3. You can cultivate your own best self. Listen deeply. Read widely. Learn how to speak so that you’re heard. Embrace the clumsy phase of acquiring any new skill. Work on that tricky combo move of reason, compassion, and wonder. Act bravely, because it gives other people permission to do the same. The more we all work on this stuff, the more exciting the world gets.Because when any one of us listens and acts and finds the path, it isn’t just about that one–it ripples out and supports all of us on our journeys.
“It is something so familiar / you remember how it goes / it was always there / it is always there”
There are so many voices we hear as writers/readers/humans as we journey through our lives that it’s easy to get focused on what we’re not, instead of what we are. But deep down, there’s another voice, one that knows the path that’s our own, that’s always known:
We heard Alex Wong open for Vienna Teng at the Musical Instrument Museum up in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, and this is one of several songs I’ve been listening to obsessively ever since. Teng’s new “Level Up” had already been blowing me away and waking me up for some weeks now. A Kickstarter-supported video for “Level Up” should be out in a few weeks, but in the meantime, I was also struck by a recent post by Teng on ways to support artists, especially this: