoke with congressman John Lewis in Montgomery, Alabama in 2013.

Tippett: I'd like to start by talking about faith, which is a bedrock of your life. It's one of the bedrocks that you name prominently in your most recent book. And I'd like to just hear a little bit about how you would describe the foundation of faith, the spiritual background of your childhood.

Lewis: I grew up in rural Alabama about 50 miles from Montgomery outside of a little place called Troy. My father was a sharecropper, a tenant farmer. But back in 1944, when I was four years old - and I do remember when I was four - my father had saved $300 and, with the $300, he bought a 110 acres of land.

We grew up very, very poor - six brothers, three sisters, wonderful mother, wonderful father, wonderful grandparents. But growing up as a child, I saw segregation and racial discrimination, and I didn't like it. And I would ask my mother and my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, why. They would say, "That's the way it is. Don't get in the way. Don't get in trouble."

But attending church and Sunday school, reading the Bible, the teaching of the great teacher, and being deeply influenced by what I saw all around me, it was this belief that somehow and some way things were going to get better, that you have this sense of hope, a sense of optimism and have faith. And people would say to me, my mother would say over and over again, "Work hard."

And sometime working in the field, I would say to my mother, "This is hard work, and this work is about to kill me." And she would say, "Boy, hard work never killed anybody." So I worked very, very hard as a child. But one day in 1955, at the age of 15, I heard of Rosa Parks. I heard the words of Martin Luther King Jr. on the old radio, and he was talking and preaching about nonviolence, about peace, about reconciliation, about the capacity, the ability, to change things, and ...

Tippett: And he was a preacher.

Lewis: He was a preacher, and I wanted to be a preacher as a young child. And I had this sense that, if I believed, if I had faith in my own capacity and ability to get things done, I too could change things. So I just never gave up and never gave in. I just tried to hold on. So when I went away at the age of 17 ...

Tippett: Wait. I want to stay with 14 and 15 just for a minute because I've read both of your books these last few days. I actually have a 14-year-old son who's here with me on this pilgrimage, and it was so striking to read about you being 14 in 1954 and reading about Brown v. Board of Education. And also as I read it, being filled with hope and excitement at that news and also not seeing anything change immediately in the world of Alabama.

And really those years of you were 14 and heading into 15, as you say, in 1955 you heard Martin Luther King's voice for the first time, the bus boycott, and also things like another 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, who was killed in Mississippi. So talk a little bit about how that period in your life, which in any life is a tumultuous moment, what started to happen to you then?

Lewis: During that period, I raised a lot of questions and I asked a lot of questions of my mother, my father, other ministers around. They accused me of being nosy, and I thought of myself as just wanting to know. I was inquisitive.

When I heard about the Supreme Court decision in 1954, I thought the next school year that I would go to a better school. At least it would be a desegregated school. I wouldn't have to ride a broken-down bus and I would be able to get new books, but it never happened for me. It never happened, but I didn't give up. I didn't become bitter or hostile. I kept the faith and I remembered hearing about what happened to Emmett Till, and I thought, if something like this can happen to a young man, young boy ...

Tippett: This is a young man who was visiting relatives in Mississippi from Chicago, right?

Lewis: Yes, and it could happen to any of us. And I remember even before then in 1951, when I was 11 years old, I traveled one summer with an uncle and aunt and some of my first cousins from rural Alabama to Buffalo for a visit, for a trip. I had never been outside of the South. And being there gave me hope. And I saw how people lived there - the way they're living in Buffalo. Maybe somehow and some way, we can make the South, make a region.

I wanted to believe, and I did believe, that things would get better. But later I discovered, I guess, that you have to have this sense of faith that what you're moving toward is already done. It's already happened.

Tippett: Say some more about that.

Lewis: It's the power to believe that you can see, that you visualize, that sense of community, that sense of family, that sense of one house.

Tippett: And live as if?

Lewis: And you live that you're already there, that you're already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it's there, for you it is already there. And during the early days of the movement, I believed that the only true and real integration for that sense of the beloved community existed within the movement itself.

Because in the final analysis, we did become a circle of trust, a band of brothers and sisters. So it didn't matter whether we're Black or white. It didn't matter whether you came from the North, to the South, or whether you're a Northerner or Southerner. We were one.

Tippett: You had made that vision real.

Lewis: For the struggle, for those of us in the struggle. But we studied. We prepared ourselves.

Tippett: Well, this is something else I want to talk about: the study, the preparation, the discipline? I think the term nonviolent resistance in the 21st century is a term everyone has heard, but reading about how you practiced that, how you learned it. I mean, there were small things like maintaining eye contact, you know, wearing coats and ties and dresses, no slouching, no talking, being friendly and courteous. But there was also really serious role-playing.

You made a comment. We are meeting each other in the context of a pilgrimage, retracing many places in the civil rights movement with members of Congress and others, which you've helped begin, which is an incredible thing.

Yesterday in one of these meetings, you made a comment which was humorous and serious at once, I think, that it would be good for Congress to take up some of the kind of role-playing that you did in the 1950s, 1960s, in the civil rights movement. So would you tell us a little bit about that, what you all did to prepare possibly to be beaten, to be imprisoned, possibly to be killed?

Lewis: Well, long before any sit-in, any march, long before the freedom rides, or the march from Selma to Montgomery, any organized campaign that took place, we did study. I remember as a student in Nashville, Tennessee, a small group of students every Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. would gather in a small Methodist church near Fisk University in downtown Nashville.

And we had a teacher by the name of Jim Lawson, a young man who taught us the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. We studied. We studied what Gandhi attempted to do in South Africa, what he accomplished in India. We studied Thoreau and civil disobedience. We studied the great religions of the world. And before we even discussed a possibility of a sit-in, we had role-playing. We had what we called social drama.

Tippett: OK.

Lewis: And we would act out. There would be Black and white young people, students, interracial group, playing the roles of African Americans, or be an interracial group playing the roles of white. And we went through the motion of someone harassing you, calling you out of your name, pulling you out of your seat, pulling your chair from under you, someone kicking you or pretending to spit on you. Sometimes we did pour cold water on someone, never hot - but we went through the motion.

This was drama because we wanted to feel like they were in the actual situation, that this could happen. And we would tell people, whether young men or young women, that if you've been beaten, try to protect the most sensitive part of your body. Roll up, cover your head and look out for each other. So when the time came, we were ready. We were prepared.

Tippett: I also read somewhere that you were trained even if someone was attacking you to look them in the eye, that there was something disarming for human beings.

Lewis: We did go through the motion, the drama, of saying that if someone kick you, spit on you, pull you off the lunch counter stool, continue to make eye contact. Continue to give the impression, yes, you may beat me, but I'm human.

Be friendly, try to smile, and just stay nonviolent. And during the nonviolent campaign in a city like Nashville and so many other parts of the American South, you never had one incident of someone striking back or hitting back. There were even people who would say, "I cannot go on the sit-ins. I cannot go on the freedom ride. I may not be disciplined enough." But we were trained. When we left to go on the freedom ride, we were prepared to die for what we believed in.

Tippett: In the way I come to understand this as I, again, study you is the point of all of this role-playing was not just about being practically prepared. You know, I suspect that some neuroscientist now in the 21st century probably understands what happens in our brain somehow with what you knew about that moment of eye contact and human connection. But you also understood this to be a spiritual confrontation first within yourselves and then with the world outside. Is that right?

Lewis: You're so right. First of all, you have to grow. It's just not something that is natural. You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. And in the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine. So you don't have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being.

We, from time to time, would discuss if you see someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person, you know, years ago that person was an innocent child, innocent little baby. And so what happened? Something go wrong? Did the environment? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? So you try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don't give up. You never give up on anyone.

[ music: "Care" by Keith Kenniff]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today remembering congressman and civil rights legend John Lewis, who died last week. On March 7, 1965, John Lewis led a peaceful march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma - and was one of the first to be beaten unconscious by police. That day became infamous as Bloody Sunday.

Tippett: So here's a line from your book Across That Bridge: "The civil rights movement, above all, was a work of love. Yet even 50 years later, it is rare to find anyone who would use the word love to describe what we did." What you just said to me illuminates that. I think part of the explanation of that is the way you are using the word love is very rich and multilayered and also challenging, challenging for the person who loves.

Lewis: Well, I think in our culture, I think sometimes people are afraid to say I love you. But we're afraid to say, especially in public life, many elected officials or worldly elected officials, are afraid to talk about love. Maybe people tend to think something is so emotional about it. Maybe it's a sign of weakness. And we're not supposed to cry. We're supposed to be strong, but love is strong. Love is powerful.

The movement created what I like to call a nonviolent revolution. It was love at its best. It's one of the highest form of love. That you beat me, you arrest me, you take me to jail, you almost kill me, but in spite of that, I'm going to still love you. I know Dr. King used to joke sometime and say things like, "Just love the hell outta everybody. Just love 'em."

Tippett: Love the hell out of them, right, yeah [laughs]. Gandhi was such an important figure for you, for all of you, for Dr. King as well. I also think that may be a little bit lost in our collective memory. I think it's important to remember that, the very rich spiritual lineage that you were all drawing on and became part of. I was really struck by you. You often refer to one of Gandhi's important terms, satyagraha.

You know, again, in terms of breaking open this word love out of the kind of superficial ways we talk about it or nonviolence in a superficial way, the definition of that that you give is steadfastness in truth, active pacifism, right? Revolutionary love is another way to think about that. Not just an external stance, but a fundamental shift inside our own souls. It's very powerful. It's not the way - certainly not the way I hear people talking about public life or political action, now.

Lewis: I think all of us in life, not just in the Western world, but all over the world, we need to come to that point. We need to evolve to that plane, to that level where we're not ashamed to say to someone, "I love you, I'm sorry, Pardon me, Will you please forgive me? Excuse me." What is it? Have we lost something? Can we be just human and say I love you? I think so - so many occasions we think of love as being romantic and all of that, but just love because it's good in itself, just love living creatures.

Now, when I was very young, you probably know that I fell in love with raising chickens, and I loved those chickens. I talked to those chickens. I preached to those chickens and I used to cry when my mother or father wanted to kill one of those chickens for dinner. They became part of my life, and my first nonviolent protests were protesting against my parents for getting rid of some of those chickens.

Tippett: OK [laughs]. Let's talk a little bit about suffering, which is something that went right alongside that love in the movement, even with your chickens and I think in the way you live now. You use the term redemptive suffering and that your mother, who was clearly a woman of incredible dignity and grace and courage, really internalized the idea of unearned suffering as a holy thing, that she would redeem that suffering.

You also wrote: "Suffering can be nothing more than a sad and sorry thing without the presence on the part of the sufferer of a graceful heart, an accepting, an open heart, a heart that holds no malice toward the inflictors of his or her suffering." I mean, I guess that brings us back to this idea of love.

But, you know, I want to ask you, before the triumphant Montgomery-Selma march that we've all seen, the beautiful pictures of King and Heschel and all those other people walking across the bridge, there was Bloody Sunday and you were in the front rows of that and you were the first person to be hit. That was an incredibly brutal act. Were you able on that bridge, as you were knocked - as you were given a concussion, as other people were very badly injured, to really internalize that accepting an open heart? Do you know that that's possible?

Lewis: I was prepared to accept the violence, the beating. And I thought we were going to be arrested and simply taken to jail. I didn't have any idea that we would be beaten.

Tippett: And that you would be met by these masses of officers, horses ...

Lewis: State troopers and horses and a posse of the sheriff, that we would be trampled by horses and tear-gassed and beaten all the way back to the church. I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death. I thought it was my last nonviolent protest. But before, I guess, I lost consciousness, I became deeply concerned about the other people on the march. But in all of the years since, I've not had any sense of bitterness or ill feeling toward any of the people. I just don't have it. I guess it's not part of my DNA to become bitter, to become hostile.

Tippett: But you've also trained your DNA a bit more than the rest of us [laughs].

Lewis: Well, maybe I tracked it. Yeah, I did control it. But the teaching, the training, the reading, and coming in contact with great teachers. Martin Luther King Jr. had a tremendous influence on me and the reading and the study of Gandhi.

When I saw the film several years ago of Gandhi and saw the march to the sea, it reminded me of the march from Selma to Montgomery. That there come a time where you have to be prepared to literally put your physical body in the way to go against something that is evil, unjust, and you prepare to suffer the consequences.

But whatever you do, whatever your response is, is with love, kindness, and that sense of faith. In my religious tradition is this belief that it's going to work out. It is going to work out. It's all going to be all right. And people will ask me from time to time, "What shall we do, John, during the sit-ins or during the freedom rides?" And I would say, "We need to find a way to dramatize the issue. We need to find a way to get in the way, but it should be in a peaceful, loving, nonviolent fashion." Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.

Tippett: And do you feel like even in that moment on that dark day on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, were you able to love those officers who came at you in this sense you're describing?

Lewis: I saw these officers as individuals carrying out an order. And since then, I've had an opportunity to meet some of their sons and daughters of some of the people. I had a discussion on one occasion with Governor Wallace about what happened on that Sunday.

Tippett: And Governor Wallace would have ordered them or he would have been behind that.

Lewis: Well, he was the governor. He wanted the march stopped. He said he never gave them the order to beat us. He said to me, "John, there were people waiting on the other side of the bridge to kill you." And I said, "Governor, when we were stopped, it appeared to me there was an attempt to kill us before other people killed us."

Tippett: Right.

Lewis: He said it was a struggle between the federal government and the state government and not against us.

Tippett: On this - sorry.

Lewis: But I never had any bitterness toward him or any of the officials, even going back to the freedom rides when we arrived in Montgomery in 1961.

There was a man named Floyd Mann who was a public safety director of the Alabama State Troopers. He came and stood and put a gun up in the air and said something like, "There will be no killing here today. There'll be no killing here today." And several years later, I saw Floyd Mann after I got elected to Congress at the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial. And he asked me, he said, "Congressman Lewis, do you remember me?" And I said, "Mr. Mann, how could I forget you? You saved my life." He cried and I cried.
[music: "Precious Lord" by Congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church]
Tippett: This is the choir from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr. pastored and preached during the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott. And they led this Congressional delegation with John Lewis in singing King's favorite hymn.

[ music: "Precious Lord" by Congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church]

Tippett: After a short break, more with the late John Lewis. You can hear the whole unedited conversation I had with him in Montgomery, or just listen again, on the On Being podcast feed - wherever podcasts are found.

[ music: "I Am Healed" by Moses Tyson Jr.]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today we're remembering civil rights legend, congressman John Lewis, who died last week. I interviewed him in the midst of a civil rights pilgrimage in 2013 through his native state of Alabama. A delegation of over 200 people attended including the Republican House Majority Leader, the daughters of Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace, and civil rights luminaries like Ruby Bridges, who was the first African American girl to desegregate an all-white southern school.

Tippett: I was present and very privileged just today here in Montgomery to witness the head of public safety here in Montgomery, the chief of police, offer you a public apology and a new generation of Montgomery policemen talk about his work to bring the truth of that history to policemen coming up now. It was an incredible moment.

Lewis: It was a very moving moment to me. You know, I cry sometimes and sometimes I think I cry too much, but they're tears of gratitude, tears of appreciation, joy, happiness, of seeing something about the distance we've come and the progress we've made. What the chief did today was so meaningful.

Tippett: He gave you his badge too.

Lewis: You know, I said to him, I'm not worthy. I wanted to say to him, you don't have to do this, but he did it. It says something about the power of love, the power of nonviolence that it happened to move us toward a reconciliation.

Tippett: And I keep wanting - I want to push you a little bit because the word love, as you said, you know, it's romantic. Love as you are talking about it, as you have aspired to live it, is not a way you feel. It's a way of being, right?

Lewis: It's a way of being, yes. It's a way of action. It's not necessarily passive. It has the capacity. It has the ability to bring peace out of conflict. It has the capacity to stir up things in order to make things right. When we were sitting in, it was love in action.

Tippett: When you were doing the sit-ins like at lunch counters, at big department stores that had been segregated?

Lewis: Right. When we went on the freedom ride, it was love in action. The march from Selma to Montgomery was love in action. We do it not simply because it's the right thing to do, but it's love in action. That we love our country, we love a democratic society, and so we have to move our feet.

Tippett: That phrase, an African proverb, when you pray, move your feet. You've got that in both of your books. I even tweeted it the other day. People love it. It's an amazing phrase. It's also interesting how that imagery recurs. You talk about Montgomery and speaking with their feet, you know, Heschel after the march said he felt like he was praying, his feet were praying. I wonder if you think about, you became a congressman, is it right, in 1987? Is that right?

Lewis: I took office in 1987, elected in '86.

Tippett: OK. So is being in politics part of your way of praying with your feet now?

Lewis: I see my involvement in American politics as an extension of my faith, not simply as an extension of my involvement in the civil rights movement. My life, whether in the civil rights movement or whether in American politics, is an extension of my faith. It's the sense that you believe that somehow and some way with love and a sense of I got to do it. You know, I talk about the spirit and I talk about the spirit of history.

Tippett: Yes, you do.

Lewis: And sometimes it's this feeling that you have been tracked down, as Dr. King would say.

Tippett: You've been what?

Lewis: You have been caught up. You have been led. You have been not necessarily forced, but something caught up with you and said, "John Lewis, you too can do something, you too can make a contribution, you too can get in the way, but if you're going to do it, do it full and with love, peace, nonviolence, and that element of faith."

Tippett: I wonder if you have the distinction of being the U.S. congressman who spent the most days in jail in his life [laughs].

Lewis: I don't know. I never thought about it. I've not thought about it.

Tippett: I can't believe there could be many who've been in jail more than 40 times.

Lewis: Well, I didn't want to go to jail.

Lewis: Jail is not a pleasant place, but jail became one of the ways out. To be arrested, to go to jail when it's unearned suffering, it sent a message. It helped make the person who's suffering better. I felt so good the day I was arrested.

Tippett: But, again, that internal discipline was at play, right?

Lewis: Yes.

Tippett: You were turning that unearned suffering into something.

Lewis: Well, we were using it to help move the society, but also not just the larger society, but to help move us as individuals, that you can suffer and you can come out better. I felt liberated. I felt free.

Tippett: Something else I want to talk to you about is the idea of patience. Someone might look at your life and thinking and the civil rights movement and say there's always this tension between a commitment to nonviolence and a total resistance to and struggle with injustice. I want you to help us inside this virtue of patience as you've learned it and lived it. You know, there are places in your memoir that are just so striking to me.

Here's a line, you were talking, I think, about literacy training, voting rights and all the things you've trained people in, and you said, "We perceived that waiting was an elegant way to prove a point." You know, that again and again, in these different situations that the civil rights fighters put themselves into, your civility demonstrated the absurdity of the other side. So there's a patience there, but there's also a total impatience.

And at the March on Washington, your speech that you were going to give was actually edited and there was lots of hand-wringing, and here's what you had planned to say: "We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground - nonviolently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy." So how - help us understand how that is not a contradiction to the virtue of patience.

Lewis: Also in the speech near the beginning, I say, "You tell us to wait." You're right. You're right. You got it right. I say, "You tell us to wait. You tell us to be patient. We cannot be patient. We want our freedom and we want it now." So when you look at that speech of August 28, 1963, you're seeing a speech by a young guy 23 years old. I learned. I've become better. I'm wiser. You can say all of that.

Tippett: Mm-hmm.

Lewis: But at the same time, I would tell my members of my own family and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and members within the movement, within S.N.C.C and S.C.L.C and others, I've always said, "Pace yourself, pace yourself." I would tell my wife and say, "Every fight is not your fight. Pace yourself." And I would say it to the young people and others sometime, "Don't get in a hurry. Our struggle is not a struggle that lasts for one day, one week, one month or one year or one lifetime. It is an ongoing struggle."

Tippett: So, patience - right, yeah.

Lewis: And in the speech of the March on Washington, I had a lot of rhetoric and, in the end, I knew within my own soul that it was going to be a long haul and I believe that. But you don't change the world, the society, in a few days, and it's better. It is better to be a pilot light than to be a firecracker [laughs].

Tippett: Right.

Lewis: Because if you're a pilot light, you're going to be around. A firecracker coming along in you, just go off. You're here one moment and you're gone in the next moment.

[ music: "Po' Pilgrim of Sorrow" by James Horner & Sweet Honey in the Rock]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today remembering congressman and civil rights legend John Lewis who died last week. I had the great honor of speaking with him in Montgomery, Alabama in 2013 - as part of a cross-partisan congressional civil rights pilgrimage which he led for many years.

Tippett: Do you hear me? Although it's a creative tension here, it's a line you're walking.

Lewis: Yes.

Tippett: And it sounds like when I read the history of the movement, you and others walk back and forth across that line all the time. But it was that keeping, as you say, the pacing, the somehow always being able to pull back and see the long haul, I suppose. It's that stance, it's that attitude.

Lewis: But we wanted to end discrimination now. We wanted people to be able to register and vote now. And we had a slogan called "Freedom Now." But to hand a sort of revolutionary effect, it was going to take much longer when you're able to change the minds and hearts and souls of people.

Tippett: How do those experiences, those values that you learned, flow into your life in politics in our time?

Lewis: Well, I think today I'm a much better person and much better human being. Sometime when I'm sitting on the floor of the House or in a committee meeting, I feel like sometime saying, you know, I passed this way once before. You know, if I was back in Nashville or in Georgia on a protest or maybe on the freedom ride, what would we do? What would Martin Luther King Jr. say? What would Gandhi do? So you cannot give up on certain basic principles and basic teachings.

Tippett: I don't think anybody would accuse the Congress right now of being a beloved community.

Lewis: Well, I think we have some distance away from becoming the beloved community, but I will not give up on Congress. And it's my hope that, when members of Congress come on trips and journey and a pilgrimage, that they will learn something, that it will grow and will become better members and better human beings.

Tippett: You know, some of the radical aspects of this nonviolence tradition that you were steeped in, that you now bring to your life as a congressman - here's something I read in your book, that after the firebombing of the Birmingham church in which four little girls were killed, where I was privileged to be with you this weekend, Reverend King said, "At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. ... In spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not lose faith in our white brothers." You know, that very demanding notion not just of having faith in yourself or faith in your movement, but faith in your enemies.

Lewis: You have to believe and you can never, ever, give up on any possibility. It's part of it, as I said, from the beginning. It's already done. You just have to find a way to make it real.

Tippett: I remember when you write about being a student and being exposed to the world of philosophy and theology and reading about the notion of the dialectic and thinking about segregation as a thesis and the fight against desegregation as the antithesis and integration as the synthesis, the end. I wonder how you see that now, because does the dialectic start all over and what ...

Lewis: Well, I don't think it necessary to start all over again. But I had a wonderful teacher when I was at American Baptist College. His name was John Lewis Powell, and he would start discussing this idea of the thesis and the antithesis and the synthesis, and he would run around the blackboard writing and jumping.

That's what the struggle has been all about, to bring these competing forces together, bring human beings together, and create a sense of community, to create this sense of family, that out of the good - the good is already there. The love is there. How do you make it real? How do you paint the picture? It's like an artist using a canvas. How do you get people to move from maybe A to B and you get C? Or from one to two and get three? That you're on a path and you have to be consistent and you have to be persistent.

Tippett: And patient.

Lewis: And patient.

Tippett: Right.

Lewis: And it's all about being faithful, being honest, being open.

Tippett: It's so clear with every accomplishment of humanity and certainly with the civil rights movement that so much important change, good change, happened and yet there's still much more work to do. Unforeseen complications appear, setbacks appear, that even all the best things we do remain imperfect and incomplete. How do you think about that and about where the movement is in terms of your faith?

Lewis: Well, I think about it, but you have to believe there may be setbacks, there may be some disappointments, there may be some interruption. But, again, you have to take the long, hard look. With this belief, it's going to be OK; it's going to work out. If it failed to happen during your lifetime, then maybe, not maybe, but it would happen in somebody's lifetime. But you must do all that you can do while you occupy this space during your time. And sometimes I feel that I'm not doing enough to try to inspire another generation of people to find a way to get in the way, to make trouble, good trouble. I just make a little noise.

Tippett: I think you embody the things that you speak and that we watch you as much as hear you. You move your feet [laughs]. So, John Lewis, I want to thank you so much for the life you've lived and for this conversation we've been able to have with you this afternoon.

Lewis: Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed it. Thank you.

[ music: "I'm Gonna Live the Life I Sing About" by R.L. Knowles]

Tippett: John Lewis died in Atlanta, Georgia on July 17, 2020, at the age of 80. He was a Democratic congressman from Georgia's 5th district. He was the author of several tremendous books, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, Across That Bridge, and a three-part graphic novel series, March.

[ music: "I'm Gonna Live the Life I Sing About" by R.L. Knowles]

Tippett: Special thanks this week to Brenda Jones in congressman Lewis's office; Gwen Haynes; Jeremy Burns; Burns Strider; and Liz McClosky, Doug Tanner and all the other great people at the Faith and Politics Institute.

[ music: "new music" by Mavis Staples]

The On Being Project is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Laurén Dørdal, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Serri Graslie, Colleen Scheck, Christiane Wartell, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, and Jhaleh Akhavan

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

On Being is an independent production of The On Being Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I created this show at American Public Media.

Our funding partners include:

The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org.

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The Osprey Foundation - a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.

And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders' interests in religion, community development, and education.

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Rep. John Lewis: When we were sitting in, it was love in action. When we went on the freedom ride, it was love in action. The march from Selma to Montgomery was love in action. We do it not simply because it's the right thing to do, but it's love in action.

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Read 163 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. There is a craft to uprising -- and this craft can change the world From protests around c…

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(Fiction, Fantasy)
"A whirlwind romance between an eccentric [trans, vampire] archivist and a grieving widow explores what it means to be at home in your own body in this clever, humorous, and heartfelt novel."

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"And who wouldn't want to bang a sentient sunflower? That dry, ridgy stem, those big dead-looking leaves, that drooping head."

This was so very good. It was unique and moving. A provocative vampire novel that is like no other. Definitely worth a read and a reread.
...more

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"And who wouldn't want to bang a sentient sunflower? That dry, ridgy stem, those big dead-looking leaves, that drooping head." This was so very good. It was unique and moving. A provocative vampire novel that is like no other. Definitely worth a read and a reread. ...more

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(Movie)
"Two strangers find themselves linked in a bizarre way. When a connection forms, will distance be the only thing to keep them apart?"

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Your Name. (2016) ⭐ 8.4 | Animation, Drama, Fantasy

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(Movie)
"The story of the discovery of the AIDS epidemic, and the political infighting of the scientific community hampering the early fight with it."

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And the Band Played On (TV Movie 1993) - IMDb

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And the Band Played On: Directed by Roger Spottiswoode. With Matthew Modine, Alan Alda, Patrick Bauchau, Nathalie Baye. The story of the discovery of the AIDS epidemic, and the political infighting of the scientific community hampering the early fight with it.

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(Documentary)
"A documentary of the successful career and assassination of San Francisco's first elected gay city supervisor."

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STUNNING. That's the only word to describe this film. If you haven't seen it, prepare to be amazed. Clear the room and remove any distractions because you won't want to miss a second of this remarkable recounting of the Harvey Milk story. Prepare to cry and scream, because you will do both.

"The Times of Harvey Milk" covers a bit of American history that almost NO Americans seem to know about, and this is a tragedy. Everyone should know about these events, and the astonishing, beautiful people who participated in them. Perhaps the most stunning moment to me comes when a red-haired straight woman, who became a frequent customer in Harvey Milk's camera & film-processing shop, recalls the night after Milk and Mayor Mosconi were killed. Her description, her face, and her tears make me cry every time I see it. And when Dan White was given a slap on the wrist for murdering Milk and Mayor George Mosconi... because the jurors thought he was under the influence of too many TWINKIES... the city erupted. The film of these riots is stunning, and you may find yourself wishing that you could be there with the rioters who STOOD UP to this historic injustice and demonstrated their rage.

People of all ages and all political persuasions will find this film a remarkable document of an important bit of American history. I believe it is essential viewing for all.

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STUNNING. That's the only word to describe this film. If you haven't seen it, prepare to be amazed. Clear the room and remove any distractions because you won't want to miss a second of this remarkable recounting of the Harvey Milk story. Prepare to cry and scream, because you will do both.

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(Movie)
"On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman."

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Original title: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman. On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman. On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.

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Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) - IMDb

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Portrait of a Lady on Fire: Directed by Céline Sciamma. With Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino. On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.

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(Documentary)
"Follows celebrated competitive skating icon Leo Baker as they try to make space for themselves in the gendered world of pro sports and build a more inclusive skate culture, which leads them to doing the punkest thing imaginable."

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I didn't know Leo Baker before this documentary but after watching the trailer for the documentary I wanted to watch it.

The love and support he got from those around him was just heartwarming. I love seeing how his world opened up when he stopped pretending to be who he is not and started being himself.

We need more stories like this to be told.

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Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story (2022) - IMDb

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Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story: Directed by Nicola Marsh, Giovanni Reda. With Leo Baker, Melissa Bueno-Woerner, Alexis Sablone. Follows celebrated competitive skating icon Leo Baker as they try to make space for themselves in the gendered world of pro sports and build a more inclusive skate culture, which leads them to doing the punkest thing imaginable.

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"Molly is a white non-binary queer illustrator, food grower, honey bee tender and a seeker of mysticism. Through their creative work they explore themes of interconnectedness, cosmology, reciprocity, biomimicry and are interested in cultivating our radical imaginations to help us shape our emergent new world."

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"My name's Alex, I'm the human behind Sweet Cowboy Blues. I'm an artist, screen printer and small business owner. My wife and I are both illus"

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Howdy Partner!

My name's Alex, I'm the human behind Sweet Cowboy Blues. I'm an artist, screen printer and small business owner. My wife and I are both illustrators and we work from our home in Cornwall with our cat Beryl and our dogs Laika & Tess. We both try to be as creative as possible and do as much as we can ourselves. My work includes screen printed clothing and prints, digital prints, postcards and stickers, along with a range of hand printed one off clothing items. Thanks so much for supporting me and checking out my shop - it all means the world!

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My name's Alex, I'm the human behind Sweet Cowboy Blues. I'm an artist, screen printer and small business owner. My wife and I are both illustrators and we work from our home in Cornwall with our cat Beryl and our dogs Laika & Tess.

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https://www.instagram.com/p/CiIGwLAhUUV/?hl=en

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Book store in San Francisco! Large selection of LGBTQIA + books.

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Queer community cafe in San Francisco