Dear friends,

I have been working on a draft of this newsletter since April 5th. It’s now April 25th and counting. Starting over and over and my sense of overwhelm is not diminished. So I’ll be brief. Titles and micro samples. That’s all I’ve got.

One book I really encourage you to borrow or purchase and definitely read:

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (2025)

“It’s almost refreshing then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of Western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die. And whatever disgust this equation, laid bare, might inspire, many know it to be true. This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.” p. 91

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the very idea of nation states and how we have come to determine where one place ends and another begins. It is not lost on me that borders can be constructed, crossed, stretched and/or erased. Here two reads for thinking about borders.

“Rafah No Longer Exists” by Tarreq El Hajjaj

“Rafah is the Gaza Strip’s southernmost governorate, located along the border with Egypt. Before the war, it housed about 200,000 residents, and its territory made up about a fifth of Gaza’s land. It no longer exists.”

Border Control by Antonia Malchik

“Borders have the power to strangle our travel, our relationships, our communities, and our work. They impart the conviction that anyone on one side of a border or another has the power to judge, to condemn, to dispense death.”

Other thoughts on the world we live in:

Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong? by Paul Tough

“Increasingly, research suggests that for many people A.D.H.D. might be thought of as a condition they experience, sometimes temporarily, rather than a disorder that they have in some unchanging way.”

Poetry Prompts for Detained Children by Joaquin Zihuatanejo

“Write a how to poem about something mundane that most people take for granted. How to hear your mother’s voice. How to see the sky. How to trust a man in a uniform. How to breathe.

Write about things that are out of order. Broken vending machines. Raging defense attorneys. This border. This country. “

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This is not the newsletter I envisioned when I started. I wanted something different. I wanted to be brave and hopeful and encouraging. I wanted to write about clarity and grace. I wanted to end on a positive note.

Instead, let’s read poems and share them. Look at art and hear what it has to say. Let’s find each other and find joy where we can.

Thank you for bearing with me.

Take care,

Sherri