I connect to the creative and those trying to make a difference, specific to a thread of humanity commonly on the side of ethnic, historic, racial, and economic justice. Self determination and agency, health and prosperity, opportunity and advancement. I look to my own family's history and see those pathways, but many don't have them, and the pathways are not strong. Strengthening them and making them more accessible is my cause in life. I've done this throughout my career, and these efforts are how I have most strongly practiced my values in life, in a variety of ways. I am most fortunate to have had this cause and path find me, and to have given myself to it in the grand scheme of things.
But I feel a strong resonance to the creative community. I think all of us do in our own way, be it through fashion or music or more. I love and appreciate the arts and I see the arts in everything. The arts have given me a perspective, a vocabulary, a critical perspective on a great deal many dimensions of life and experience. An appreciation that transcends a creative practice or expression like a painting. At its greatest impact, it hits me in the feels like nothing else, in ways that I've read other describe as spiritual. I once told someone the only proof I could ever give if pressed to do so of an existence of God would be John Coltrane.
To that end, artistic moments of experience connect me to the greater whole of people, especially those who both connect to this rise in community, bending history to the noble arc of justice, the expression that comes from it, and the centering peace these forms of expression give me, that I sit within. It is tough to describe where this sits: in an expressionist landscape painting of California, in a piano solo by McCoy Tyner, in a WPA poster, in a music criticism article on hip hop, in a blues riff by Bo Diddley, in the example and history of Ella Baker, in Jody's subtle and graceful outfits, in the triumph of people against adversity, in a black t shirt, in the California wing of the Crocker Art Museum or the Hudson River Valley School section of the de Young Museum, in the Beatles discography, in a scotch bar in Edinburgh, in a quiet summer evening, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the string section of a Debussy symphony, in any film shot by Haskell Wexler, in a cumbia on the radio, in a sunrise and a sunset, in a confidence inspired by a deep seated knowing that this is where I am supposed to be doing this exact thing as if a link on a tread of legacy and heritage. I have joined arms and hearts and minds with these visions, these expressions, these causes, this history, and am doing my part to honor this sense of community, connection, and deep value. Like when a brown kid makes it.
But the removal of fear is paramount, and against sometimes formidable odds, fear is the greater of enemies. Any time I can help someone feel less fear is a worthy moment of purpose, in this life, always.
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