This week I’m doing something different: pairing my drawings and notes with a story generously shared with me by my friend and neighbor (and Why Are We subscriber) Elena Faro. The words I’ve hand-lettered in this post are hers – but any errors, opinions, etc are of course my own. Thank you Elena for letting me co-opt your story!
Notes:
Other people’s stories: I’ve always had the intention to tell stories besides my own in this Substack, and I’m excited to start here, with this one. To me it represents both a local, personal story happening at a specific place and time and a universal human experience of unexpected connection. Especially in the world we live in now, this seems like the most important kind of story to tell.
And, it is also a Thanksgiving story! Hoping that all of us have some good time with people we love next week.
Images: The drawings in this post are based on pictures I took in different places in my neighborhood at different times. I like to collect pictures of graffiti like this because of the stories they hint at, and the mysterious ways they communicate.
The final image has special resonance for me because the figure in it is my child. In August, when I was walking with him and noticed the message on the green streetlight box, I was worrying in ways parents do: would the upcoming school year be ok for him? How would I feel when he was grown and not living with me? How would technology and climate change shape his future?
Now, as a parent and human, I’m thinking all the time of the 5,000+ children in Israel and Gaza whose futures have been cut short. And of those who don’t have parents, who don’t have homes. Of all the many thousands of Israeli and Palestinian children whose futures are being shaped by this extreme, inhumane violence and trauma. And of the world’s future when human life seems to mean so little.
And so I am sharing a few more things, in addition to those I shared in the last post, that I’m finding helpful right now:
This episode of Chris Hayes’s “Why Is This Happening?” podcast, which is an interview with the ferociously intelligent human rights lawyer Sari Bashi, who is a Jewish woman of American and Iraqi descent, married to a Palestinian, and lives in the West Bank.
The poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye – for example, Gate A-4, or Big Bend National Park Says No to All Walls.
’s A list of beautiful things #25, which includes another Naomi Shihab Nye poem, as well as more pieces that, as she says, “offer insight to the war through art, poetry and beauty, which have an important role to play amid tragedy.”This pair of episodes of the Ezra Klein Show podcast, which, as Klein writes, “look at both the present and the past through Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. The point is not to choose between them. The point is to really listen to them. Even — especially — when what’s being said is hard for us to hear.”
Thank you for being here with me.
Thank you for this, it's the best thing to freshen up my appreciation of the written word (no A.I.!) in quite some time. I like the collaborative effort, the muti-part media framing and the (urban) pressure to find one's place of relevance. Nice work, Jen!
This is beautiful, Jen! Fennel (finocchio) was very big with my Sicilian grandfather and it would appear constantly at my grandparents’ house with the fruit and the nuts. Did not really know what it was when I was a child!!