@jacobcollier One of my all-time favourites.
♬ original sound – Jacob Collier
@jacobcollier Thank you @GRAMMY U for having me! And cheers to my legendary friend @Jessiereyez 🙂
♬ original sound – Jacob Collier
GrandInfluencers
Who are the people who influenced the people who influenced you?
We might call them the GrandInfluencers. I like to think of this question and these people from time to time.
We are connected more broadly and expansively than we are always aware. Whether we know their names or not, there are people who have had a major impact upon the shape and direction our lives because they had a major role in shaping the people who most influenced and inspired us.
I found myself reflecting on this several years ago when I heard Bryan Stevenson speak in Ann Arbor. Bryan Stevenson was presented with the Wallenberg Medal at the University of Michigan for his vision and service, and afterward, he gave the Wallenberg Lecture.
Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization committed to ending mass incarceration in the United States, protecting human rights and dignity, and challenging racial and economic inequities. Within the large, crucial vision of this work, Stevenson has spent decades entering personal relationships with the people he represents in court. They have impacted his life, as he has impacted theirs.
His lecture was filled with stories of human connection as he challenged us to do justice in our neighborhoods, nation, and world and to change our narratives about race and poverty.
He opened the lecture first with a story about his Grandmother. He grew up calling her Mama. When Stevenson was a child, she would give him enormous hugs, and when she finished, she would ask, “Okay, can you still feel me hugging you?” If he said no, she would do it all over again. This became one of their playful rituals, and Stevenson came to know that he was loved and absolutely cherished.
As she was dying, her last words to him were, “Can you still feel me hugging you?”
Beautiful. It’s clear that he does.
She shaped so much of his vision and calling. She was the daughter of enslaved people, and she taught him about the terror and trauma of slavery. She also filled him with a sense of love and worth. Stevenson has been addressing slavery in its many forms throughout his life, protecting human lives, standing up to false narratives, and telling the truth — both about our national history and about human dignity.
In many ways, this started with his Grandmother. Unknown to many future clients, she impacted their lives — and in many cases, affected their freedom — through the formation of Bryan Stevenson.
And Stevenson told us stories about some of these clients. Unknown by name to us, they have impacted the formation of Bryan Stevenson as well, and their stories are now challenging the narratives and power structures of mass incarceration.
We are connected more broadly and expansively than we are always aware.
Who influenced the people who influenced you? Who are your GrandInfluencers?
We honor them with our lives by being ourselves. And though we cannot always predict the direction entirely, when we demonstrate love to others and are present in formational ways, we will embolden and empower people we will never meet.
More People in the Room
Sometimes when I’m gathered with a group of people, either in a physical space or on a Zoom screen, I’m aware that the influence of additional people is present during that time. Embedded in everyone’s relationships, there are hidden conflicts, attachments, and places of grief that influence that time. But most often, I like to think about the meaningful, formational influences that are present.
There are people who have participated in fashioning who we are along with our values, hopes, and even mannerisms or ways of phrasing our words. Their influence is in that space too because these people are part of who we are. They have “particularized us;” that is, they have made us more specifically who and how we are. When we are present, their influence is present too.
And this means when we are connected to people in a physical space or on a Zoom screen, we have the occasion to interface with the influences of others too. We are impacted meaningfully by people we cannot see and in most cases by people we have not known ourselves.
When we are aware of people beyond us, we feel more connected, and often, we can be inspired. Consider this post an invitation to reflect intentionally about whose influence is also in the room. And if we know people well enough, we might even ask.
–Renee Roederer
This Week in Nature
“I don’t know what y’all want trans people to do”
“I don’t know what you all want trans people to do. I remember growing up in elementary school and having that one kid in class whose body didn’t seem to match his behavior in our eyes, and how they were never spared a single second of humiliation, threats, bullying. Even teachers wouldn’t stand up for them when they saw this stuff happening. If another kid stood up for them, they were bullied too…
“So what do you all want to see trans people do? Because to see someone bullied, harassed, and threatened — told that they were too feminine, they’d never be a man — only to transition and be told they could never be a woman, makes it seem like you don’t want them to be.
“I understand the whole concept makes you uncomfortable. I was socialized in the same world you were. But there are people who are going through some thing that you don’t understand. And I don’t understand it either, but it’s not for me to understand. It’s enough for me to know that people have been subject to harm their entire lives just for trying to be the most authentic version of themselves in ways that I’ve taken for granted by entire life. So it’s not too much for me to stand in solidarity with them or applaud them when they break barriers, because it’s taken an immense amount of courage just to be here.” — Jamyle Cannon
It’s Easy to Imagine…
The bills targeting trans youth, their parents, and drag are an emergency.
If you’ve read the stories — the ones people claim to revere —
It’s so easy to imagine Jesus eating with the Drag Queens.
It’s so easy to imagine Jesus saying,
“Let the Trans Youth come to me.”
It’s so easy to imagine him telling us,
“Don’t throw those stones.”
It’s so easy to imagine him telling us,
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
It’s so easy to imagine him telling us,
“What you do these, you do to me.”
We Need to Protect Trans People and Trans Youth
That Sacred In-Between
What is that sacred in-between? That space right before death where powerful things seem to happen?
The truth is, I don’t know.
Is it a new reality coming into being? Is it simply (but still, amazingly!) the human brain giving a euphoric experience at the end of life? Is it a liminality between what has been and what will be? Is it an expansion of time — either in reality, or perhaps, in a beautiful illusion during a near-death state?
I don’t know. All I know is that I find it to be comforting.
I mean this: Sometimes, when people near death, they rally quite unexpectedly and receive a burst of strength that seems unexpected. Some appear to experience joy. Or in a last bit of consciousness in their bodies, some experience the presence of people who have died before them.
Before she died, my grandmother Ruby was unconscious and on a ventilator. After the ventilator was removed, she died pretty quickly. But right at the end, she suddenly opened up her eyes, looked up and smiled, and a couple tears dripped down her cheek.
I don’t know what that is, but I find that to be comforting.
I’ve also known of situations where people have spent whole days moving back and forth between conversation with people who are in the room and the next moment, announcing they could see someone from the earlier part of their life. It seemed that everyone was present at once.
I don’t know what that is, but I find that to be comforting.
In pondering this, I don’t mean to put a silver lining on death. I know these kinds of things can be hard to celebrate when loss is recent and grief is acute. But at the same time, it’s all such a mystery, and perhaps these kinds of moments can give some solace too.
That Would Be Fun
A friend of mine recently said this:
Wouldn’t it be great if we could walk around in the world, and every time we see someone or pass someone, a little number would appear, telling us how many degrees of separation are between us? Then if we wanted to, we could try to figure out who we know in common?
That would be really fun. And I bet we’d be shocked at how many 2s and 3s there would be.
–Renee Roederer
Smuggling Grace 