Moments of Insight, Volume 1, Issue 9
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Moments of Insight • Vol. 1 Issue 9 • July 10, 2020 A Note from Anna, our Founder & Director Send us a Letter We know we cannot be there in person with you, but wanted to encourage you Hi everyone, to check-in with us like we do when we are together. You know how Anna I hope you are doing well and are able to find some space to relax and feel usually asks us to state how the week some inner peace. I’m good. Been in my head some this week trying to nail has been and share something we've the last of the Insight to Well-being curriculum so we can train more learned? We'd love for you to write it teachers and expand into more prisons. down and send us a note. I’ve been watching a British show recently called ‘I May Destroy You’. It sounds more ominous than it is… It centers around a British woman, her Send us a poem or artwork struggles and her life as a writer trying to make it all work in London. The We would also love for you to share any lead role is played by Michaela Cole, a young woman who grew up in East poems, artwork or insights you've had London. that we can include in one of our next volumes of 'Moments of Insight'. Feel 'I didn’t think much more about it until I read an article about her, written by free to share ideas of what you'd like us Alex Jung for the New York Times Magazine titled, ‘Michaela Cole: to include in this newsletter as well. How a young talent from East London went from open-mic nights to making the most sublimely unsettling show of the year'. This brilliant piece invited All letters, art and ideas can be sent to: me into a deeper understanding of who she is and where she comes from. It The Insight Alliance showed me, once again, that anyone can do anything they put their mind to. PO Box 820214 And we don’t know what's possible until we dip our toe into the unknown: Portland, OR 97282 “ …When Michaela was in drama school it was the first time she had ever been in an environment full of upper-middle-class white people (“middle- uppers,” as she wrote on the blog). She began to understand that her classmates saw her as someone who lacked, but it also made her realize she had an advantage. “The way I looked at myself and my life shifted,” she says. “I’ve never had a garden. We never grew up like that. I don’t particularly mind, but I think there is something in growing up in concrete and not understanding putting fingers in soil, growing things, foundation. My family has rented our whole lives. You’re always on fragile ground because it’s not yours. It gives you a drive, an ambition, because nothing is certain. That is a resilience no person with stability can replicate…There’s blessings to the struggle.” THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 01 CONTINUED FROM PG 1. What I loved in reading this is the creativity that is born from her struggle. It’s inspiring and gutsy. When she was in negotiation with Netflix, they said they would pay her $1 million for the show but give her no royalties and she'd have to hand it over. But she wasn’t having it. She knew she was worth more. So she kept going. She wanted some ownership. So she walked away. Then a bit later Michaela was the keynote speaker at a big media industry celebration. She surprised people by openly and directly sharing her experience of being undervalued and marginalized as a creator. Piers Wenger, the controller of BBC drama commissioning had this reaction: “She’s this thing that we all say we want most, which is this cool young woman of color, who happens to be a fantastic writer — the joke Holy Grail of modern television. And here she was, talking about what a shit time she’d had,” says Wenger, the controller of BBC drama commissioning. “It was pretty hard to hear because we’ve been complicit, myself included. That was an incredibly ballsy thing to do to stand up and say, ‘This is what I need. Are you good enough to give it to me?’ Not ‘Am I good enough to deserve the kind of treatment that I want?’ ” And as it turned out she ended up doing her show with the BBC and they gave her everything she wanted. When we think outside the box and go for things we haven’t tried before, or aren’t sure are even possible, we throw ourselves into the celestial soup of the unknown. The creative potential of the ‘shit we don’t know we don’t know.’ It can be a fun place to hang out. It’s where hope lives. It's our Well of LOVE AFTER LOVE Being. And, it's what we're all made of. BY DEREK WALCOTT Hope to see you soon, The time will come when, with elation You will greet yourself arriving At your own door, in your own mirror. And each will smile at the others welcome And say, sit there, eat, You will love again the stranger Who was yourself Give wine, give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger Who has loved you All your life, who you have ignored For another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters From the book shelves The photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the Mirror. Sit feast on your life. THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 02 I read an article from the Veterans The BREATHE Act ART BY BRUSHFIREHEART.ART The BREATHE Act is presented by the Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives. This visionary bill invests in a new vision of public safety—a vision that answers the call to defund the police and allows all communities to finally BREATHE free. This act would: 1. Directly make changes to the Federal criminal- justice system,including changes to the policing, prosecution, sentencing, and jailing practices that have disproportionately criminalized Black and Brown communities, LGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous people, and disabled people. Three examples of specific changes include: Eliminating surveillance tactics that are disproportionately used to target Black, Brown, and Muslim communities by prohibiting predictive policing, racial recognition technologies, drones, and similar tools; Abolishing mandatory minimum sentencing laws; Abolishing the “three strikes” law 2. Investing in New Approaches to Community Safety Utilizing Funding Incentives. The bill would: Create Federal Grant programs that incentivize decarceration and subsidize non-punitive, community-led approaches to public safety. ART BY JESSICA GAYLOR 3. Allocating New Money to Build Healthy, Sustainable & Equitable Communities for All People. The bill would: Establish a Grant to promote educational justice that incentivizes jurisdictions to make specified equity-focused policy changes and provides resources for programs and investments. Establish a Grant to promote environmental justice that incentivizes States to make specified equity-focused policy changes and provides resources for programs and investments in community. Establish a competitive grant to promote health and family justice that incentivizes jurisdictions to make specified equity-focused policy changes. Establish a competitive grant to promote economic justice that incentivizes States to make specified equity-focused policy changes and provides resources for programs and investments that include, but are not limited to: Food cooperatives and urban gardens; Paid parental and sick leave; Comprehensive, high-quality child and elder care; and The creation of comprehensive health centers that offer culturally competent services for all people, including services related to reproductive health. Establish a competitive Housing & Infrastructure Grant Program that incentivizes jurisdictions to make specified equity-focused policy changes. For example: Authorizing State funds to expand the affordable housing supply. 4. Holding Officials Accountable & Enhancing Self-Determination of Black Communities.The bill would: Require Congress to acknowledge and address the lasting harms that it has caused. Ensure democratic, fair, and secure voting processes that are free from racial discrimination and voter suppression in every State. THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 03 'Life of a Song' from the Financial Times UK FOLSOM PRISON BLUES BY JOHNNY CASH A NEW DEFINITION OF LOVE “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”: it’s perhaps the most chilling line BY ECKHART TOLLE ever written in popular song. And the words are perhaps even more famous than "Some people have been trying for the song from which they come, “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash. centuries to love their neighbor as Cash explained to Rolling Stone magazine what inspired the line: “I sat… trying to themselves. But they have been finding it think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and difficult because loving your neighbor as that’s what came to mind. yourself really means, first of all, you need to be in touch with yourself, the self that ”The track came to be regarded as one of the great American country music songs you are beyond the form. And then and one that perhaps defined Cash’s career. It combines two archetypes of you can love your neighbor as yourself country music — the train song and the prison song — as well as two characteristics of Cash himself: sin, and the search for redemption. because you recognize your oneness with your neighbor... This quintessentially American song was actually written in the then West Germany, while Cash served in the US Air Force in the early 1950s.