Welcome Mavens!

Want to hold the brief in your hands (it’s 10 pages)? Download PDF here. Want to read more deeply about the quick takes? Find links within each to do a deeper dive on your own with downloadable excerpts, Lael Notes, podcasts, videos, etc.

Themes

The Bridge (Embodying)

• Seeing the power of our position as GenX—between two generations that seem at war with each other (Baby Boomers + Millennials/Z). We are fluent in both languages and share values with both. We have grown up straddling two different realities (“the way it is” and “the way it should be”), which makes us powerful conduits for change if we can stay on (and lead from) the bridge.
• White women leading white men (applying lessons learned from black women leading white women)—harnessing the power of our relationships to engage people in their discomfort, be with them in transition, and usher them into hard conversations. This also applies to our relationships with other white women.
• Being an outlier—resisting the pull to water ourselves down, temper our truth, or concede to popular thought/feelings. Feeling different, weird, unconventional, leading from the edge, and being lonely.
• Key questions to consider: Where do I feel like I’m between two worlds? How can I stay fluid?

Focus (Holding)

• The need to focus in the age of distraction is paramount, and yet it’s never been more challenging. It takes ENERGY to focus—it’s physically demanding, lonely, and not popular. It seems we’re always missing some vital piece of information because things happen so fast. Our bodies are taking in and processing all that information, which exhausts us, and our old tricks of self-care aren’t cutting it.
• Many would prefer to not see what’s happening right in the light of day (“let’s just hope that doesn’t happen”, “I can’t talk about that anymore…”) because it’s easier to not see/feel than it is to take action and address. Resentment, judgement and distain are at an all-time high, while curiosity feels like it’s at an all-time low because exhaustion has set in—our ability to engage in thoughtful discourse has seemed to vanish as the divide between people seems to get bigger.
• Simply put: the world is louder and time feels precious—which means solitude, reflection, wandering, deep thought and research feel like a luxury we don’t have the time for anymore.
• Key questions to consider: What will support me in seeing more clearly? Where do I resist seeing? 

Reckoning (Owning) 

• Being able to weave together different thoughts, patterns, words, images, data points and stories to paint a picture of where we are and what we’re experiencing as a means to disrupt a pattern of one-dimensional thinking
• Mental elasticity, systems thinking, the ability to hold multiple truths and a capacity to be with ambiguity/unknown (“I don’t know…”) are the competencies of being on the bridge between here and there—and this is challenging in a society that values knowing, answers, fixing and doing.
• Understanding resistance—in ourselves and each other—to increase compassion while also hold boundaries. The need to stay whole (integrated, connected, rooted) in a culture that feels fractured, scattered and determined to “get it right” rather than assume responsibility or own our mess ups.
• Key questions to consider: Where am I being challenged? Where can I challenge others? 

Quick Takes

Luvvie Ajayi Jones: Professional Trouble-Maker

• I want to dream like white men who have never been told there are ceilings for them, let alone caps.
• The audacity of unshackled white men is massive.
• The only way I wish to be more like them is by having the lack of oppression that gives me the freedom, gumption, and unmitigated gall to think it’s even possible to own a mountain. I want that dauntlessness.
• This must be said: It’s not that the men of Summit are smarter or even braver than anyone else for thinking about buying a mountain. But they (like millions of white men) benefit from being constantly centered, elevated, and catered to, so they have not been programmed to expect less from the world, like the rest of us have.
• We need the nerve and rashness to dare to think these things are possible too, even when we know we might need to be four times as good, three times as qualified, and twice as professional to get what they will have handed to them when they walk into a room in their cargo shorts, half asleep.
• Dreaming big is in itself a privilege. However, I’m asking us to trick ourselves into thinking we have the privilege of dreaming big.
• Sometimes we must dream so big that we make people uncomfortable. That is actually when you know you’re doing what you should—when you mention something to someone and they gasp.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: What If We Get It Right?

• If ever there were a moment for our collective wisdom to take center stage, this is it—all hands and minds and hearts on deck.
• I have a tenuous relationship with hope. I don’t even like the word. It seems so passive, like wishful thinking. I’ve been asked ad nauseam, What makes you hopeful? How do you stay optimistic? That always snags me, because I’m neither. I’m a scientist: I’m a realist. I immediately think: Fuck hope. Where’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?
• It took me far too long to realize that what people were really asking was, ‘Can you please give me hope? I need some.’ And that version of the question, that vulnerable and true version, that “tell me how you, how I, can keep going” version, I totally get. We, those of us trying to turn things around, are not robots. We are humans with heaps of emotions and attachments and fears.
• The dictionary definitions of “hope” and “optimism” both include the expectation of a positive outcome. A positive outcome is a wild thing to expect given the scenarios we face. But the definition of hope, also includes the word “desire” something I have in abundance. I want climate solutions so badly.
• So when people perceive me as hopeful, I think what they’re actually seeing is that I am joyful. And thank goodness for the human ability to decouple hope from joy.
• It’s worth repeating: this shit ain’t over yet. And while I don’t have any assurances for you—hot damn, the world is a wreck and the future uncertain—I am overflowing with motivation to work toward a better world, even knowing it won’t be a perfect world. A world with mended landscapes and renewable energy and clean air and climate justice is possible. And that is worth a shot.

Johann Hari: Stolen Focus

• When attention breaks down, problem solving breaks down.
• If we can understand what’s happening, we can begin to change it…focus=clarity
• Bottomline: we are losing our light (to see clearly, to act accordingly)
• Attention takes 3 different forms (source: James Williams, former Google Exec), Hari added a 4^th
• *You can only find your starlight and daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind wandering and deep thought

1. Your Spotlight—The first layer where you focus on immediate actions. It requires narrowing your focus.
2. Your Starlight*—The second layer that applies to your longer-term goals over time. When you feel lost, you look up at the stars to get the direction you’re traveling in.
3. Your Daylight*—The third layer makes it possible to know what your longer term goals are in the first place, It allows you to reflect and see the things around you. This is the most important because it allows you to know who you are, what you want, and where to go.
4. Our Stadium Lights—The fourth form of attention that allows us the ability to see each other. It enables us to work together to formulate and fight for collective goals.

Halla Tomasdotir (President of Iceland) interview with Adam Grant

• Leadership ultimately comes down to asking yourself the question ‘Who am I not to offer myself up to do something?’ Experience has taught me that if I wait until I’m confident to do something, I’m unlikely to take big risks or take big leaps.
• In a world where we face so many fears, so much anger, so much hate, so much division, so many complex challenges and questions, I think we have to really draw on our full mental and emotional capacities to meet this moment.
• I didn’t become President in 2016 [I lost], but I became president of my own life. It was really about me taking the time to sit well in my own skin. You may not win the race you offer yourself into, but if you do it with a clear vision for why you do it, and how you want to do it, there is every chance you’ll come out of it as a winner because you’ll grow a lot.
• Questions are far more important than answers right now. I want to be a president who is known for asking questions, not having the answers.
• There is something that each and every one of us can do to help deliver the world we want. I have a lot of respect for people who don’t want to do it from such a visible post, but I think all of us have a reason to ask ourselves, ‘How can I serve?’
• I worry how we build trust in a world that already has low trust when we have nothing that we can collectively agree on as truth. There just seems to be all kinds of versions of truth being pushed and echo chambers…so I think we’re all developing blind spots.

Andrea Gibson on Instagram

• If I’m to be what Mary Oliver called a bride, married to amazement, I cannot file for divorce.
• The only thing we have control over in this life is where we put our attention. So in the darkness, I put my attention on the moon, pouring into the skylight above the bed, to kiss my love’s forehead.
• Life is so sweet I’ve said to her 7,000 times in the last year, and only then realized that I’d previously been living my life like I was owed my days, owed the sunlight that travelled 93 million miles to warm my face today.

NYTimes Opinion: Thanks a Lot, Boomers.

• “It’s easy to hold a sign saying ‘I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit’. But if you’re looking to hold someone accountable, own the world YOU made. Protest yourselves. You were handed the world on a silver platter. You’ve been an electoral powerhouse since the 80s. When presented with the choice between protecting your interests or investing in a better future for your children, you usually chose yourself. It’s like you feel Democracy only exists to serve your needs.’

Lee Harris’s November Energy Update

• Skepticism is based on non-experience or disbelief
• Don’t be surprised if you’re a little less tolerant of the judges in your life—I have compassion, but I also have boundaries. I have no problem with people not meeting me, but I’m not very tolerant these days of someone who wants to push against me…I did a lot of that when I was younger and more wounded. I don’t need to play that game anymore. Watch the hygiene of how you let people speak to you.
• Someone else’s truth does not have to be yours—and the fact that they believe their truth is the only truth tells you what a limited world they’re living in. This level of certainty of the mind has actually been very helpful for societal control. Societal control is going through a real reckoning right now.
• It’s hard for you to change anything when you’re hiding something. The minute you stop hiding and you bring yourself forward, your energy signature, your truth, goes into the room, and it effects the room. So many more people are capable of change than we realize.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes: Women Who Run with the Wolves

• The modern woman is a blur of activity. She is pressured to be all things to all people. The old knowing is long overdue.
• And when we pick up on her trail, it is typical of women to ride hard to catch up, to clear off the desk, clear off the relationship, clear out one’s mind, turn to a new page, insist on a break, break the rules, stop the world, for we are not going on without her any longer.
• All one might need, all that we might ever need, is still whispering from the bones of story.
• Story grease the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women.
• To find her, it is necessary for women to return to their instinctive lives, their deepest knowing. So let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones. Shed any false coats we have been given. Don the true coat of powerful instinct and knowing.

Brittney Cooper: Eloquent Rage

• The problem with the 2016 presidential election is simple: white feminists didn’t come get their people. Who are the people of white feminists? Other white women. Until the election of Donald Trump, very few Americans, beyond political scientists and analysts paid attention to the fact that white women have a long history of voting for predominantly for Republican candidates in presidential elections. But when we woke up on November 9^th, 2016, to discover that white women were not interested in forming a president in their own image, suddenly we began to train our eyes more on white women.
• I have always known of white women’s great capacity to be treacherous. But I did not know that they suffered a far more acute version of a problem that white feminists have, for decades diagnosed Black women with having: For white women, their race comes before their gender.
• Watching white women take it to the streets to protest an election outcome that was a result of white women’s powerful voting bloc, felt like an exercise in white-lady tears if I ever saw one.
• It feels really important in this moment to make clear that feminism is a multiracial project. Feminism doesn’t belong to white women.
• When white women signal through their tears that they feel unsafe, misunderstood, or attacked, the whole world rises in their defense.

Lael Couper Jepson: Spit-It-Out Love Letter

• This waiting thing we do? It’s got to stop. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment in our history, and ours are all bound up—not by someone else, but by our own thoughts about who we are and what we’re capable of doing.
• You are an untapped resource, woman, but you’ve yet to fully open the spigot of you. Imagine what would be possible for our world if you did—indeed all of us women did. We would create a veritable tsunami of change, seemingly overnight.
• It’s dark out there and feels vastly unknown. So much is there, but unseen, which is scary. And yet, there is an expansiveness to the ocean. We sense it as it reawakens our skin, offering us hope even as it feels daunting.
• We talk about what might be possible for our world if women were to lead us into the future. We imagine what might be different as a result.
• I believe men—and the predominately masculine values they have used to design, organize, govern, and grow our world as we know it—are an exhausted resource. Literally and figuratively.
• Until women find our way back to this place where the feminine lives and unlock it for ourselves, we will continue to reach for and deplete the very same resource that has been thoroughly exhausted—the masculine energy in us.
• I believe with all my heart that if enough women choose to trust themselves and what they have inside them at this particular moment in history, we will create a groundswell of change that is so desperately needed in this world. We will create—collectively—a critical mass powered by women.

Sharon Blackie: If Women Rose Rooted

• The world which men have made isn’t working. Something needs to change. To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves—and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are. The stories we’ve been living by for the past few centuries—to stories of male superiority, of progress and growth and domination—don’t serve women and they certainly don’t serve the planet.
• Stories matter, you see. And so the stories that we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, and the stories that are told to us by others about the world and our place in it, shape not just our lives, but the world around us. The cultural narrative is the culture.
• We need to understand our dysfunctional ways of being, to confront the beliefs and values we have subscribed to which cause both women and the planet to be in this mess in the first place. We need then to discovery our own authentic values and ways of being in the world, to wake up to our own creative power as women, conceive our own individual vision for what we might offer to an ailing earth.
• ‘The world will be saved by the Western women,’ the Dalai Lama once said. And if we stand with our powerful and inspiring native sisters from around the planet, together we all might just have a chance.
• And if we rise up rooted, like trees…well then, women might indeed save not only ourselves but the world

Margaret Wheatley: Who Do We Choose to Be?

• It is possible to use our influence and power to create islands of sanity in the midst of a raging destructive sea. So much is possible if we consciously and wisely choose how best to step forward as leaders for this time.
• Facing reality is an empowering act—it can liberate our mind and heart to discern how best to use our power and influence in service of this time.
• But we can’t get there from here without traversing through the falling apart stage. We cannot simply leap into new ways of being; first we must prepare for disintegration and collapse.
• The chaos cycle predicts this has to happen, that things must fall apart. And human history documents in astonishingly clear detail the pattern of collapse that all civilizations go through.
• This book is born out of my desire to summon us to be leaders for this time as things fall apart, to reclaim leadership as a noble professional that creates possibility and humaneness in the midst of increasing fear and turmoil.
• The belief in never-ending progress is fueled by our inexplicable arrogance that we can supersede the laws of the Universe. For the first time in history, humans are changing the global environment, rather than adapting to it. This is hubris of ahistorical proportions, and we are failing miserably, as you may have noted.
• For those of us not blinded by the false promise of progress, we may understand the dire state of this civilization. Do we fall into private collapse consumed with fear and despair? Do we become one who does nothing but complain for what’s being lost? Do we succumb to grief for the suffering of so many? Do we give up? Do we cocoon in self-protective bubbles? Or do we acknowledge where we are and step forward to serve?
• Blind reactivity and fear are not the answer. Self-protection is not the answer. Denial is not the answer. Sane leadership is. What is sane leadership? It’s the unshakable faith in people’s capacity to be generous, creative, and kind. Within our sphere of influence, there is much we can do.

Shawn Anchor: The Happiness Advantage

• Escaping the Cult of the Average: The fact that there is one weird red dot (on the scatter plot diagram)—what we call an outlier—up above the curve is no problem. It’s no problem because we can delete it. We can delete it because it’s clearly a measurement error—and we know it’s an error because it’s screwing up our data. If you are interested in observing the general trend of what you are researching, then outliers mess up your findings.
• The typical approach for understanding human behavior has always been to look for the average behavior or outcome. But in my view this misguided approach has created what I call the “cult of the average”. If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average.
• Conventional psychology consciously ignores the outliers because they don’t fit the pattern. I’ve sought to do the opposite instead. Instead of deleting those outliers, I want to learn from them.
• You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.

Minna Salami: Sensuous Knowledge

• Working as a black, African-heritage woman in the white and male dominated world of ideas, I am like the second explorer who has navigated the other side of the metaphorical mountain.
• It is not my aim to convince the first explorer that he’s wrong about the mountain. That would place him, yet again, at the center of the narrative. What’s important to me is the second explorer’s hidden narrative, to put her world at the center.
• I emphasize the word hidden because it is also not the point of Sensuous Knowledge to provide a “new” or “alternative” perspective to the Europatriarchical one. That would also center whiteness and maleness by implying that they are the axis around which everything must turn. My blackness and femaleness are not “new” or “alternative” angles to me. They are the only angles I know as far as race and gender are concerned.
• [Toni Morrison once wrote], “Black women have always considered themselves superior to white women. Not racially superior, just superior in terms of their ability to function healthily in the world.”
• And so what’s important about the explorer’s hidden view is that it disrupts one-dimensional thinking and contributes to a more vibrant understanding of the world.
• We have to wonder why, despite all the feminist work, womanhood is still so devalued.
• Striving to become like men and adopt notions of masculinity is, frankly, setting a low bar. Men are just as enslaved by the social system. The golden prison of masculinity sentences men to a life of conformity. Both women and men ought to reject the imprisoning definition of masculinity.

Lisa Lister: Witch—Unleashed, Untamed, Unapologetic

• The witch represents the part of each of us that has been censored, ignored, punshed and demonized. And it’s a part that wants—no, needs—to be accessed and fully expressed. I regularly get asked, ‘Why do you think women are fearful to speak out, to be heard and to fully express themselves?’ My answer: It’s because we’re fearful of the witch inside each and every one of us. The witch is a woman fully in her power. She is in touch with the dark. She knows how to be the witness, how to let things go and how to follow her own counsel. Most importantly though, she questions everything.
• She hears the whispers of those who have gone before her and she feels the ancient secret that are in her bones. She’s the one who knows without fail that there’s more to this life than actually meets the eye. She causes hierarchical power structures to shake in her wake. She knows that at any given moment, she can be a hot mess, a woman of grace and beauty, angry and grief-struck, loved and pleasure-sated, tired and soft and raw and vulnerable. She knows that in some moments, she can be all of these at once. She is whole.
• A modern-day oracle shares the very best counsel when she remembers herself—the deep intuitive trust of the wisdom and knowing held in her body.

Susan Cain: Bittersweet

• Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents. We’ve organized American culture around the sanguine and the choleric, which we associate with buoyancy and strength.
• The bittersweet-melancholic mode, in contrast, can seem backward leaning, unproductive, and mired in longing. It yearns for what could have been, or what might yet be. But longing is momentum in disguise; it’s active, not passive; touched with creative, the tender, and the divine.
• The space you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.
• The word compassion literally means “to suffer together.” Sorrow and tears are one of the strongest bonding mechanisms we have.
• If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someone’s opinions, no matter how radiant or fierce someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.
• None of this is possible without first cultivating self-compassion. [We need to learn] to walk the bridge of sadness, and find the joy of communion waiting on the other side.
• Leonard Cohen’s broken “Hallelujah.” That, in the beginning, all of creation was a vessel filled with divine light. That is broken apart, and now the shards of holiness are strewn all around us. Sometimes it’s too dark to see them, sometimes we’re too distracted by pain or conflict. But our task is simple—to bend down, dig them out, pick them up. And in doing so, to perceive that light can emerge from darkness.

Susan Simard: The Mother Tree

• [I wanted to] unlock the mysteries of why the land mended itself when left to its own devices. The trees soon revealed starting secrets. I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy that can no longer by denied.
• I uncovered the lessons of tree-to-tree communication, of the relationships that create a forest society. The most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.
• This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.
• Cooperation is the key to our survival.
• My childhood was shouting at me: The forest is an integrated whole

Brook Baldwin: Huddle, How Women Unlock Their Collective Power

• Huddle is a word associated with masculinity and sports. But what if we flipped it on its head and feminized it? It’s a noun. It’s a verb. And it’s time for us, as women to own it.
• A huddle is a place where women can become energized by the mere fact of their coexistence. A huddle is where we can uplift each other to succeed, thrive, and if I may—get amazing shit done.
• Sometimes they are a space where women can simply bear witness for each other, or quietly sustain each other’s very survival.
• I know women aren’t always great to each other. When we compete or trash each other, we miss out o something incredibly valuable. One of the most potent resources we have is each other.
• Groups of women are changing the face of this country—and long before America elected the nation’s first female vice president, women have always had a very strong hand in shaping our history. But sometimes these stories don’t make the headlines and historians don’t always focus on the huddles of women who have helped change the world.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: Stages of Grief (modified)

1. Denial (“uninformed optimism”) characterized by numbness, this can’t/won’t happen thoughts. It’s very much business as usual, and talk about change is dismissed as “heard it before…”. People don’t want to think about what needs to change—especially if it doesn’t impact them. Thoughts are very much centered on the past and focused on external environment (not internal feelings). Associated with danger.
2. Resistance (“informed pessimism”) characterized by blaming, stubbornness, and lots of emotions. There is questioning and a tendency to withdraw. People claim to not have heard about something, seem shocked by something that has been present for a while, and are confused and bewildered. Focus is very much internal, centered on the self, and references the past longingly. Associated with endings.
3. Exploration (“maybe if…”) characterized by a lack of structure or clear boundaries. High uncertainty, but also high creativity. Lots of energy, but not as much focus. Stress is present. Focus is still on the internal/self but is more forward-looking. Associated with beginnings.
4. Commitment (“I want to make this happen”) characterized by renewed focus. Challenges and goals are identified—energy is now focused both outward (on external circumstances) and future. Prepared to learn new skills. Most receptive time—open to new processes and practices. Associated with opportunities.

Brene Brown: Lock-In and Lock-Through Power

• I wanted to use the concepts of locks to illustrate the tricky work-to-home and professional-to-personal transitions that we have to navigate with our partners, children, and friends.
• Specifically, we have a “locking through” problem—the term used to describe the process of raising or lowering a boat to match the water level of the adjoining waterway. We’re coming off of one depth and either falling uncontrollably to a completely different level of flow, or we’re scrambling to rise and get synched with something more elevated. Either way, there’s a lot of rough water in these transition processes.
• When we don’t make the time for the lock-through process—when we fail to take the time to level-up or down with our new environment, we can quickly find ourselves questioning why, just hours ago, when work seemed overwhelming, we were longing to be in the very place that we now find ourselves trying to escape.
• “Locking in” is about paying full attention, going “heads down” to get it done, and making a commitment to limit distractions. We lock in for reasons of mental toughness. We lock in when we go into flow. We lock in when we go into deliberate practice, and we lock in when we go into deep focus.
• Your one flashlight can only ever be shining on one thing at a time. In a day when you do a lot of task switching, you’ll start having less integrity in any of the states your attention is in. You’re going to become more slower, more error prone, and emotionally worn out.

Want to hold the brief in your hands (it’s 10 pages)? Download PDF here. Want to read more deeply about the quick takes? Find links within each to do a deeper dive on your own with downloadable excerpts, Lael Notes, podcasts, videos, etc.

Themes

Centering (as a verb)—What (or who) lives at the center of my focus?

• Physics: where attention goes, energy flows. Is what I’m putting my attention on what I want to see multiply and grow? Or is it what is distracting, detracting, or degenerative?
• Am I consciously choosing what to focus on or am I stuck in a default mode that feels more comfortable and familiar? Where am I centering gender and not race out of habit, comfort or convenience?
• What is the visual I hold when I seek to center something—What’s in my crosshairs? Center of a bullseye? What would a more organic, less combative, life-giving metaphor look like?
• How self-righteousness and blame can feel so seductive when exhaustion is present, but not helpful to move us forward because it breeds shame, regret, and disconnection.
• What would it look like to give each other more grace without making excuses for each other or colluding? How could we call each other forward (don’t step over it, look away) with compassion?
• Is there alignment between what my body, mind, and spirit want to center—or is it creating tension that taxes and/or compromises my clarity/movement?

Quiet (Listening)—What would it look like to listen more fully to the whispers inside me?

• Acknowledging the hunger so many of us feel for solitude, reflection and listening to what lives inside us—and how we resist it because it’s easier (even as we know it comes at a cost).
• The nature of the winter season and the invitation we experience in the northern climates—to get quiet, to retreat inward in the darkest and coldest months of the year. And yet, it’s also the season of the most clarity—with the leaves off the trees and snow (eventually, hopefully) blanketing the gardens, roads and walkways. “Snowdays”, cancellations, and impassable roads give us an “excuse” to simply be.
• Our intuition is heightened this time of the year because our environment can feel hushed and sound travels. The veil is thin, and ancestors try to reach out, even if we resist. We put our words away, slow down, hunker close—and our senses come alive in a way that’s quietly revealing, not splashy or loud.
• Simple pleasures, humble gestures, kindness and our humanity is quietly present—not hidden, just not “in your face” loud. Naked truth is told in stories and passed along.
• Individual performance wanes (pretense falls away), community gatherings waxes (organically building)

The Great Unfuckening—Where am I done pretending, performing, and pleasing?

• How the desire to fake it, laugh at what’s not funny, apologize, or do emotional labor to make other people more comfortable is…done. Kaput. Fini. And how that’s linked to the neurobiology in women’s brain’s at mid-life.
• Assuming responsibility for being a fully awakened, embodied, clear-eyed woman—even in (especially in) the face of other people’s discomfort, narratives/scripts, and attempts to silence, shame, or sideline.
• The habit of tempering our truth and managing ourselves because it’s deeply inconvenient, unconventional, disruptive, makes people uncomfortable, and is perceived as dangerous. Rage.
• Realizing liberation comes from truth, clarity and aliveness—we are not the problem, the system is.

Key Concepts

• Wonder as a tool of engagement
• Journaling as a tool for listening
• Activating our senses to increase our aliveness and connection (to ourselves, each other, nature)
• Light: be the candle, be the mirror, or make it
• Riding the thermals
• An awakened woman
• The Great Unfuckening
• Reclaiming our power to choose
• Allowing joy to fuel activism
• Dressing naked truth in a story
• A quiet revolution
• The disturbed edges
• Honoring the sadness
• My plot of earth
• The arrivals gate
• The humility of winter
• Truth lives in the basement(s)
• Keep looking at your hands
• The egg isn’t passive, she chooses
• Fucking up, falling down, and falling apart
• Spiritual imagination
• Art as a portal to the unseen world
• Braiding (tension is needed to make it strong)
• White comfort and people pleasing
• Divine feminine / divine masculine
• Cautionary tales that keep us compliant
• Setting ourselves free from conventional dialogues

Quick Takes

Karen Walrund: The Lightmaker’s Manifesto (listen to podcast)

• Instead of doing your usual dance—the soft correction, the diplomatic phrasing, the careful preservation of everyone’s feelings—you just…say it. No cushioning. No apology. No emotional labor to make your truth more palatable.
• Welcome to what I call the Great Unfuckening—that point in midlife when your capacity to pretend, perform, and please others starts shorting out like an electrical system that’s finally had enough.
• You might think you’re becoming difficult. Impatient. One of those “bitter older women” you were warned about. But here’s what’s actually happening: your brain is restructuring itself. And thank god for that.
• As estrogen levels shift in perimenopause and beyond, this intense drive to please and nurture others begins to diminish. What replaces it isn’t bitterness. It’s clarity.
• The accumulated cost of a lifetime of performance. You’ve been running complex social calculations every single day for decades. After thousands of interactions where you’ve monitored and managed your authentic responses to maintain social harmony, something in your system starts breaking down. Not because you’re broken, but because the system was never meant to run this way indefinitely.
• Your brain isn’t malfunctioning. It’s finally refusing to malfunction anymore.
• Here’s the part that makes this transition so uncomfortable: other people don’t like it. This backlash is proof of concept. It confirms that your people-pleasing wasn’t optional. It was required labor that kept everything running smoothly. And when you stop providing it for free, people notice.
• The discomfort you’re causing? That’s not your problem to fix. That’s information about a system that was always exploiting you.
• But here’s what complicates this: the liberation feels dangerous. The woman you’re afraid of becoming? She’s not real. She’s a cautionary tale designed to keep you compliant.
• This is hard to talk about, but necessary: some relationships won’t survive your refusal to keep pretending.
• Here’s what no one tells you about aging out of fucks: it’s practice for being fully alive.
• You’re not becoming difficult. You’re becoming free. Your truth? It’s not the problem. The system that required you to hide it was always the problem.

FKA Twigs & Minnie Driver read letters from the Ask Polly column about the secret fury of nice women (watch YouTube)

• Dear Polly, I’m trying to figure out how to be less nice—I don’t want to be less generous or less kind, just less nice. It degrades my life—I’m only now starting to see how much. I’m mad about it.
• The older I get, the more I have to pry my desperate grasp on the idea that niceness somehow gives me value. That it obligates the world to treat me well. I have long known this does not work, and yet I kept—keep—doing it.
• When I have a necessary NO, I have a moment of triumph, and then spend the rest of the day under an avalanche of guilt.
• I assess my value in how much people like me—even when I don’t like them. Even when I hate them.
• What I want is to be actually kind. I want to give things when they’re needed—or even wanted. But I want to do it consciously, not by reflex or because the cost of saying no is so absurdly high…
• What do I do with all this fakery and anger and saccharine sweetness? What if I dispose of all this niceness and what’s left is something no one likes?
• Dear Nicely-Nicely,… here’s the thing: being nice is worthless if you’re just going to feel resentful about it in the end. You might as well just be outspoken and state your needs from the outset. Because as much as people resent assertive women, they resent disingenuous, overly friendly, secretly furious women even more.
• Maybe you need to ask yourself: how secretly furious am I?

Melanie Falick: Intro from The Making of a Good Life (read PDF excerpt)

• He began and ended his lecture by holding up a simple wooden boat that he had carved for his grandson. With that small handmade object, he reminded us to never let the lure of technology or business overshadow the value we place on working with our hands.
• He said technology is a great tool, but it will never be a substitute for human work and ideas. Keep looking at your hands.
• [Hearing him say that] is when I realized it was time for me to move on professionally. I was in tears because he had broken through the mental façade I had built to protect myself from confronting the scary reality that I was in a job that had, for a long time, been ideal but that would not suit me for much longer.
• Although I was making a good living, I was no longer making a good life.
• I didn’t know what I needed to do next. I just knew that I needed time to be quiet and let my mind wander. I needed to set myself free of certain conventional dialogues about what was and wasn’t possible, plausible, dreamable so instead of feeling trapped, I could reignite my passion and identify the opportunities that I knew had to exist but that I couldn’t yet see.
• As a result of giving myself time to wander and to make, I no longer felt lost: I understood myself better.

Opening scene of movie Love, Actually (watch clip YouTube)

• Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think of the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport.
• General opinion is starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that.
• It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.
• When the planes hit the twin towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge. They were all messages of love.
• If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love is actually all around.

Lee Harris: The Power of Women (read PDF)

• The world will come into balance through the leadership of women. It will come back into balance the more the feminine energies are allowed to be, without censorship or limitation. This will also occur as men come to fully understand the divine feminine and reclaim this power for themselves.
• Women are potent creators. They give life to the planet, and the male gives seed to the womb; an egg is fertilized and a baby is produced. So this is a profound relationship between men and women. You cannot divide one from the other, really but a division is exactly what has happened societally, and for a very long time.
• The divine feminine has been very cleverly edited out of your narratives. You have been dealing with the repercussions of this for a long time.
• This is a fear of the feminine principles and energies, especially the capacity to feel and express emotions. And this fear gives rise to resistance and anger, as some people resist the heart opening.
• The revolutionary truth for women is that the release of your anger will lead you to your power. And it is safe for you to embrace and express your power now.
• It is time for you as a woman to speak your truth. Just let those words settle in and feel into what they mean to you.
• Where women need to speak outwardly, from their masculine, men need to listen inwardly to their feminine. That is the balance.
• Women are going to be needed in the coming years like they have never before been needed.
• Women are creating the changes the world needs to see. And no matter how long their inner power has been denied, it’s time for women to be bolder.
• The more you unify the part or you that feels, that senses, that knows, with the part of you that is capable and willing to take action you will achieve the extraordinary.

Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass (no PDF)

• Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus, the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations. Its favorite habitat is sunny, well-watered meadows. It thrives along undisturbed edges.
• Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.
• Look at the legacy of poor Eve’s exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just the land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to the land.
• And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echo of our stories. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick…”
• The Skywoman’s story shared by the original peoples throughout the Great Lakes is a constant star in the constellation of teachings we call Original Instructions; they are like a compass, not commandments—providing an orientation, but not a map. The work of the living is creating that map for yourself.
• It’s good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant. She fell a long way from her home in the Skyworld, leaving behind all who knew her and who held her dear. She could never go back.
• Can they, can we all, understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future. Can a nation of immigrants once again follower her example to become native, to make a home?

Sharon Blackie: The Enchanted Life (read PDF)

• It’s like a dance, he tells me. And your dance partner in the sky is a thermal. He’s not talking about flying fast jets, he’s talking about hang-gliding. You’ll inevitably drift downwards as you fly. You have wings: it’s usually a gentle enough drift, but it’s no fun; your flight will last no more than a couple of minutes and then you’ll have to pack up all the equipment and trudge it all the way back up the hill you originally took off from if you want to fly some more.
• But what you really want is to fly for hours at a time, to explore the world of birds, the mountains, the clouds. And for that you need nature’s help. You need a thermal.
• When the sun warms the land, he explains, it doesn’t do it equally. Rocks or hollows which are protected from the wind get warmer than their surroundings and heat the air above them. And that warm air rises. So if you manage to fly inside this rush of rising air, you rise up with it.
• As a bird you know, and as a pilot you learn to intuit where they might be in that vast, seamlessly featureless open sky.
• And when you approach the thermal at speed, your wings tremble, but it’s not out of emotions or fear: they tremble in the way a dog trembles in anticipation of being let off a leash to follow a scent.
• The problem with thermals, though, is the downdrafts that surround them. Downdrafts take you by the scruff of the neck and dunk you. You’re flying along and, all of a sudden, your flightline slews and yaws without warning or hope of negotiation. That’s how you know the thermal must be close and it will be wild and headstrong. And just as you’re beginning to feel afraid, there comes the upward surge, like a punch in the gut…Any hesitation now and the thermal will push you out.
• You need to commit. Either you carve up and left, into the heart of the lift and dance with this frenzied partner, gripping it around the waist, or you’re thrown out. Too slow.
• And yes, that is the moment you remember in your dreams. You fly and you dance. So yes, it’s worth the battering of the turbulence, the gamble of airspeed and safety, to enter into the music.
• Once you’re established in a thermal, a quietness comes on you both.

Sophie Bashford: If You Choose to Love and Awakened Woman (a PLEASE READ short PDF)

• …understand that you are entering into radical and challenging territories
• …you cannot stay asleep. She will awaken the forgotten and numbed-out parts of your spirit that urge you to remember that there is more to your life here than this.
• …she will look into your weary eyes and send a lightning bolt of truth thru your body, jolting you awake, stirring long-lost desires for soul love within you
• If you choose to step into the aura and body of a woman whose spiritual fires are blazing, you are accepting that you need a certain level of danger and risk in order to grow…your life will not be sleepily comfortable all the time.
• Once you begin to love a woman of this nature, you must accept total responsibility for the life changes that will ensue…she will take you into undiscovered worlds of mystery and magic.
• …she will break and tear you open so that your fierce, passionate heart drives you half-mad with longing…she will see you like you’ve never been seen before…she will not run from your darkness, because your darkness does not scare her.
• …it’s a monumental risk to love an awakened woman, because suddenly there is no place to hide.
• Loving a woman like this is a choice you make to start living with your soul on fire.
• Your life will never be the same once you’ve invited in her energy.

Sue Monk Kidd: The Secret Life of Bees (excerpts, no PDF)

• The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quicky sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.
• At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room…I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.
• For two years now I’d kept these things of her’s [her late mother’s] inside a tin box, buried in the orchard. There was a special place out there in the long tunnel of trees no one knew about…I started going there before I could tie my shoelaces….but later I would slip out there sometimes after T. Ray had gone to bed, just to lie under the trees and be peaceful. It was my plot of earth, my cubbyhole.
• I wanted to lie down in the orchard and let it hold me…when I looked up through the web of trees, the night feel over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Lightning came, not jagged but in soft, golden licks across the sky. I undid the buttons on my shirt and opened it wide, just wanting the night to settle on my skin, and that’s how I feel asleep, lying there with my mother’s things, with the air making moisture on my chest and the sky puckering with light.
• It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming. August gazed at the sky where the moon was rising, large, and ghostly silver. “Look at her, Lily,” she said, “ ‘cause you’re seeing the end of something.” “I am?” “Yes, you are, because as long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark.” August stared at the sky a long moment and then, turning toward the house, said, “Now it won’t ever be the same, not after they’ve landed up there and walked around on her. She’ll be just one more big science project.”

Minna Salami: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (read PDF excerpt) *redo from Nov

• Working as a black, African-heritage woman in the white and male dominated world of ideas, I am like the second explorer who has navigated the other side of the metaphorical mountain.
• It is not my aim to convince the first explorer that he’s wrong about the mountain. That would place him, yet again, at the center of the narrative. What’s important to me is the second explorer’s hidden narrative, to put her world at the center.
• I emphasize the word hidden because it is also not the point of Sensuous Knowledge to provide a “new” or “alternative” perspective to the Europatriarchical one. That would also center whiteness and maleness by implying that they are the axis around which everything must turn. My blackness and femaleness are not “new” or “alternative” angels to me. They are the only angles I know as far as race and gender are concerned.
• [Toni Morrison once wrote], “Black women have always considered themselves superior to white women. Not racially superior, just superior in terms of their ability to function healthily in the world.”
• And so what’s important about the explorer’s hidden view is that it disrupts one-dimensional thinking and contributes to a more vibrant understanding of the world.
• We have to wonder why, despite all the feminist work, womanhood is still so devalued.
• Striving to become like men and adopt notions of masculinity is, frankly, setting a low bar. Men are just as enslaved by the social system. The golden prison of masculinity sentences men to a life of conformity. Both women and men ought to reject the imprisoning definition of masculinity.

Susan Cain: Bittersweet (read excerpt PDF) *redo from Nov

• Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents. We’ve organized American culture around the sanguine and the choleric, which we associate with buoyancy and strength.
• The bittersweet-melancholic mode, in contrast, can seem backward leaning, unproductive, and mired in longing. It years for what could have been, or what might yet be. But longing is momentum in disguise; it’s active, not passive; touched with creative, the tender, and the divine.
• The space you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.
• The word compassion literally means “to suffer together. Sorrow and tears are one of the strongest bonding mechanisms we have.
• If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someone’s opinions, no matter how radiant or fierce someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.
• None of this is possible without first cultivating self-compassion. [We need to learn] to walk the bridge of sadness, and find the joy of communion waiting on the other side.
• Leonard Cohen’s broken “Hallelujah.” That, in the beginning, all of creation was a vessel filled with divine light. That is broke apart, and now the shards of holiness are strewn all around us. Sometimes it’s too dark to see them, sometimes we’re too distracted by pain or conflict. But our task is simple—to bend down, dig them out, pick them up. And in doing so, to perceive that light can emerge from darkness.

Rick Rubin: The Creative Act: A Way of Being (no PDF)

• No matter what tools you use to create, the true instrument is you And through you, the universe that surrounds us all comes into focus.
• The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.
• Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage. The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science.
• The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities. The unseen world is boundless.

Meggan Watterson: What We Have Forgotten (read PDF excerpt)

• If I could start over, from the beginning, I would start with the most invisible, the threads in the web of our ecosystem that are rarely named, much less revered.
• I would start by listing the names of the trees, the flowers, the seeds that carry the light that gives us I would start first with what goes unnoticed, with what we haven’t realized is the most sacred among us. I would start with the names of everyone we’ve excluded, of the street children, the outsiders, the outcasts…with everyone one of us who things we aren’t worthy of love just as we are.
• I would start with the mother who remind us that our first country was a woman’s body, and our first element was water, and that our first reality was darkness.
• If I could write the beginning, it wouldn’t be in the light. It would be in the womb, in the dark, in a cave, in an egg. It would be to name all that has been left out of what’s holy.
• If I could start again, I would install an altar within me. I would place the most sacred object inside it: my own heart. And I would live this way. Speaking from it.
• If I could begin again, it would be with her love because this is what has been forgotten. I would start with her love because this was the bridge. This is the bridge. This is how we move the story of what it means to be human forward.

Alice Tarbuck: A Spell in the Wild (December) (no PDF)

• December comes down hard on us all, this year. The sky is tight, leaden, and will not give in to snow. The dark days open like a throat, and we all file downwards, into winter’s belly. We are so tired.
• December is about the light dying. It’s about everything dying, really, and I keep telling people this in apocalyptic tones. December is the month the earth hangs still, the month the dark might swallow us, all hungry and cold and cruel.
• In December we are caregivers, guardians of life during the dark periods. Guardians of the light, too. We are called to trust that spring will come, that frost will thaw, that light will win, victorious over darkness. It’s hard, however, to believe that it will.
• This year, however,…I cannot seem to get any [light]. I am well fed, yes, but my soul hurts, a strange numbness of cold and grief with the world. I do not know how to nourish myself, how to take up arms against night’s forces. But none of us can fight off the darkness alone.
• It isn’t surprising that humans quickly turn to introspection as the light fails. We light candles against the darkness, turning thoughts inward, using the little light that is left ot illuminate our darkest places.
• Magic is harder when everything is cold and wet and miserable. Magic is harder when there’s no incentive to be outside, and when we feel apart from the world. We have to find new ways to make magic during the winter, ways that often feel less than ideal.
• What does it mean to honor this often hostile time as a part of the year when true, good, expansive work can be done? What does it mean to do magic in the dark?

Want to hold the brief in your hands (it’s 10 pages)? Download PDF here. Want to read more deeply about the quick takes? Find links within each to do a deeper dive on your own with downloadable excerpts, Lael Notes, podcasts, videos, etc.

Themes

Time (Perception)—What’s my relationship to it? How does it shape/inform my reality?

• Linear time, non-linear time—can both exist in a world designed with only one? What has been the cost for humanity? Are we using the fullest capacity of our brains—and are we open to being surprised we’re not?
• Are our beliefs around time designed to give us the illusion of control and order? How does our inability to be with the unknown or mysteries get in the way of us perceiving a greater reality? What is the fear that keeps us from exploring this more openly?
• Time-travel, channeling, and communicating through the veils—what would happen if we practice this more openly and actively? What if this weren’t perceived as “crazy” or “out there”—but was seen as a distinct strategic advantage? What might be different as a result?
• Chronos time is how we define time traditionally—we measure it. Chiron time—“divine time” or “God’s time”—it where we “lose” time and it ceases to exist consciously. We are in the moment. People refer to this as “being in the zone” or “flow”. Chronos time is what creates the grind—we’re told to USE time and be productive—and this belief powers our economy. Chiron time is what we’re hungry for—but we fear we’re “wasting” time, being lazy or are self-indulgent. How are we participating in this—what if we stop?

Winter Mind (Power) — How can I harness this? What would be possible for me as a result?

• Harnessing the power of the winter season and all the “REs” it invites us to do as human/animals—rest, relax, reflect, retreat, reimagine, reduce, return, replenish, and restore. How might winter be reframed as a bounty, rather than a burden—like the other solstice we celebrate?
• What stories do we have about this season—and how do they shape our behavior and our choices?
• What do we need to design for ourselves to support our harvest of this season? What permission do we need to give ourselves? What instructions do we need to give others? What helps, hurts, is missing?
• What would it look like if we “wintered” as if our life depended on it—and how might our choices model a new way forward for future generations of women? What if this had the power to revolutionize our experience of being a woman in the world? What if this were a pivotal moment for us as women to lead?

Aging (Perspective) —What’s my experience of this? How do I want to be a model for others?

• What are the narratives around getting older and aging that we’ve been told, taught and sold? How have those stories morphed into beliefs as we’ve aged—consciously or unconsciously—and how do they make us feel as we carry them inside us? What is the toll—how has it taxed us and our sense of self/vitality?
• How do our words, behaviors and actions reinforce those beliefs? Where does self-expression, pleasure, beauty and celebration of our bodies get confused with what we’re told to want, how we’re expected to look, and what has us stand out—or fit in? Are we choosing—or following a path other women created?
• How might we embody “elder” versus “elderly” as older women? What would it look like to be “pro-aging” versus “anti-aging”? What might be possible for us, what would that signal, and what would happen next?
• How age, wisdom and power all converge for women in menopause—and how threatening and disruptive that is to society, the status quo, and the systems that seek to hold us back. How will we choose to be?

Key Concepts

• A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points
• Winterizing your mind
• Joyful aging—a radiant rebellion
• Raising a little hell
• Seeing nature with fresh eyes
• Not dead, but sleeping
• Winter being about the RE’s (restore, reflect, regroup, retreat…)
• With the authority of the crone
• Reseeding the planet
• The willingness to serve—and the wisdom of not being used
• Doing those deeply unfashionable things
• Falling out of sync with everyday life (on purpose, not by accident or anomaly)
• How we defer the onset of winter…is akin to how we defer the onset of aging
• Menopause Manor: our domain
• Becoming pregnant with ourselves, at last
• People don’t die as a consequence of maturing
• Tracing the contours of what I was thinking and feeling—to gain agency over it
• If you’re in conversation with self, you can be in conversation with the world
• Being outrageously open
• Trusting and allowing yourself to be guided rather than “making things happen”
• Bringing the mystery close enough to touch
• Spiritual liberation
• Staying in the room even if the words don’t immediately speak to you [as a metaphor for these times]
• Decentering yourself long enough to hear the voice of another
• A meaningful life isn’t necessarily a longer life
• Plodding novices going through a societal learning curve together, one person at a time

Quick Takes

Madeleine L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time

• My child, do not despair. Do you think we would have brought you here if there were no hope? We are asking you to do a difficult thing, but we are confident you can do it.
• Explanations are not easy when they are about things for which your civilization still has no words.
• To tesseract you just need your mind. You have to find the right frequency—and have faith in who you are. You need to become one with the universe and yourself. Love. That’s the frequency.
• “I just don’t get it…” That is because you think of space only in three dimensions…we travel in the fifth dimension. The fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words…a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.
• You see, though we travel together, we travel alone. All you need to do it is to believe it’s possible.
• We can only tesser where we find light, for we are light.

Karen Walrund: Radiant Rebellion (read PDF chapter)

• A funny thing happens when you tell people you’re writing a book about joyful aging. First their eyes widen. “Joyful aging…” they repeat softly, as something resembling relief washes over their faces. Then: “Oh I need to read that book.”
• Perhaps you dare to believe it’s possible to view aging as a full-of-potential evolution of who you are today. And maybe you have a sneaking suspicion that the bleak views of aging can’t possibly be true.
• For many of the traits of decline that we associate with aging (dementia, Alzheimers, late-life disability…), the numbers have been going in the right direction—the physical, sensory, and cognitive abilities of older adults, particularly women, are improving. So if the news is so great, what’s our problem? Why do we continue to fear aging?
• A hefty portion of the responsibility [for our anxiety] falls squarely in the lap of the anti-aging industry. The industry grew from 3.9 billion in 2016 to 4.9 billion in 2021 in the United States alone. The global anti-aging market went from 25 billion to nearly 37 billion in the same period. The success of this industry’s profits, from pharmaceuticals to face creams, hinges on making sure we all—men included—feel bad about getting older.
• The main structural motive for ageism is that it is often quite profitable, both financially and as a means of preserving power.
• The way I figure it, it’s time for a revolution. To clarify, I have no interest in becoming some sort of super-ager…I just wanted to wade through all the anti-aging advice out there and understand what it would really mean to live my most healthful, grounded, forward-looking life. I was curious what it might mean to “age against the machine”.
• Rebellion=the act or process of resisting convention, or normal and acceptable ways of being. So I’ve divided my findings into four areas: ignite (where we learn about the origins and kindle our revel spirit), disrupt (where we commit to “civil disobedience” by rejecting social norms around agism and start to redefine what it means to age freely), connect (where we cultivate community with those who inspire that new freedom within us, and envision (where we imagine and then create the future we want to see by living our redefined aging philosophy out loud).
• It’s time to raise a little hell.

Kristi MeisenBach Boylan: The Seven Sacred Rites of Menopause

• The term “crone” has received a great deal of unfavorable notoriety over the years. For centuries, the expression was used to describe a woman’s appearance, rather than her ability to think and act on her feet.
• Thankfully, times are changing, and for the most part, the word “crone” is now accurately being used as a synonym for a woman who not only embodies postmenopausal wisdom but shares it with the world. It is the time when the wisdom and healing of a woman’s menopausal journey quickens in her heart, and her desire to share all that she has learned drives her back to the outer world. And so, just as the maiden years symbolized the time when a woman gave birth to herself, and the childbearing years the time when she gave birth to others, the crone years symbolize the time when a woman gives birth to the planet by sharing all that she has learned.
• The ceremonious crowning of a crone usually goes unnoticed by those in the outer world, but back on the island of Avalon the wise-woman and wise-child are both celebrating the joyous event. For this crowning symbolizes a blending of two worlds.
• It’s important to remember that one doesn’t have to have lived to be 50 to be considered a crone, though. Crones come in all ages and sizes. [Being a crone] signifies that a woman is willing and able to share her wisdom, not only with the other women of her tribe, but with the men as well. And it is with the authority of the crone that the woman returns to the outer world to reseed the planet and spreads what she has learned with all living creatures.
• What stops some women from achieving the status of crone in their latter years, though, is their inability to differentiate between being of service, which means contributing to the welfare of others, and being subservient, which means to be useful in an inferior capacity. What often happens is that a woman is so burned out from being used in an inferior manner, that she rebels against being of use to others in any capacity.
• But the time has come for America, and cultures like her, to finally acknowledge the wisdom of its aging population. In fact, there will be 50 million postmenopausal women living and breathing on this great planet by the year 2005. The crones of our land must not back down off their thrones of wisdom.
• Most importantly, the crones of our land must take up storytelling. For true wisdom can never be harnessed and experienced until it is shared. When a crone tells what she knows, truthfully, and with an open heart, she becomes the mandala, the healing, completed circle for her sisters. She becomes not only a storyteller, and a bearer of wisdom, but she becomes the story itself.

Suleika Jaouad: The Book of Alchemy (great interview with her)

• I’ve kept a journal for as long as I can remember. Journaling went from a favorite pastime to a lifeline when I was diagnosed with leukemia at age twenty-two. Journaling through illness gave me a productive way to engage with my new reality. Rather than shutting down or surrendering to hopelessness, I could trace the contours of what I was thinking and feeling and gain a sense of agency over it. It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.
• I’ve learned about how this life-altering and even lifesaving practice can help us tap into that mystical trait that exists in every human: creativity.
• Above my desk, I keep a Post-it of a quote attributed to Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The Book of Alchemy is designed to expand that space, to give us ideas and inspiration for how to choose our response.
• Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one’s life and work. The journal is like a chrysalis: the container of your goopiest, most unformed self. It’s a rare space, in this age of hyper curated personas, where you can share your most unedited thoughts, where you can sort through the raw material of your life. There’s nothing more humble than the journal.

Tosha Silver: Outrageous Openness

• Over time I realized I mostly adored discussing how to align with the Divine, independent of life’s endless fluctuations. I know without a doubt that a Force of Love exists that can guide, help, and interact with each of us in the most intimate and practical way no matter what the conditions. If only we know how to invite It in. My overriding passion for inviting and dancing with this Force eventually gave birth to this book.
• I began to weave into sessions what had transformed my own life the principles of Divine Order and Source gleaned from reading Florence Scovel Shinn, a writer from the 1940s. Divine Order says that the perfect solution to any problem is already selected if you allow yourself to be guided; Divine Source says there is a natural Universal Abundance that knows how to meet every need. Harmonizing with this Force of Love—call it the Shakti, God, Goddess, One Mind, whatever you will—is the golden key to everything.
• If a state of radical openness, acceptance, and attention is held.
• Anyone can learn how to move with these Divine principles. Eventually the individual ego’s drive to “make things happen” falls away, replaced with a relaxed, trusting openness to answers as they spontaneously arise. Synchronicities and magic unfold with more and more frequency, strengthening one’s innate trust in the process.
• One only needs to be willing to be outrageously open.

Vivian Swift: When Wanderers Cease to Roam

• Before I got my winter mind, summer only mattered to me. Then I came to live in this little village on Lond Island Sound and I discovered my Winter Mind and with it I discovered the rest of the year.
• January is the warrior month because it takes a warrior to soldier through these cold, dark, harsh January days. This must be why the Romans put January at the head of the calendar, the better to teach the most important lesson of the year, that: What it takes to get through January is what it takes to get through LIFE.
• How to winterize your mind: 1) see the sun rise and set every day, 2) learn how to draw a tree, 3) put something beautiful in your room so that it’s the first thing you see when you wake up, 4) mend something with your hands, 5) hibernate—seahorses, ladybugs, wooly bear caterpillars and dragonflies do it

Cole Arthur Riley: Black Liturgies (read PDF chapter)

• Literature—real art—could not be found in a church pew; how could it? Religions main purpose is to bring the mystery close enough to touch. We give God a name, a face. We write creeds to outline the conditions of our belief. This requires that the mystery stay still and at times contract. But art has little concern for definition, certainty, or ever permanence: it survives by the mystery expanding and re-creating itself…it’s about [caring] enough to rise and go on the journey.
• To be a writer with any sincere concern for the human condition as we’ve known it, one must contend with the spiritual. This is inescapable.
• I want spirituality that demands artistry, not just from the divine, but from me.
• The independence of personal prayer required more imagination than I could access at the time. It is exhausting enough trying to keep oneself alive, to be expected to articulate love and hope and beauty—and more dangerously, lament—it was like trying to float with weights hanging from my neck. Liturgy, I found, was a kind of rest.
• To be clear, liturgy in no way saved me, nor was it even a remedy for my depression. But it was an anchor, something that kept me from drifting helplessly into my own interior current. Ritual, when coupled with beauty, makes for a very adequate mooring. I won’t carry you to shore, but it will keep you close enough that hope can swim out to visit you regularly.
• …there are days when it is particularly difficult to pray words written by a white man. For all its beauty…He was incapably of speaking to my pain, Black grief, Black hope, in a voice I could trust. I wanted more. And so I began Black Liturgies. Mostly out of rage. I was desperate for a liturgical space that could center Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body unapologetically.
• If this book is loyal to anything, it is to spiritual liberation in all its incarnations and complexities. Whatever spirituality calls to you from these liturgies, I hope it leaves you feeling more free.
• The Greek origins of the word liturgy can be translated to “work of/for the people” Most simply, it is a form for a sacred experience, often practiced in community, and habitually. The liturgy that I’ve found healing in happens to be written liturgy. For me, reimagining written prayer outside of the white gaze has been a practice in both literation and solidarity.
• Something striking happens when you are made to read words written in particularity, with a shared voice. All of a sudden you may come across a phrase or an emotion that doesn’t immediately resonate with you. It may not be for you. But what does it mean to commit yourself to staying in the room—remaining in the words even if they don’t immediately speak to you. Are you capable of decentering yourself long enough to hear the voice of another?

Katherine May: Wintering (read PDF of Lael Notes)

• Somewhere in the middle of this catastrophe, a space opened up. A gap in the mesh of the everyday world. I’m aware that I fly in the face of polite convention in doing this, falling out of sync with everyday life remains taboo. We’re not raised to recognize wintering—instead we tend to see it as a humiliation, something to hide. We treat each wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored. This means we’ve made a secret of an entirely normal process. Those who endure it are forced to drop out of everyday life (pariahs) in order to conceal their “failure”. We do this at great cost.
• In our relentless, busy, contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We must stop believing that these times in our lives are silly, a failure of nerve, or a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us.
• [re: the idea of teaching yourself how to winter because society won’t]. I began to get a feel for my winterings. Their length, their breadth, and heft. We must learn to invite the winter in. Wintering is one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.
• Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it’s essential. Over and over again, we find winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit. Yet still, we refuse them. We are pushing away this innate skill we have for digesting the difficult parts of life. The world of the cold season is to learn to welcome them. Finding winter—and accepting its invitations—is like finding a hidden door. It’s the stuff of dreams.

Alice Tarbuck: A Spell in the Wild (Read PDF December chapter)

• December comes down hard on us all, this year. The sky is tight, leaden, and will not give in to snow. The dark days open like a throat, and we all file downwards, into winter’s belly. We are so tired.
• It isn’t surprising that humans quickly turn to introspection as the light fails. We light candles against the darkness, turning thoughts inward, using the little light that is left to illuminate our darkest places.
• Winter gives us what we need, lets us prepare before going back out into the world when the light returns. Winter can be seen as a time of healing, regrouping, of doing work on ourselves rather than work in the world. It’s easy to believe in this structure, but hard to enact it in contemporary society.
• Modern life means we often work in the teeth of nature, against its cycles. This has been encouraged by alternative means of illumination. Who needs to heed the sun’s rhythms when we have electric light? What is difficult, however, are the effects of living against the rhythm of the day: it is exhausting, our bodies are prone to illness, and our brains to sadness.
• We have to find new ways to make magic during the winter, ways that often feel less than ideal. What’s more, there is often more call on our power during winter. What does it mean to honor this often hostile time as a part of the year when true, good, expansive work can be done? What does it mean to do magic in the dark?
• It’s useful to see nature with fresh eyes, to look again at that which seems so dead. This is a skill, and it isn’t an easy one…think about the world as not dead, but sleeping. Know that underground, the roots are still bringing water to trees, and that although we cannot see them, things are still growing, and sleeping, in soil.
• Your brain is working on things that are inside. It is reflecting, taking stock. Your view is turning inward: try to follow it, to see where it leads, to see what it reveals to you.

Michael Greger: How Not to Die

• It all started with my grandmother. My grandma was given her medical death sentence at age sixty-five. Thanks to a healthy diet and lifestyle, she was able to enjoy another thirty-one years on this earth. The woman who was once told by doctors she only had weeks to live didn’t die until she was ninety-six years old. The lowest-tech approach—diet and lifestyle—can undeniably reverse heart disease, our leading killer. Yet medical practice hardly changed. Why? That was my wake-up call: in medical school, even with our paltry twenty-one hours of nutrition training, there’s no mention of using diet to treat chronic disease, let alone reverse it.
• The question that haunted me during training [in med school] was this: if the cure to our number-one killer could get lost down the rabbit hole, what else might be buried in the medical literature? I made it my life’s mission to find out. I didn’t want another doctor to graduate without this tool—the power of food—in her or his tool box.
• Until recently, advanced age had been considered to be a disease itself, but people don’t die as a consequence of maturing. They die from disease, most commonly heart attacks. Most deaths in the United States are preventable, and they are related to what we eat. Our diet is the number-one cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability. Surely diet must also be the number-one thing taught in medical schools, right? Sadly, it’s not. Only a quarter of medical schools offer a single course in nutrition, down from 37 percent thirty years ago.
• In terms of life expectancy, the United States is down around twenty-seven or twenty-eight out of the thirty-four top free-market democracies. Are Americans living longer now compared to about a generation ago? Yes, technically. But are those extra years necessarily healthy ones? We’re actually living fewer healthy years now than we once did.
• We eat almost as if the future doesn’t matter. And indeed, there are actually data to back that up. Maybe it’s time we stop blaming genetics and focus on the more than 70 percent that is directly under our control. We have the power.

Atul Gawande: Being Mortal (read PDF of Lael Notes)

• I learned a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. What worried us was knowledge. While we knew how to sympathize, we weren’t at all certain we would know how to properly diagnose and treat. We paid our medical tuition to learn about the inner process of the body. We didn’t imagine we needed to think about much else. Yet within a few years…I encountered patients forced to confront the realities of decline and mortality, and it did not take long to realize how unready I was to help them.
• Modern scientific capability has profoundly altered the course of human life. But scientific advantages have turned the process of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals. And we in the medical world have proved alarmingly unprepared for it.
• There’s no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all aging from the day we are born. One may even come to accept this face. But that’s not the same as saying one knows how to cope with what cannot be mended.
• A monumental transformation is occurring. In this country and across the globe, people increasingly have an alternative to withering in old age homes and dying in hospitals—and millions of them are seizing the opportunity But this is an unsettled time. We’ve begun rejecting the institutionalized version of aging and death, but we’ve not yet established our new norm. We’re caught in a transitional phase. However miserable the old system has been, we are all experts at it. We know the dance moves. With this new way, in which we together try to figure out how to face mortality and preserve the fiber of a meaningful life, with its loyalties and individuality, we are plodding novices. We are going through a societal learning curve, one person at a time.

Sharon Blackie: Hagitude (read PDF of Lael Notes)

• In the oldest known cosmology of my native lands, it wasn’t a sky-bound old man with a beard that made and shaped our world. It was an old woman. How thoroughly we’ve been taught to forget. The over-culture would so like to pretend we’re not here.
• Hagitude=hags with attitude. Feisty, aging women who refuse to be buried, silenced, made invisible, or relegated to the shadows. I’m quite prepared to be inconvenient. I have no intention of being invisible.
• The ways we think about aging depend on the stories we tell about it. How we think about aging women depends on the images we hold of them.
• What would it mean instead of being elderly woman, to be considered an elder woman? So how do women transition from becoming elderly to becoming elder? STORIES. Stories help us conjure up sharply honed images of who exactly it is that we might want to become. They are spells—they hook us and reel us into their magic.
• Our failure to understand and embrace aging is also related to the face that we are increasingly and profoundly cut off from nature and from natural cycles and rhythms.
• There can be a certain perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just as the world expects you to become quiet and diminish. Something inside us knows that the cultural mythology which tells us what an aging woman should be is not only misguided, but pernicious. It knows that we’re missing something that’s essential—something that we badly need. Something that the culture badly needs.
• Whether we choose it or not, the veil between the worlds begins to disintegrate in menopause, and the medial woman archetype begins determinedly to assert herself. The second half of life, then, gives us the opportunity to rediscover the parts of ourselves that we’ve buried—to find the path we’ve lost. The journey to elderhood actually begins with coming to terms with your changing body—we are shape-shifting creatures through and through—until we arrive at our bones. We have to take responsibility for ourselves to uncover our own inner hag—and extend her fearlessly into the world.

Ursula LeGuin: Space Crone (read PDF of essay)

• Menopause is the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting because it’s one of the few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. Menopause with its chime-suggestion of a mere pause, after which things go on as before, is reassuringly trivial. But the change is not trivial, and I wonder how many women are brave enough to carry it out wholeheartedly. They give up their reproductive capacity with more or less of a struggle, and when it’s gone they think that’s all there is to it. But this is to evade the real challenge, and to lose not only the capacity to ovulate, but the opportunity to become a Crone. It requires fanatical determination now to become a crone.
• Women have thus, by imitating the life condition of men, surrendered a very strong position of their own. Men are afraid of crones, so afraid of them that their cure for virginity [fucking] fails them: they know it won’t work. Faced with the fulfilled Crone, all but the bravest men wilt and retreat, crestfallen and cockadroop.
• Menopause Manor is not merely a defensive stronghold, however, it’s a house or household, fully furnished with the necessities of life. In abandoning it, women have narrowed their domain and impoverished their souls. There are things the Old Woman can do, say, and think, that women cannot do, say or think. The woman has got to give up more than her menstrual periods to do, say or think them. She has got to change her life. The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. Not many will help her with that birth.
• It seems a pity to have a built-in rite of passage and to dodge it, evade it, and pretend nothing has changed. That is to dodge and evade one’s womanhood, to pretend one’s like a man. Men, once initiated, never get a second chance. They never change again. That’s their loss, not ours. Why borrow poverty? Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.
• If a space ship came by from the friendly natives of the fourth planet of Altair, and the polite captain of the space ship said, “We have room for one more passenger; will you spare us a single human being, so that we may converse at leisure during the long trip back to Altair and learn from an exemplary person on the nature of the race?”—I suppose what most people would want to do is provide them with a fine, bright, brave young man…But I would not pick any of them. Nor would I pick any of the young women who would volunteer…I would pick an old woman over sixty… Into the space ship, Granny.

Want to hold the brief in your hands (it’s 10 pages)? Download PDF here. Want to read more deeply about the quick takes? Find links within each to do a deeper dive on your own with downloadable excerpts, Lael Notes, podcasts, videos, etc.

Themes

Honesty (integrity) — Where am I participating in what I know to be false? What is my truth?

• The things we do to “live within a lie”—ie. engaging in seemingly benign rituals that we use to signal compliance and avoid trouble, even though we don’t believe in the truth of them and disagree, or how our silence can signal compliance and agreement, and presence can signal dissent.
• Pushing context as a way of changing a culture—it has distinct openings, which create opportunities for us to seize a moment that might not have been possible before. Is now a contextual frame to consider “new” ideas and possibilities we might not have considered before (desperate times, desperate measures…)?
• Understanding how the “once upon a time” stories are “here and now” and still being woven into the fabric of our society by the words we use about ourselves, about our world, and with each other.
• How our cultural programming can be like gossamer threads that tie us, pull us, and cling to us like a legacy we are enacting and carrying forward without us even realizing it. How women are kept from the truth of who we are—corralling our power and diminishing the potential fullness of our lives—with subtle scripts that began in the church, but have permeated our culture

Aligned (clarity) — How do I stay grounded in myself when I’m full of contradictions?

• This is about our willingness (and discipline) to stay in the tension of two opposing realities, straddling multiple truths in uncertainty, and not pushing for clarity when ambiguity is present–despite our discomfort, exhaustion, overwhelm, frustration and desire for closure or a clear resolution.
• How paradoxical thinking is a spiritual practice, allowing for more connection, compassion and openness for a new idea to be born.
• This is an especially prevalent invitation at midlife, where our experience we’ve gained can collide with or override our willingness to stay in the uncertainty long enough for an even deeper wisdom to emerge.
• Rather than reconciling, choosing between, or arriving at some middle place, this is about learning to embrace the extremes of ourselves (and our reality) and hold them both as true, right, and valuable.

Sovereignty (authority)—How can I assume the throne of my full power as a woman?

• The courage to listen to what we know—instinctively, intuitively, in our bones—in the face of a world that would mock us, dismiss us, even kill is for that knowing.
• This is about tapping into our deep wisdom/knowing—individually and collectively—channeling it through our voice, and bringing it into the world as a powerful instrument of change—even as it’s inconvenient, disruptive, heretical, unconventional, not desired, nor proven.
• An invitation to “do power differently” as women, rather than to just repeat history. And that begins with understanding our power, excavating our voice, and re-writing stories, and getting uncomfortable (new muscle memory) so we can live into a different future than the one we were given.
• Changing the culture by taking more social risks—what would that look like for us? Where do we “behave” socially (still), and where could we push our own boundaries of comfort to change that for ourselves—and model that for others?

Key Concepts

• Middle powers
• Living a within a lie
• Performance of sovereignty (rather than actual sovereignty)
• Signs that signal compliance
• Participation of ordinary individuals in rituals they know to be false
• Accepting subordination through accommodation
• Straddling the tension (of paradox)
• A call to the middle…and an invitation to honor the extremes
• Contextual boundaries—and openings
• Pushing the borders of accepted experience
• Expanding the cultural context
• Breaking Cassandra’s curse
• Knowing in our bones
• Women have something the world needs
• Women digging deep to excavate their voices
• Doing power differently, not repeating history
• Taking social risks
• Stitching the world back together with care and inclusion
• “Once upon a time” is now
• The circle as a framework rather than a line
• The long tails of culturally programming—gossamer threads that cling to us, pull us, tie us
• Clipping the strands one by one—letting falsehoods about who we are blow away
• Unshackling her from oppressive ideas
• The millionth circles—a tipping point that ushers in a new era
• Archipelago of Arrogance
• The neat categories into which our world is sorted
• Striking chords and touching nerves
• The narrow end of the wedge to open up space
• The darkness of the womb, not the tomb
• Multi (racial, faith, cultural, generational, gendered)
• Revolutionary love
• Showing up to the labor
• Not only grand moments, but in small pockets
• Reimagination
• Wonder as a tool to return to love
• Timely context—ideas whose time has finally come

Quick Takes

Jean Shinoda Bolen —Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World

• Twice before, American women have changed their world and been an influence on the world through collective action. The first was called “the women’s suffragette movement”—the right to vote was the goal. The second has simply been called “the women’s movement”—social, personal, and economic equality were the goals. I believe the third movement is stirring below the surface of collective consciousness and is gathering momentum. The third time may become “the women’s peace moment”, and the goal will be to stop violence by involving women in prevention of violence, resolution of conflicts, and restoration of peace.
• Until women collectively become involved in creating a culture of peace to stop violence begetting violence in the human family, women and children will continue to be the primary casualties.
• When people find themselves at a crossroads or in a crisis, to move forward toward health, reconciliation, and life, the challenge is to let go of an outmoded attitude, idea, or perception. Individually or collectively, a shift has to take place, a tipping point is reached, and then the phenomenon of “there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come” kicks in.
• In January 2003, I was the recipient of the Woman of Vision and Action award. At breakfast the next morning, I heard of “Gather the Women” for the first time, an internet project inviting women to create gatherings on or about March 8^th: International Women’s Day. I felt the power of the words “gather the women” as soon as I heard them. [I wasn’t alone] Gather the women would have an evocative power on others as well. That men also came was an indication that there are men who recognize the need for women to take a lead and will be there to support what we do, even when storms arise.
• If you heed the message of gather the women, the first step might be a discussion with friends, or an invitation to them to form a circle with a spiritual center, or you may have an idea [to center].
• Energy of women together is generated by a mix of love, outrage, ideas, comments, infectious laughter, and a desire to make a difference.
• “The millionth circle” is a metaphor for the circle that, added to the rest, brings about a critical mass that ushers in a new era.
• The position I take here is that women as a gender—as a whole, not every woman, but women generally—have a wisdom that is needed. It’s time to gather the women and save the world.

Canadian PM Mark Carney — Speech at World Economic Forum ‘26

• The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.
• It begins with the greengrocer—posting a sign they don’t believe is true in their store front because they believe compliance will buy them safety. The sign signals compliance to avoid trouble.
• Communism persisted not thru violence alone, but thru the participation of ordinary individuals in rituals they privately know to be false.
• Havel (Czech dissident who later became president) called this “living within a lie”
• The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and it’s fragility comes from the same source.
• Let me be direct, we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
• You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination. Let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads.
• The question for middle powers [like Canada] is not will we adapt (we must). The question is will we do so simply by building bigger walls or whether we can do something more ambitious.
• We aim to be both principled and pragmatic. Which means we actively take on the world that is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.
• When middle powers compete with each other to be the most accommodating, this is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.
• The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, then we’re on the menu.
• What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth? It means naming reality. It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. It means building what we claim to believe in rather than waiting for the old to be restored.

Brené Brown — Stronger Ground (paradox and the human spirit chapter)

• The two threads running throughout the book: 1) the powerful role paradoxical thinking plays in understanding ourselves, the people around us, the complex environments in which we work, and getting our head around a world that can feel as though it’s on fire, and 2) a clear global yearning for morehumanity within us and between us, a real call for a collective recommitment to the human spirit—a shared re-grounding in the understanding that what makes us human is not a liability, but a source of wisdom and connectedness across the world.
• To understand the tenacity of paradox and the wisdom of the human spirit is to realize that following these two threads is perhaps the clearest path to making meaning of our lives and our work.
• Paradoxes embrace ambiguity, exposes our intolerance for uncertainty, pushes our boundaries, and if we hang on long enough, often forces us to deny the comfort of our ideologies for a deeper wisdom that is a more honest reflection of the human experience and the human spirit.
• In my experience, paradoxes are incredibly tenacious. Humans get so uncomfortable straddling the tension and uncertainty that surfaces when two seemingly opposing ideas are both valid that we often simply give up. We let go of the tension and pick one idea, normally the most familiar one, and make ourselves feel better by discounting or diminishing the competing idea and/or the idea holder.
• The gift of the paradox is that if we hang in there and tolerate the tension—grounding down and holding both ideas—a new and deeper level of understanding is born.
• For example, in my work life, I’ve spent five years trying to run from the paradox of freedom and commitment. [but then I learned that] making and keeping commitments and writing them down miraculously led to more freedom.
• Carl Jung was my gateway drug into paradox. Jung explained that a paradox is one of your most valued spiritual possessions (“only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.”) In a world defined by spiritual crisis, where we seem to be slicing and dicing our fullness by orphaning pieces of our humanity, the paradox seems more important than ever.
• The Grace Paradox: we grow spiritually much more by doing things wrong than by doing everything right. It’s allowed me to be more generous and loving with others (and sometimes myself). Spirituality can’t be separated from paradox, because the spirit’s job is about wholeness—and that’s always both/and.
• [re: Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward] It didn’t matter how complex and competing the ideas, the answers to the questions were always Yes, and. Learning how to embrace the power of paradox across every part of our lives is the great developmental milestone of midlife. The goal is not to tap out and run toward certainty…the goal is to develop the strength and grounding required to hold the tension of two opposing ideas until a new idea is born—until something more encompassing, more connected, and more nuanced emerges. The real gift of his teachings has been learning how to hold paradox within myself—to love and accept the weird contradictions in me.
• Paradox as liberation [quoting Admiral Jim Stockdale, POW Vietnam]: “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.” I’ve started calling this learning “gritty faith and gritty facts” and it helped us reconcile a growing divide that was negatively affecting our culture and our impact [liberating us from 2 camps: the dreamers and the reality checkers–to make us one].
• Plumbing and poetry: The plumbing of leadership involves keeping watch over an organization efficiency in everyday tasks; the poetry is finding meaning in action and rendering life attractive. Some of the most transformational leaders I’ve met have the ability to cast a poetic vision that excites people and can oversee the building of systems and communities that are able to deliver that vision.

Christina Baldwin — Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture

• I come from the middle. I spent the first twenty years of my adult life living in the middle of the country, in the middle of the middle class. This sense of personal placement is important because it is the rootedness of middle ground I bring to my own awakening, and to the work of the circle.
• I returned home to the middle, carrying the circle like a mustard seed, asking, “What might the circle do?” I believe this is a question that a vast community of people is ready to ask.
• In every society there are seekers whose role is to push the borders of accepted experience and whose thoughts and actions expand the cultural context. Ideas and social forms pass through a culture, coming first from the edge and, as they are accepted, moving to the center and becoming the “norm”.
• At the interactive edge between the self and society, context is constantly shifting, absorbing new information, ideas and technology, making room for new experiences that have proven possible. Context is the collective atmosphere inside which something is seen and understood. Context is amazingly important. Pushing the context is how a culture changes, both in expansion and in reaction against expansion.
• When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come”, he understood the power of contextual opening—and the need to seize a moment.
• The tension between expansion and contraction as context changes is enormous and complicated. If 24 percent of the culture is pushing the opening, at least that percentage is trying to slam it shut, and another huge percentage is just trying to stay out of the controversy. And this has always been so.
• This is a moment when the circle is coming back into cultural context and we may place the power of the circle into the bedrock of the culture. We cannot have this conversation about circling without the help of context—context prepares us to consider new ideas.
• Riding context is like riding the surf: We are swept up and moved along by forces that we ourselves have not called but which set the pace and support us on the journey. Context is a very important aspect of what we do now, what we do next, for we need cultural context to carry the circle forward.
• We need a revolution in the West: Not a violent overthrow, but a willingness to take responsibility for the course of history being set forth in our names. We need a revolution determined to activate broad, inclusive social change. I knew the revolution had begun for me. And I set out to learn how to call the circle—how to create the context the circle needs in order to reenter the mainstream of our culture.
• Culture has always been created by taking new social risks.

Elizabeth Lesser: Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are Storytellers, Human Story Changes (listen to her interview w/Amanda Palmer)

• Casssandra was wood by Apollo by giving her the gift of sight—she could see the future. When she refused his sexual advances, he became enraged. Instead of taking the gift of prophecy away, he cursed her to remain clairvoyant, and made it that that no one would listen to her or believe her predictions.
• Women have been ignored, ridiculed, punished, even killed for their opinions forever. But without the balance power of her voice—the female voice—things in this world end in disaster. Cassandra’s tale is your tale. It is all of our tales. We must speak, and we must be taken seriously. We must change the way the story ends.
• Are you going to be a doomed prophetess, or are you going to find a different voice and save your city?
• Here’s the good news: while the distrust of women is the root of our story, it no longer has to be the fruit.
• It doesn’t matter where you work, what you do, or where you live. Women know something that the world needs now. We know it in our bones. We’ve always known it.
• Listen to Cassandra. When Cassandra speaks, we must listen. There’s work to do. Listen to her, and then get to work.
• I know in my bones that we can break Cassandra’s curse, that we can dispel our culture’s enduring mistrust and devaluing of women. And when we do, all of humanity will benefit.
• It’s about redefining what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. It’s about taking back words and making them your own. It’s about doing power differently.
• Toni Morrison: “As you enter positions of power, dream a little before you think.” Respect your own dreams and trust your instincts before you allow self-doubt and overthinking to hijack your vision.
• It feels to me both the right time and a fraught time to be writing a book about women and men, femininity and masculinity. The right time, because all around us women are rising up and overturning old concepts and structures; fraught, because of the wide gaps that exist between women everywhere—gaps in our privileges, our generations, our rights, our beliefs.
• I am aware that any examination of women is an intersectional one. When speaking of women as a group, we run into the same challenges as when we speak of any category of people: within a group there is both commonality and diversity. It’s a big ol’ soup, this question of women in our times, and often I have wanted to step away from the stove and leave the cooking to others.
• Humanity has come to the end of a long, unbalanced era, one that started thousands of years ago, one that has been both creative and destructive, but one that has run its course and is running away with our future.
• I believe it’s time for women to dig deep, to excavate our voices, to elevate our emotional and relational intelligence, and to transcend the limiting stories of the past. It’s time for us to be both the scribes and the teachers of a new way—and to stitch the world back together through care and inclusion.
• The best thing about being older is that I finally trust my own point of view, so much so that I no longer suppress it when it deserves to be expressed, nor do I argue it with a person who is uninterested in listening, learning, or growing (or helping me to listen, learn or grow). I know my own heart, and I value my experience. I’m not afraid of being exposed when I’m wrong. I’m not looking for accolades when I do the right thing. I am at home in my own skin, and my own mind, and in the joy and mess of being a human.
• What I know to be true: we are still under the sway of antiquated myths and misguided interpretations of religious parables. You may think these stories are the stuff of “once upon a time” and have nothing to do with you or your times. But “once upon a time” is now, because the past is laced into the present on the needle and thread of stories. Solid things come and go, but stories endure. It’s important to know these stories and to ask the question: Who told them? Why? And how have they maintained their authority all these years later?

Valarie Kaur—See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love (read my Lael Notes on this book)

• The future is dark. But what if—what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind us now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ear, ‘You are brave’? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition?
• What does the midwife tell us to do? I cried over the roar. BREATHE! And then? Push!
• But how do we breathe? How do we push? How do we keep laboring for justice when we feel so hopeless? I needed to answer those questions for myself, as much as for others.
• Will we give birth to a nation that has never been—a nation that is multiracial, multifaith, multicultural, and multigendered, where power is shared, and we strive to protect the dignity of every person? Or will we continue to descend into a kind of civil war—a power struggle with those who want to return America to a past where only a certain class of white people hold political, cultural, and economic dominion?
• Humanity itself is in transition. Will we marshal the vision, skill, and solidarity to solve these problem together, or will we perish?
• Is this the darkness of the tomb, or of the womb? I don’t know. All I know is that the only way we will endure is if each of us shows up to the labor.
• Revolutionary love is how we stay in the fire. I believe revolutionary love is the call of our times.
• If you cringe when people say that love is the answer, I do, too. The problem is not with love, but the way we talk about it. We mostly talk about love as a flood of emotion. But feelings alone are too fickle and fluid to sustain political action. Black feminists like bell hooks have long envisioned a world where a love ethic is a foundation for all arenas of our society. I believe we can reclaim love as a force for justice for a new time.
• Love is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.
• “Revolutionary love” is the choice to enter into wonder and labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.
• My story begins where many stories start—in a moment when we wonder how to breathe through the world we’re in and how to push to transform it. I discovered 3 practices of revolutionary love:
• “See No Stranger” is about learning how to love others. When we wonder about people, grieve with them, and choose to fight with and for them, we can build the kind of solidary the word needs.
• “Tend the Wound” is about learning how to love even our opponents. When we rage in safe containers to tend to our own wounds, and listen to understand theirs, we can gain the information we need to reimagine solutions.
• “Breathe and Push” is about learning how to love ourselves, how to breathe amidst labor, push ourselves to go deeper, and summon our wisest selves in times of transition.
• Revolutions do not happen only in grand moments in public view but also in small pockets of people coming together to inhabit a new way of being. We birth the beloved community by becoming the beloved community.
• When a critical mass of people practice together, in community, and as part of movements for justice, I believe that we can begin to create the world we want, here and now. This book is about how to labor with love.

Rebecca Solnit — Men Explain Things to Me (read original article)

• [context: the story of a man talking to Rebecca at a dinner party about a book she “should read”, going on and on and on. Until Rebecca’s friend said 3-4 times “That’s her book.” The book she wrote, but he hadn’t read, just heard about it in a NYTimes review.] The fact that I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of ear shot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.
• The out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.
• Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.
• I’ve had a lot more confirmation of my right to think and speak than most women, and I’ve learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing—though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There’s a happy medium between these two poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.
• Being told that, categorically, he knows what he’s talking about and she doesn’t, however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of this world and holds back its light.
• After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn’t happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.
• Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public standing as a writer of history helped me stand my ground, but few women get that boost, and billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever. This goes way beyond Men Explaining Things to Me, but it’s part of the same archipelago of arrogance.
• Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t. Not yet, but it could happen. Though I’m not holding my breath.
• [I used to joke about writing an essay “Men Explain Things to Me”, but then one evening in 2008 a houseguest insisted I had to write it down because young women needed to read it.] Young women, she said, needed to know that being belittled wasn’t the result of their own secret failings; it was the boring old gender wars, and it happened to most of us who were female at some point or other.
• I wrote it in one sitting the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it’s clear it’s been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer. It spread quickly and has never stopped going around, being reposted and shared and commented upon. It’s circulated like nothing else I’ve done. It struck a chord. And a nerve.
• Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn’t really a gendered phenomenon. Other men got it and were cool. By 2012, the term “mansplained”—one of the New York Times’s word of the year for 2010—was being used in mainstream political journalism.
• Chords, nerves: the thing is still circulating as I write. The point of the essay was never to suggest that I think I am notably oppressed. It was to take these conversations as the narrow end of the wedge that opens up space for men and closes it off for women, space to speak, to be heard, to have rights, to participate, to be respected, to be a full and free human being.
• The battle for women to be treated like human beings with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of involvement in cultural and political arenas continues, and is sometimes a pretty grim battle. Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity and to liberty.

Elise Loehnen—On Our Best Behavior: The 7 Deadly Sins + the Price Women Pay to be Good

• Is it the weight of my unreasonable expectations? Am I putting too much pressure on myself? None of those felt true… [Her doctor said:] “I think you’re trying to live up to some sort of saintly idea, yes. But I think it’s deeper, that if you feel like if you’re good enough, you’ll be safe from judgement, loved.” This observation hit, right in my clenched heart. I could feel something primal and angry, something rebellious and pissed, break free.
• I’ve come to realize that, on some level, everyone is saying the same thing: We all struggle to be known, to express the truest, most tender parts of ourselves, to feel safe enough to bring our gifts to bear. We wonder: Who am I? What do I want and need? How do I find my purpose and serve? Our greatest imperatives are to belong, to love and be loved in return. Yet life gets in the way.
• Sometimes interference comes from the tangible (traumatic childhoods, systemic injustice, natural disasters), but more frequently, the barriers that keep us from full expression of our potential are intangible. These gossamer threads tie us up or pull us along like marionettes. They are the long tails of cultural programming, a legacy that clings to us as we move through the world.
• Once you discern the web and its perverted construction, you can begin clipping strands one by one, letting falsehoods about who we are blow away.
• There are more subtle scripts about bad behavior that have taken firm root in our culture, continuing to circumscribe our lives. When it comes to a mythology that has kept women from the truth of who we are, there is no better map than the set of vices that are considered the gateway to immortality: the Seven Deadly Sins. The attempt to avoid these sins corrals women and diminishes the potential fullness of our lives. They are not solely the provenance of the church: the sins have permeated our culture.
• Culture is contagious: We pass it on to each other like a virus. No one wholly invents themselves. Culture is whispered into us, transmitted through almost every interaction.
• What’s apparent though, is how twisted many of us feel, like a snake eating its own tail: What’s me, versus the me I think I’m supposed to be?
• We are easy to shame, eager to prove our worthiness, to seek validation from some power outside of ourselves. This tendency often shows up in the shadow of Seven Deadly Sins, which have been an impressively brilliant tool for ensuring behavior across millennia. Their fingerprints are everywhere, particularly for women: we have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power. While this might seem like a better deal—power is something women are currently being coached to assume and then sanitize with our femininity—we see the dangerous implications of this programming everywhere. These concepts control us and keep us small. [Once I saw it] I couldn’t unsee their influence.

1. Sloth—believing sloth to be sinful, we deny ourselves rest. Good women are tireless and hardworking with no professed interest in or requirements for rest, either at home or work.
2. Envy—believing envy to be sinful, we deny our own wanting. Good women do not want or strive for more than they have; they do not openly covet the skills or achievements of others.
3. Pride—believing pride to be sinful, we deny our own talents. Good women are not too intimidating or confident; they work hard to appear modest, minimizing, and focused on finding other people who can champion their ideas.
4. Gluttony—believing gluttony to be sinful, we deny our own hunger. Good women strive to be thin, really as small as possible.
5. Greed—believing greed to be sinful, we deny our own security. Good women don’t negotiate on their own behalf, never ask for more, appear grateful for what they’ve been given, and avoid talking about money. They often spend faster than they save and strive to be generous “to a fault.”
6. Lust—believing lust to be sinful, we deny our own pleasure. Good women want to be seen as sensual, warm, and inviting of sex but not overtly interested.
7. Anger—believing anger to be sinful, we deny our own needs. Good women are assertive only on behalf of other people. They are quick to forgive and nonconfrontational, confrontational, content to sacrifice their needs and embrace discomfort to preserve the peach and maintain the status quo.
8. Sadness—believing sadness to be sinful, we deny our own feelings (original, but deleted) [Good women should be happy, optimistic and work not to bring anybody else down]

• This list gives me chills. I hate it. I see it and feel, viscerally, how tired I am of controlling my own behavior, of bending myself to abide by cultural expectations. I recognize the ways in which I want to be seen do not align with who I know myself to be. There is a deeper, more real me. I keep her largely hidden, mediate her through these filters, make sure she remains in check. I always believed it was dangerous to let her out. But now I’ve come to understand that it’s more dangerous to keep her bound: If I don’t unshackle her from these oppressive ideas of goodness, that part of her will slowly asphyxiate and I will never know what it will feel like to live fully as myself—not diminished, not bound, not scared.