“Bad teams, they reject their roles. Good teams, accept their roles. Great teams, embrace their roles.” -JJ Redick
“There are no small parts, only small actors.” -Konstantin Stanislavski
Forget about the size or quality of the role. If you’re fortunate enough to be cast in a project, then go all out. Give it everything you got. Play the part with all your heart, mind and soul. As if your life depended on it. As if it’s the last part you’ll ever play.
“It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?
We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.
But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.” -David Brooks, The Moral Bucket List Essay in The New York Times
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” -Joan Didion
“To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.
To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.
When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.
The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.
But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in.” -Susan Sontag, At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches
“I will keep constant watch over myself and—most usefully—will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil—that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past.” -Seneca, Moral Letters
Maybe you’re feeling satisfied today because you worked hard on building your resume virtues. (Or maybe you’re frustrated because you didn’t.)
But what did you do today to build your eulogy virtues? Because those are far more important. Those are what last. And the good news is you can always work on them. (Love and simple acts of kindness are the way.)
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” -Alan Kay
“There were no textbooks, so we had to write them.” -Katherine Johnson, Mathematician and NASA scientist who played a key role in sending the first astronauts to space, on what it took to accomplish the mission
“I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.” -Cicero
Don’t like what’s going on out there?
Don’t see what you want or need or could really use?
Have a deep desire to do, to help, or to make something happen?
“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” -Aristotle
“Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” -excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream”, speech delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
How does a dream become a reality?
First you dream it.
Next, you express it out loud. Consistently, confidently and passionately. To anyone and everyone who will listen.
Then you set out to do it. Along with the others who believe in you and your dream.
And you keep doing it, and doing it, and doing it. No matter how long the odds, no matter how dim the light, no matter how difficult the struggle.
Until it gets done.
Until the dream becomes a reality.
P.S. – Happy birthday. (The full transcript of Dr. King’s incredible speech can be read and listened to here.)
“The lack of a singular hero in the face of this disaster is not something to fret — only our desire for one is. Even though some claimed to be such heroes around the other disasters we’ve faced, I find they were more like the movies we make – they were acting a role. They were fulfilling our fantasies. We need and want something different now than individual heroes.
My fantasy is that now together we start to step out of our illusion. The truth is there will be no hero to save us.
There will only be each other. There will only ever be each other.
It is time we stop motivating everything to allow only one person to wear the cape. The heroes are the community. The community shall rise. It is by working together that things get built back better. There are no small actions. Each little improvement we make demonstrates our abilities to make a difference. When we look at all of these and take them together, we see teamwork.
Sometimes we lead. Sometimes we support. Each time and with each action, we are lending a hand. We are reaching out. We find a path and build it so others too can walk forward.” -Ted Hope
“The only solution is love and that love comes with community.” -Dorothy Day
“My grandfather was the first sage warrior I knew…Papa Ji tied his turban every day, clasped his hands behind his back, and surveyed the world through the eyes of wonder. When he listened to kirtan, sacred music, he closed his eyes and let the music resound wondrously within him; he wrote poetry in his garden…As I fell asleep each night, Papa Ji would sing the Mool Mantr, the foundational verse that opens the Guru Granth Sahib, our sacred canon of musical wisdom. It begins with the utterance “Ik Onkar,” which means Oneness, ever-unfolding. “All of Sikh wisdom flows from here,” Papa Ji would say. All of us are part of the One. Separateness is an illusion: There is no essential separateness between you and me, you and other people, you and other species, or you and the trees. You can look at anyone or anything and say: You are a part of me I do not yet know.” -Valarie Kaur, Sikh activist and author of Sage Warrior: Wake to Oneness, Practice Pleasure, Choose Courage, Become Victory
Depending on the situation, your circumstance and your strengths…Perhaps you lead. Perhaps you follow. Perhaps you do both.
But either way, no one ever does it alone.
We do it together. With each other. For each other. Because we only have each other.
We are one.
P.S. – This inspiring news story of nonprofit groups partnering to transform a downtown LA arts hub into temporary housing for fire victims.
P.P.S. – For more of the interview with Valarie Kaur including a brief story of Guru Nanak, founder of the Sikh faith, click Here.
Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. First realize that you are sick; then you can move toward health.
When they think that they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don’t know, people can find their own way. -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation)
“Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto.
Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.
Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre.” -Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, excerpt from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1996
“As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.” -Socrates
“In the end is my beginning.” -T.S. Eliot, poem Four Quartets
“I Don’t Know” is brave, honest, vulnerable and empowering. Continuously say it.
At the Start (when you have no idea if it will work or how you will get through it): “I Don’t Know.”
During the Middle (regardless if you’re making progress or not): “I Don’t Know.”
In the End (after you’ve solved it or completed your project): “I Don’t Know.”
The continuous “I Don’t Know” allows you to always have beginner’s mind, and an open eye and heart. It keeps things fresh, thereby inspiring you for the next project, problem or artistic endeavor you wish to tackle.
P.S. – Hat tip to the always excellent Poetic Outlaws Substack for the Nobel speech by Wislawa Szymborska. You can read it in its entirety Here.
P.P.S. – Speaking of remarkable Polish women and the Nobel Prize…Marie Curie is the first woman to win a Nobel, the first person to win it twice, and the only person to win it for two different scientific fields. For a great Marginalian article on Marie Curie, click Here. And read the poem Power by Adrienne Rich here.
“So, what is hope, and what is hope for? Hope is an emotional temper that emboldens the heart to be active, it is a condition, a mood, an aura of being. It is a feat of the imagination, both courageous and ingenious, a vitality that inspires us to take innovative action to defend the world. Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope – the necessary driver of change — to inspire us to action.” -Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files
“Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much.” -Helen Keller
Join us tonight, January 14th, at 6:30pm PT for a special Vs. Tuesday Night Zoom. It’s a chance for everyone affected by these wildfires (directly and indirectly) to share, to grieve, to uplift and to hold space together. It’s also an opportunity for us all to explore and strategize the most efficacious ways to help those in need.
If you’re not already on the Vs. readings email list, but want to join tonight’s Zoom, drop me a line (jclark@vstheatre.org) and I’ll forward you all the info.
If you can’t join tonight but have ideas or links you’d like me to share with the group, drop me a line and I will do so.
Stay safe out there there. We’ll get through this. Together.
P.S. – For a good list of resources and ways to help, click Here. (h/t to Arts For LA for providing)
“If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. -Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” -Jim Stockdale (Medal of Honor winner who spent 8 years as a P.OW. in Vietnam)
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me. -poem “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Optimism is great, but it’s not enough. For those really difficult and uncertain times, when circumstances are brutal, when you don’t know if you’re gonna make it through, when you don’t see any light in the distance, when you can’t possibly fathom how this story ends well, enter hope.
Hope is mysterious and mystical. Hope is relational. It’s trust in one another and something much bigger and more powerful than just yourself and your optimistic mindset.
You don’t need to know how or when you will get through this. You just need to know and have constant hope that you will.
That hope and trust is what allows you to take the necessary steps and actions to just get through this minute, this hour, this day. And to help each other do the same.
Well I don’t know about your right and wrong I got a muse from the east to the west All I know is if I never said it before I’m going to say it with my last breath
I will never forget your healing hands my love I thought my heart had stopped I swore I had given up I will never forget your healing hands my love You gave me daylight you gave me sunlight -song “Healing Hands” by Citizen Cope
It’s been incredibly heartwarming to see Angelenos coming together to help one another during these fires. I thought to share a beautiful story about the power of art, brotherhood and radical generosity. (Courtesy of George Bothamley and his always excellent “Art Every Day” Substack, I’ve cut and paste it below. You can also read it directly on his site Here. )
For a long time, Albrecht Dürer’s drawing of these praying hands was interpreted as being kind of self portrait – i.e the artist seems to be depicting his own hands as a symbol of both his spiritual and artistic devotion.
But, actually, the truth about this picture is that the hands actually belong to the artist’s brother – Albert Dürer
And for the real story behind its deeper meaning, we need to briefly go back to when the two brothers were growing up in poverty together; in a small town just outside of Nuremberg.
Albert was the eldest of the two brothers, but they were always very close; and in sharing a mutual love of art, they would spend many happy days together making drawings, or dreaming of becoming professional painters when they grew up.
Back then, the artistic talent in both young boys was undeniable – so, had they been born into a wealthier family, there would have been no question that the two of them would have been sent off to study together in an academy, or for a joint apprenticeship under a master painter in Nuremberg.
But, sadly, the Dürer family were struggling financially at this time due to Albrecht the elder’s business as a goldsmith taking a bit of a down turn.
And in the 15th century – much like now – being an artist was not always the most lucrative field to go into.
So, when the brothers were on the cusp of coming of age, they settled on a little agreement together.
They knew that it could be possible for at least one of them to go on to study art professionally, as long as the other stayed behind to take care of the family.
Thus, in an attempt at the fairest possible way of making this decision, they put their future fate on a coin toss.
Heads for Albert – Tails for Albrecht.
In other words, if the coin landed on heads – then Albert would go off to pursue artistic training in Nuremburg; and the younger Albrecht would instead take a job as a labourer in the local mine, to support to family.
And if it landed on tails . . . then roles would be reversed. Albrecht would go to Nuremburg – Albert would stay behind.
The coin was tossed – and it was the younger brother who came out as the luckier of the two.
Thus, only a few weeks later, Albrecht Dürer was on his way to the city, with a letter of recommendation to become an artist apprentice. And Albert, just as he promised, stayed in the family home . . . taking a job in the local coal mine.
A few years passed – and clearly the result of the brother’s coin toss paid off.
Albert’s work was physically exhausting – but it helped keep the family above the poverty line until business picked up again.
And Albrecht excelled so much in his painting apprenticeship, that he found himself rather unexpectedly set en-route to becoming the most sought after artists in all of Germany.
At only 21 years old – soon after painting the portrait seen below- the young man returned to his home town like a celebrity. But, of course, Albrecht still carried with him a certain amount of guilt about all his success too.
He was deeply aware of just how much of a sacrifice his brother had made for him. And he couldn’t escape the thought that, if a simply coin toss had gone a different way, all of this success would have been Albert’s instead.
So, one evening – when the two brothers finally had some alone time together at their family home – Albrecht said to his brother
“Brother, listen to me. You’ve sacrificed so much for all of us . . . isn’t it time you followed your dream too? You know, I am earning well now. I can provide for everyone quite comfortably. And you don’t have to go back down to those mines anymore. Come with me . . . come to Nuremberg! I’ll help you get started as a painter – and we’ll achieve what we both dreamt about all those years ago together. You will create marvellous things, I’m sure of it!”
But- in spite of his deep gratitude for all that had been said – sadly, Albert could not share his brother’s enthusiasm
“No.” he said “It is not possible. My time has gone now.Albrecht, look at these hands of mine. You see the fingers? In these few years of work, I have broken all of them – multiple times. And you see these scars? These lumps? These marks where my hands have been beaten, bruised, calloused, and crushed by so much stone. You know . . . I can hardly even hold a knife and fork delicately when I eat, such is my loss of feeling in these hands now. So how could I ever hold a paintbrush or pencil?! No, brother. For me . . . it is too late.”
Then, letting go of his brother once more, Albert brought his broken hands together in prayer – saying
“Come. Let’s just pray together – as we used to when we were children. We should be grateful that you have achieved enough for both of us!”
And clearly, this moment is one that Albrecht would never forget; because it is the very thing he captures in his most famous drawing here – sketched over a decade later, when the two brothers were in their mid to late thirties
Technically, it was designed as a “preparatory” sketch for a larger altarpiece commission that the artist was working on at the time (now destroyed).
But in all the tenderness and painstaking care taken over the work here – we can see that, for Albrecht, this drawing is so much more than just a study of hands.
In truth, it is an expression of gratitude instead ; paying tribute to his brother’s sacrifice.
And for that reason, the underlying message of this work is that Albrecht Dürer may have been the artist in practice . . . but nonetheless, his entire career was in fact the result of his brother Albert’s hands too!
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