Alanna Risse

Would you ever believe what. crazy world we live in now? It is truly a mad, mad, mad world. Having lived through the end of the depression and world war ii, the korean war, the civil rights movement, and so much more, you never told me how “normal” apocalyptic times would feel. They probably just felt too normal to even consider as a topic for discussion. It’s just life rolling along. It’s true that daily life goes on no matter how crazy things get. This is something I want to tell my students. Despite everything, despite feeling like you should hide under the overs until it’s all over with, we have to just keep on keeping on. Staying aware of things going on, but not putting our lives completely on hold to wait for change. Change is incremental. Things accumulate like piles of dirty laundry or like any process of making or unmaking. We generate, we accumulate, we purge, mostly in small steps. And then looking back, it feels big, but in the moment, it feels small.

We never talked about stuff like that, or if we did, I can’t remember. It’s been so long. You’ve been gone 29 years. Happy 90th birthday by the way! Your death was probably my first big tragedy. Bigger than the divorce, bigger than any sorrow or violence I’d endured. The tragedy of your death was my lesson that life continues to go forward, even when it seems like it should all stop. I wish I knew then how to carve out time for myself to grieve. Instead I grieved while still in motion. Now I know how to give myself breaks, when I remember that I can. Perhaps I should tell me students all of this, plus remind them to step out of the stream every once and while so they can watch the current from the sidelines. Anyway, I miss you.

Dang it, life is so overwhelming. And I want to start writing in this thing every day. But I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel. I’m pretty sure the hamster wheel would allow me 5 minutes for a blog post. So yeah let’s do this thing.

This morning, I looked at my email and there was one from CNN: the title was: CNN’s Good Stuff. It was a newsletter with all good stuff in it. People who’ve survived covid, bandaids finally getting a color make-over, people helping their communities, hero stories, virtual getaways, and so much more. I audibly yelled: “YES!!!! Thank you John Krazinski.” He single handedly convinced the media that people want good news.

So that’s some great news. I’m a big fan of “yes, and.” What’s that? It’s tied to a growth mindset. Yes, and is the practice of seeing the positive and adding to it, instead of seeing the negative and squashing the conversation. It’s the philosophy that all things have a positive, and it’s possibly to grow exponentially from it if you chose to. So sharing good news with people can help inspire people to do more of the same, as well as inspire people to expand on ideas and make them even stronger. We need solutions right now but all we get from the media is the bad stuff.

I’m not saying we should close our eyes to the bad stuff, absolutely not! We should bare witness to it all, but also try and help make things better, however we can.

Here are John Krazinski’d eight episodes of SomeGoodNews if you haven’t seen them: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOe_y6KKvS3PdIfb9q9pGug

I just found this in an old blog post. I was about 25 weeks pregnant at the time:

“I must do this for my daughter. I must show her that you can do what you love, that you don’t have to settle. That money isn’t as important as happiness. I want her to know hard work, when applied to the things you love and hold dear, gives great rewards.”

It makes me happy that I’ve stayed true to this. It has definitely not been easy but it’s been worth the journey. Every day my path feels a bit clearer and more focused. Of course there are still side trips, but I move in the same direction.

This weekend I’m in a writing retreat lead by Sarah Sentilles called the WORD CAVE. I’m getting back to a practice of writing. I’ve collected a million sources and today I will focus on just writing, not worrying about my sources. I’ve started to feel like I have to back up every sentence with facts. But I know I am an authority, I know what I’m talking about, and I offer plenty of sources to back it up. SO I need to let go of feeling like I have to prove myself.

Today’s meeting was beyond intense. So much hard work is being done this weekend. People are digging deep, writing hard things. I’ve thought about all the hard work I’ve been doing over the past 5 years. I want to go through my private writings and make some of it public, or at the very least revisit it. That might be a good project for the week, now that PSU is ramping down. I feel like this week will feel like a release of tension. Sarah said we should expect the regular post-intensity crash, so I promise to be kind and get lots of rest. Tom’s not drinking until his birthday so he’s been reading in bed and going to bed early. I’m excited to join him. So many good books are on their way to me now and the library is opening back up.

I wrote this today in our morning writing exercise. The prompt was “question and answer”. To simple ask a question and answer it. We’d had just an intense check-in, I couldn’t imagine writing even a single word, but the first thing that came out was, what is an ocean? I liked the question so much I decided to stay with it to the 7 minute exercise.

Here’s what I wrote, unedited, so you can follow my journey with the writing:

What is an ocean? The earth is an ocean with some islands on it. It is water, we are water, we came from water. The islands are made up of pimples erupting and crusting over. The earth is a ball of fluid with rock and fire inside, keeping it from freezing, like a heart pumping blood. We are all water too. Our organs keep things moving. The land masses give the ocean shape and change its flow into beautiful, intricate patterns. But the earth is water. The surface land is inconsequential just as our solid parts are inconsequential. Our spirits rest in water. The ocean talks to the sky. They are lovers, as we are lovers to the sky and universe. We are tiny oceans born from the mother ocean.

And in my email this morning was this: