I read a really gorgeous essay called Be Gentle this week, by a couple of children’s book illustrators.1 They write about their dog, their kid, and some of their characters. I was especially struck by this description of their dog:
Wednesday’s soul, it seemed, occupied some hard-to-reach space between animal and human creatures. We understood her immediately to be an artist. And like every artist I have known, she was both apart from and uncomfortable around her peers. The internal strength of her otherness was delivered, sometimes with alarming directness, through the eyes. If your own soul was not on good footing, she could easily tip it off its balance. This is also like the artists I’ve known.
I felt immediate kinship with Wednesday.2 I was also struck by this description of one of their characters:
It has been pointed out to me by friends and strangers over the years that both the story and character of Amos McGee are tinged with a certain, unspecific melancholy. Melancholy was never my intent, but I see it now, too. It is evident mostly in the face of Amos himself, which Erin imagined and constructed with great care. Before setting pencil to paper Erin sculpted Amos’s face in clay—something I have rarely seen her do since. The melancholy of Amos McGee is born, I think, from a knowledge that the world is never quite as gentle as it ought to be. It is a melancholy easily seen in the faces of great men or women who have spent a lifetime imploring others to be kind. Consider the face of Mister Rogers, or Jane Goodall, or Martin Luther King Jr.—all of whom have borrowed, by the way, from the rudiments of children’s-book writing in their own work: direct and honest speech, musicality, the strategic positing of a hopeful question.
I mean……….
The world is not as gentle as it ought to be, nor is it as kind. Which is to say as we wish it was. And, there is gentleness in the world and kindness in the world. Over the years I’ve been so moved when people are gentle with me, especially in moments of duress. It’s a profound generosity and brings a kind of bittersweet relief. Bitter only because it brings my armor into the fore. Or maybe it makes me realize how badly I’m always yearning for that disarming kind of presence.
I found out about this essay through this Friday Inspiration newsletter. I’ve been getting them since last summer, I think. This guy Brendan writes about running, among other things, and also shares such a great mix of funny, weird, uncanny, and poignant stuff. Kind and gentle stuff. It is nourishing.
I’ve been thinking about citational practice as a kind of nourishment/guidance/intel mapping, or tracking, or noting. As in no, I didn’t come up with this, as in yes, look at all that’s gone into the mix and the mix is enduring for now. As in look where I got it so you can get it if you want to too.
My friend Elizabeth and I were geeking out this week about how the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond talks about organizing and relationship building (networking..) as striving for, building (okay okay weaving) a net that works (many levels of safety net from personal to societal ~interwoven~). Maybe citation can be an energetic, spiritual net that works, that catches more of us when we fall, too. Or maybe I’m just in grad school lol. Either way, we need all the reinforcements we can get.