🕯️ Attunement to life's little pleasures

A graphic I drew for NOFA-VT that never got used.

Hey y'all,

I hope you had a great week!

Here are three things I'm feeling inspired by this week:

1. A podcast I revisited: Constellation Prize, Crossing Guard, Bianca Giaever

Bianca Giaever is a radio producer and filmmaker. I’ve been a fan since her short film, The Scared is scared, went viral 11 years ago.

Bianca has an uncanny ability to tell stories and share the beauty and ecstasy of the mundane–illustrated by this t-shirt with her 12 favorite traffic cones.

Every episode of her podcast, Constellation Prize, is a masterpiece. In Crossing Guard, she documents her sense of ennui and loneliness in summer of 2020, and–inspired by a quote from the Pope–she seeks out a stranger in New York City who is lonelier than her, leading to a friendship with a local crossing guard, Sofia. Bianca documents their conversations for six months.

"Attunement to life's little pleasures is an antidote to the shame of existence." - Bianca Giaever paraphrasing Jean Paul Sarte, I think

2. An essay I read: Ceasefire, Comma, Grace Oedel

One of the things I miss most about working at NOFA-VT is being in proximity to my friend and NOFA's Executive Director, Grace Oedel. I've never met anyone so visionary without being naive, so true to her values without being pretentious. Working with her (and for NOFA in general), I felt more attuned to the complex challenges we face as a society while feeling more confident that we can build a better society where everyone thrives. “We have all the tools we need,” is a common refrain in that office.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world, I encourage you to be similarly moved by Grace via her brilliant Substack, Here We Are.

Her most recent essay, Ceasefire, Comma, is a perfect articulation of how I've been thinking and feeling about social change work in these times, which out of necessity usually takes the form of harm reduction: crowdfunding campaigns to cover essential healthcare, giving farmers modest grants that allow them to scrape through another tumultuous season, asking representatives to do the bare minimum of not dropping bombs on children.

Grace asks us: this work is important and needed... but how are we working upstream?

3. A book I'm reading: Hidden Systems, by Dan Nott

I was so excited to finally pick up Dan Nott's Hidden Systems at the Non-fiction Comics Festival last month after following his work on Instagram for the past few years.

Dan explores and illustrates how invisible systems that we use everyday–water, electricity, the internet–actually work.

A favorite page:

Thanks for reading!

Christine Tyler Hill is the human behind Tender Warrior Co.