The movie Brown Sugar is, at its heart, a tribute to hip-hop — complete with a soundtrack featuring artists like Mos Def, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, and Mary J. Blige. It follows Dre and Sidney, childhood friends whose love of hip-hop is what connects them throughout their life. This coming-of-age story celebrates how love and music feed one another — an idea that spoke to Nick George. From the first time he picked up the DVD at Walmart as a college student to his life now as a spoken-word poet and community leader, Brown Sugar has accompanied him as a grown-up in life, in art, and in love.
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How has becoming a parent — or being a caregiver — changed you?
This is a poem of two halves. In the first half, a man questions God — how could a loving Father allow suffering to happen? And in the second half, the man becomes a father himself, filled with fear and love. His questions about fatherhood change; he’s no longer wondering about the beyond, he’s wondering about the right now.
“I am persuaded that hopelessness is the enemy of justice; that if we allow ourselves to become hopeless, we become part of the problem. … And if I’ve inherited anything from the generation who came before me, I have inherited their wisdom about the necessity of hope.”
Question to Live
Where do I direct my curiosity and care? Where have I not been looking? |
Integration Step
Remember: curiosity, listening, and presence — proximity that is spiritual as much as physical — is a first step before setting an action plan. |
Heart of the Matter
This Wisdom Practice is a wonderful way into the question that so many of us have been asking, so many of us across all of our divides and differences. Seeing the reckonings that are upon us, seeing the repair that we want to happen in our world — how to begin? The language of hope as a “superpower” could be problematic; one thing we do with virtues and with virtuous people is to put them up on pedestals where what they’re describing and modeling feels inaccessible to the lowly rest of us. But there’s no pedestal here, if you know what Bryan Stevenson’s first counsel is when people ask him, “How do I live this way you live?” How do I develop this muscular hope that is also so pragmatic, and that shifts things in the world? His counsel is: “Get proximate.” Find a way to get proximate to the people in your neighborhoods, your communities, the places where you work, the places where you live — the people who are marginalized, who are excluded. He’s talking about physical proximity, but what he’s also describing is this connection that is always there with deep ways of living and being, with virtues and moves of character — that what we do externally also involves inward preparation and settling. Getting proximate also means getting spiritually proximate. How do you do that? You get mentally and emotionally present to things that perhaps you haven’t noticed or gotten up close to before. You get curious, which is just this very quiet muscle, this quiet virtue that makes almost all of the other virtues more possible. The invitation to practice here is to take Bryan Stevenson’s counsel to become proximate into your mind, into your body. Walk around with it. Walk around with it and see what it does inside you, and see what it moves you to see and to do in the world that you can see and touch. That’s the first place, the primary place, any of us are called to be present — for our presence to matter. |
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Drew Lanham and Krista. Find the full conversation here.
J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. He’s the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature and a forthcoming collection of poetry and meditations, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts.
What does it mean to be good? What does it mean if we aren’t good? Whose fault is it? These are just some of the questions that animate Amadeus, a fictional portrayal of famed composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his musical rival Antionio Salieri. These questions also inspire Sue Phillips, a Unitarian Universalist minister. She first watched the movie in the late ’80s, just as she was coming out and understanding her place in the world.
Career Girls is a love letter to the friendships that shape us in our formative years, and the nostalgia that accompanies us once we’ve grown out of them. The indie movie follows Annie and Hannah, college friends who reunite for the first time since they graduated six years ago. Karen Corday, a writer, was the same age as the characters when she first saw the movie. She says it helped her feel seen and comforted to know that her experiences “just living as a person in the world” were worth exploring.
Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.
Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.
Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.
You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
< Back to Retreat
A narrative prose poem about two brothers — one on a visit home from college — who are turning to face east in their small shared room. With seven years between them, one is a young man and the other, the poet, is nearing his teens. Their prayer is interrupted by a sudden surprising noise, and the sound of this makes them fall over each other in laughing. Their bodies, their joy, their uncontrollable delight is the prayer of their own lives.
Contact takes the sometimes opposing forces of science and religion and puts them in conversation. The movie is based on a 1985 novel by Carl Sagan about Ellie Arroway, a SETI scientist who discovers a radio signal that could suggest extraterrestrial life. During her search she encounters Palmer Joss, a Christian philosopher who challenges her convictions as a scientist. Ellie’s pursuit of meaning outside of religion — an oftentimes lonely endeavor — was an experience Drew Hammond had never seen portrayed in a movie before. A high school teacher, Hammond says the movie granted him permission to stay curious and pursue the questions he has about the world — and it continues to shape how he interacts with his students.
If your home were a museum — and they all are, in a way — what would the contents of your refrigerator say about you and those you live with? In his poem “Refrigerator, 1957,” Thomas Lux opens the door to his childhood appliance and oh, does a three-quarters full jar of maraschino cherries speak volumes.
We’re pleased to offer Thomas Lux’s poem, and invite you to read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.
What stories or myths bring you strength?
This poem tells the story of a person living with invisible chronic pain who finds unexpected fortitude from a girl dressed as a superhero. Their encounter, “at the swell of the muddy Mississippi,” doesn’t have a fantasy ending, but instead finds strength and glory in bodies and myth.
“There’s something magnetic about a group of people that say, ‘Hey, we don’t have it all figured out, and we need each other.'” New Monastic and Simple Way founder Shane Claiborne on bridging the gap between the structures we are raised in and the human needs around us.
Brad Aaron Modlin’s poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade” speaks of learning to grow up by yourself. The poet wonders what life lessons would look like if they could be taught by a teacher; a good teacher, a teacher like Mrs. Nelson.
A question to reflect on after you listen: What life lessons did you have to learn by yourself?
In a poem that addresses a worm directly as “you,” Gail McConnell considers how these tube-shaped beings live: ingesting the earth, aerating it, digesting it, making its nourishment accessible for all kinds of growth. The worm burrows, knows dead things, and knows underground ways. Tiny and segmented though a worm is, nonetheless it senses that “all there is // can be gone through.” The poem’s close attention to the worm’s tactics of survival seems to indicate that much could be learned from its underground ways.
“You’re always asked to stretch a little bit more. And actually, we’re made for that. In any case, there’s absolutely no excuse for making our passionate love for the world dependent on what we think of its degree of health … This moment, you’re alive.”
Question to Live
Can I stretch towards the love for the world on the other side of my grief? |
Integration Step
Carry Rilke’s words with you like a friend: “Move back and forth into the change.” |
Heart of the Matter
That dance with despair, as Joanna describes. The way pain turns if we actually look at it, take it in our hands, be with it, and keep breathing. This analysis of grief is reminiscent of an idea in Christian theology that is about the move from grieving to mourning to lamenting. The invitation here is to cultivate that move inside ourselves and, for the sake of the world, to stand reverently with our grief, to let it turn to mourning and lament and something that brings us more deeply into our love. A muscular hope may not be possible without the capacity to make that move. And it is something we can and must practice. |
In a poem considering trees, Jason Allen-Paisant opens up many associations with trees: in a woodland, there’s a dead tree, from which new forms of life are finding sustenance. He, a Black man in the woods, is aware of people looking suspiciously at him. The poem reflects on how trees were used for building the ships of enslavers, who considered countries and people their property. In light of this, he shares a nature poem about all the things that nature holds.
“The way in which people live their lives and commit themselves — how they believe, what they engage in — those things are critical in shaping the human niche. … Those are evolutionarily relevant processes.”
Question to LiveWhat assumptions about evolution and essential human nature am I walking around with? |
Integration Step
Become a little less riveted by “critical mass.” Look for “critical yeast” — small groups of unlikely combinations of people in a new quality of relationship. |
Heart of the Matter
This is such a wonderful and freeing thing to be able to take in every once in a while, as Rebecca Solnit paraphrases Foucault: “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what [what] we do does.” We control our intentions, to some extent. We control our behavior. But we don’t control what that sets off in the world. The other piece of what she’s saying that feels so resonant to me for us now is this notion that the earthquake shakes you awake, and then the question to live — how do you stay awake? Here we are, in a pandemic generation. Everything that we thought we knew for sure, so much of that was upended. We were called to so many questions and to learn edifying and deepening things about ourselves and others and the world. How do we stay faithful to those questions and to that learning? |
A note from the Poetry Unbound team:
We’ve updated the audio for our episode “Amanda Gunn — Ordinary Sugar.” This updated version includes an additional stanza initially omitted from the recording and additional reflection from Pádraig.
How can russet potatoes be made to taste of sugar and caramel? By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds.
We’re pleased to offer Amanda Gunn’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.