It is a gorgeous cool and bright Halloween here in Seattle, perfect weather for trick-or-treating in any other year. Tonight we are just hanging at home, hiding Twix, Reese’s cups, and Sour Patch Kids in the backyard for my son and sitting by the fire.
I made chocolate cake this morning in my skull cake mold…
I’m really in the baking groove and might make this Apple Cider Doughnut Loaf Cake from Bon Appetit tomorrow…
Photo by Laura Murray via Bon Appetit
Tomorrow with the daylight savings change, the sun will set at 4:51pm. My plan to usher in the darkness is to sit by the fire and finish Case Histories, the first book in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. It’s so good…
I spotted this Everlane oxblood sweatshirt today which is going on my wishlist…
Also these Trader Joe’s freezer to oven croissants are a wonder and I’ve been making them for my son in the mornings. You don’t have to proof them overnight (you don’t even have to preheat the oven!) and they’re ready in 28 minutes…
It’s going to be a wild week with the election. Remember to breathe and abstain from doomscrolling. And if you can, find ways to laugh. My favorites this weekend were found on McSweeney’s…
A few favorites: In This House We Believe, Captions From My Parents’ Museum of Conceptual Art, and Horror Movies for Toddlers.
Or you could just go all in and watch Dave Chappelle’s latest on Netflix…
Also, On Being continues to be a bright light in my life. I never listen to an episode while I am doing something else (besides driving which isn’t as much these days). So if I’m at home, I put headphones on and sit quietly so I can take it all in.
Her lead in to the most recent episode…
“This is always a starting point for meaningful change inside ourselves and our families and communities: We pull up stories we’ve been raised on in the light of what we know now. We see what was not being said, hear the questions we scarcely allowed ourselves even to think. We recover lost chapters. My colleague in radio and podcast, John Biewen, has been doing this with the interwoven questions of what it means to be human and what it means to be white. In a series called “Seeing White,” to which many people have turned in 2020, I think John has modeled something. As a documentary investigative journalist who’d covered race with the best of intentions and rigor, he realized he’d been turning to others — people of color — to be searching about racial rupture and healing. He then turned the lens back on himself.
So that’s the conversation ahead between me and John Biewen. It starts simply — tracing the racial story of our time through the story of a single life. It’s an exercise each of us can do, beginning with a curious eye on our childhoods and hometowns. And if we do this searchingly, it becomes a step towards a more whole and humane world, starting with ourselves.”
And later on this…
Tippett: Do you know Ruby Sales? She’s a civil rights elder, theologian; wonderful, one of the elders who’s with us. And she said to me in 2016, “There’s a spiritual crisis in white America”; that it was a crisis in white America. And she said, “There’s nothing wrong with being European American. That’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality.” And she said, “It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed.” She was looking at our electoral — because this has real world political consequences, especially in our current political crisis. I also think of James Baldwin writing that “white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other. And when they have achieved this, which will not be tomorrow” — this was in The Fire Next Time — “and may very well be never, the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
Biewen: Wow.
Tippett: It actually is a truth of life, if you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else. And if white people can’t figure out how to care about each other’s well-being — that that’s part of this reckoning, as well.
Listen to the whole conversation here.