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A cookie is a cookie is a cookie …
Two incidents from grad school keep popping up as I re-visit bell hooks All About Love and Communion.
At the end of my MA program, I took my first feminist theory classes with a professor, who inspired me. She challenged me, and I admired her. She is the reason I ended up in the Ph.D. program at my school. She pushed me to go somewhere else, but I wanted to continue to study with her. In the end, she left the university right after I submitted my dissertation proposal, so I probably should have listened. (That is an entirely different story.) The exact name of the course escapes me, but I am sure it had something to do with feminist pedagogies and composition. I am sure, because I unwittingly ignited a firestorm of feminist debate at our end of the semester dinner party.
At the end of that semester I completed my first year teaching composition at the local community college. I’d opted to complete an internship style program rather than write a thesis. I brought some Cowboy Cookies (around my house that means oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips and walnuts) that I’d baked as part of my contribution to the dinner. At some point, I must have mentioned that I had also made enough cookies to take to celebrate the end of my first year teaching with my composition students.
After twenty years, I don’t remember the conversation verbatim, I am pretty sure it started with an exasperated comment from my professor wondering if I’d learned anything at all in her class. Because baking cookies for my students perpetuated gendered stereotypes about how women professors should care for students. Basically, I’d forsaken feminist pedagogies, shored up expectations that women will perform uncompensated caring labor, and made things more difficult for women who don’t fit the stereotype. I didn’t have a great come back. I pointed out that it was the end of the semester, and that the point wasn’t about caring for the students. I was celebrating a milestone – the end of my first year teaching. A classmate, who was every bit as passionate, strong-willed, and inspiring as our professor, vehemently defended me. She argued that the point of feminism is that I had the choice to make cookies or not make cookies.
They went on about it for long enough that the whole incident became a reference point for those of us in the class for the next few years.
A couple of years later, during my Ph.D. work, I had the opportunity to hear bell hooks speak. I believe it was at Winston-Salem State University. I don’t remember the exact talk now, but I know she talked about love. I know because I remember, with regret, how dismissive I was about her message. Still influenced by my professor and other feminist scholars, I was too focused on how work considered, “women’s work” is devalued within systems. And as hooks writes, “Patriarchy has always seen love as women’s work, degraded and devalued labor.” I went into the talk wanting a different kind of feminism from hooks; what she offered was more radical than I knew at the time.
It wasn’t until 2021 or 2022, that I finally started to read hook’s work on love, that I was ready to really listen. In the All About Love chapter “Community: Loving Communion,” hooks opens by reminding us that “Communities sustain life — not nuclear families, or the “couple,” and certainly not the rugged individualist.” For hooks, “When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life in the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.”
My professor wasn’t wrong. Overtly caring work like nursing, teaching, child care has been characterized as women’s work and degraded and devalued. You can find a million articles about it, and if you require less academic/more real world proof, watch Meet the Parents again and pay attention to all the jokes about Ben Stiller’s profession. Resisting that devaluation has been important work, particularly when we consider the way that devaluation compounds as it impacts across race as well as gender.
We are, however, so clearly living in broken communities. [gestures hopelessly at the world]
hooks’ message was more radical than I knew, because I couldn’t comprehend the ramifications of these broken communities. Love isn’t all we need. We also need action. We need the “acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility” hooks says demonstrate love. I think we also need the accountability that comes with responsibility.
I know I’m guilty of conflating love/acts of care a bit as I am trying to work out their relationship in my stories. Their relationship and the difficulty of teasing them apart for discussion is some of the point. We need a broader vocabulary of love, and we need a less gendered understanding of the labor of love that enables us all to assume the responsibility of it.
Clearly, there is a lot to think through here. I’ve reached the limit of blog-post attention span, though. So, I’ll pick up the threads another time.
Learning to Labor
It’s a bit funny how time is the one thing we always seem to want more of; yet, sometimes when we suddenly get it, we don’t know what to do with it.
The time I suddenly have on my hands is a blessing and a curse. A blessing that allows me to focus on recovering from burn out and attending to what I call the “admin” of my life — the chores, appointments, and tasks that need to get done, but that I rarely have time for during the week. A curse that undermines my ability to rest and get things done by activating my avoidant self and the critical self-talk about everything I “should” be able to do in a day. All the items that “should” be ticked off my list already.
Letting go of the “shoulds” to focus on the present helps me get to that rest and recovery. My brain knows these things. My body and my inner monologue often need some time to catch up.
Recovering my morning reflective practice has been the best gift of this time. The alarm doesn’t go off every morning, but I do get up at about the same time every day. After my daily maintenance routine, I set a timer and read for :25 minutes and then journal for :25 minutes. Right now, that means working through Brene Brown’s new book, Strong Ground. Afterwards, I focus on some projects for myself, and usually do some other reading.
Right now, all my efforts have me about to that middle, half-filled yellow silhouette in the image above. The challenge moving forward is letting go of the inner monologue that tells me what I have done isn’t enough. That I should be doing more. That I am wasting this time.
I’m not though.
As she promotes this new book, Dr. Brown talks some about the AI revolution that we are all facing in the workforce. Specifically, she brings up people in the workplace who believe that our “human-ness” will keep AI from completely taking over. That people will remain essential in the work place because of the human things we can do that AI cannot – empathy, connection, rhetorical awareness, etc. Brown points out that one problem with this thinking is that right now “we” (humans) are not very good at what makes us human. She has a point. Even a cursory glance at the headlines and happenings in the world illustrates all too well how we are failing each other.
Her observations raises other questions for me that I’ve been struggling with as I attempt to adapt to this AI revolution. What makes us human? What is work? How do we measure what is important about the work that we do? There’s no Dunning-Krueger effect here; I do not think I can answer these questions. I’m rumbling with them, though. Finishing Dr. Shannon Valor’s The AI Mirror. Returning to bell hook’s all about love, and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.
In a quotation within a quotation within a quotation, Brown’s Strong Ground introduced me to Dr. Sara Lewis with a long passage from her book The Rise. In that book, Dr. Lewis provides a quotation from Lewis Hyde, “Work is what we do by the hour, [but labor] sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify. … Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms— these are labors.” This distinction between work and labor lives in me; it is the marrow of my bones. I’ve been working by the hour since well before I was sixteen and legally able to get a job.
Although the trend has been developing before, since the beginning of this year, the pace and pressure to reduce labor to quantifiable, productive work increased exponentially. The AI revolution is not the only force reshaping workplaces. My body, my brain, and my inner monologue have been calibrate for work. Work done by the hour. Work measurable by word count, check marks on the to-do list, emails sent, meetings held.
Suddenly, though, there is time to labor. Time to read and question and think and re-think. I suppose it is only natural for it to take some time for me to adapt to this pace. Perhaps a question to add to my list, “How do humans labor?” And a question to take back to the office with us, “What labor do I need to do today?”
Personal Holidays
October 4, 2008 was as gloriously sunny Saturday as it is today on October 4, 2025.
I know, because on October 4, 2008 I was supposed to enjoy a day at the North Carolina zoo with my ex-husband. The sun shined and the leaves had just begun to change colors. It was a truly rare Saturday that the ex-husband and I had the opportunity to spend time together. Instead, October 4, 2008 became a day I can never quite forget and that I never really know how to celebrate, Stroke Day.
I last celebrated Stoke day in 2018. It felt like 10 years was enough time to mark, so I did it right. I invited friends to my place in Aberdeen, NC and we had a lovely spread of snacks, and I had a cake made.
It was a great end to the Stroke Day commemorations. So, I didn’t really expect to be writing about it still.
On this Stroke Day, though, I haven’t been able to escape the memories. Maybe it’s the fact that the day is falling on a Saturday again. Maybe it’s the fact that, in a year that has already challenged me and the rest of the nation, yet another challenging event has just begun. The seventeen years since stroke day have taught me the depth of my strength and the boundless capacity of my joy.
So, whether I choose to commemorate it or not, October 4th remains a personal holiday for me. One that reminds me to be as grateful for the struggles as I am for the gifts.
Ebb and Flow 2.0
I’ve quite the collection of drafts from this month and very few actual posts. The world around us all has been chaotic and hard this month. I uploaded this picture of mine to the media folder for a draft about feeling hollow. The post was raw, written at around five am after glancing at the headlines and feeling completely vulnerable and helpless. It also wouldn’t post for reasons I still haven’t figured out.
It was difficult to find a picture in my photo library that captured the hollow feeling flooding me. This shot from the Oklahoma City Myriad Botanical Garden came closest. The empty spaciousness of this large room, the cool, shadowy nature of the space felt right. That morning, the bright light of the outside world, the trees, their shadows, the warmth felt so far from where I was, where we were, though, that I almost didn’t use it. It felt too much like a hope I couldn’t muster.
To me, the saddest thing about losing that post from last week is that I don’t remember what set me off, what made me feel so completely depleted. I don’t remember because the blows keep coming; I don’t remember, because the specific blow doesn’t matter any more. I’d tentatively titled that post “Ebb and Flow,” I know I was trying to remind myself that becoming hollow creates space to refill.
Refilling is what I’ve tried to focus on the last couple of weeks. Enjoying the brief time I had with Ouiser, catching up with people using actual communication – not just memes, creating the best environment possible for my team, and remembering to practice self-compassion. In her book Self Compassion Kristen Neff provides a mantra for hard times that came back to me as I re-shelved books in the new office.
This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is a part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment.
I’ve often adapted this mantra for whatever situation is wearing me down, and I find it helpful. The reminder to be kind to myself prompts me to focus on refilling and rehabilitating myself. Taking the time to do the soft things like take a candle lit bath in my wonderful tub, sitting by a fire pit for a glass of wine in the evening and a cup of coffee in the morning; and doing the hard things, eating well, getting movement into every day, writing, maintaining my restorative practices even when I don’t “want” to.
This is a moment of suffering. Collectively and individually we are suffering, and we don’t know how long this moment will last or how deep it will become. Suffering is a part of life. It is natural and okay to feel hollow, to feel depleted when the suffering is so large, when it just keeps coming. Up right and breathing is sometimes the absolutely best we can do in a day. Recognizing and naming the suffering is the first step that will allow us to start ameliorate the suffering. May I be kind to myself in this moment. This mantra helps me remember to be kind to myself when I start calling myself stupid and lazy for not doing all the things right all the time. It also helps me remember to be kind to others when I can.
Remembering to be kind to myself and others is always the first step in refilling myself. We don’t have much time to refill these days. The blows come swiftly and drain away the little reserves we have. It’s okay to feel hollow, to have days that feel hopeless. It’s natural, but so is refilling. We just have to keep going until this moment passes.
All this has happened before …
The important work is done. The guest bedroom is complete, for now. Ouiser will even have her own TV to enjoy while she is here. The new office, well that is another story, it’s not so complete. There are piles of books and stuff all over the floor. My new desk is in its place, though. And I’ve cleaned off just enough space to write at it.
Dragging the piles of things from one room to the other, I stumbled across this old post-it note titled “Daily Quarantine Questions” from 2020. I don’t remember when I copied down these questions, or where I got them from, maybe Brene Brown. I’m so glad they survived the last five years, because they were an amazing reminder of how to get through chaos and overwhelm.
- What am I grateful for today?
- Who am I checking in on or connecting with today?
- What expectations of “normal” am I letting go of today?
- How am I getting outside today?
- How am I moving my body today?
- What beauty am I either creating, cultivating, or inviting today?
I am 97% sure I don’t need to explicate for you why these questions felt so relevant and perfectly suited to this moment. This is a blog, though, and that kind of thing is kind of what we are both here for, right? Don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief. The sweeping scope and pace of change in the first two weeks of the current presidential administration has felt chaotic, to put it mildly. Announcement after announcement has kept everyone on edge; it’s been hard to find the space to pause between the stimulus and response, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl.
These questions came back to me at the perfect time. They provide a path, showing us how to find the space for ourselves. They also made me realize how much we’ve all internalized since 2020. Of all the things to be grateful for in the past two weeks, the greatest has to have been realizing how we’ve learned to check in on each other when things are hard. Yes, I am purposefully using an expansive “we” here. I don’t think it is just my small circle of friends who have spent the last few weeks, sending a couple of extra texts, making overdue phone calls, and maybe even sending the occasional piece of snail mail. These questions and these practices are the skills we learned five years ago that are going to strengthen us today.
![They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by [Abdurraqib, Hanif] Book cover. Blue background, picture of wolf head and chest on a man's body wearing a red track suit with white strips down the shoulders and arms, and a thick gold chain around its neck.](http://grabow.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/TCKUUTKU.jpg)
Finding the questions also made me curious about what, if anything, I’d posted about the questions in 2020. I looked back through the archive, something I rarely do, and found this entry, “Unexpected Joy,” from February 2020. If you are new here and haven’t read this book of essays by Hanif Abdurraqib yet, you should. They are great. The post, written in 2020, actually talks more about 2016. It doesn’t mention the questions, but it does address what the questions are meant to help you find – the unexpected joy. Like connections, and maybe even growing out of our connections, joy is essential to our survival, to our healing, to our resilience. I think I say it best at the end of that entry.
Abdurraqib concludes, “Joy, in this way, can be a weapon–that which carries us forward when we have been beaten back for days, or moths, or years.” And I remember how beaten down I felt in the years leading up to 2016. How alone I felt trudging from one crisis to the next just trying desperately to hold it together, to make sure I could provide for my family. Yes, there were moments of joy in those years, friendships made, but I remember how my smile rarely reached my eyes, and my guard never fully came down. In 2016, joy became my weapon. It carried me forward each time an event beat me down. Joy also became the weapon of my recovery. It flooded my life in the fall of 2016: the house full of friends at the birthday party I threw for myself, the renewal of old friendships, the long mornings and afternoons on the deck, the comfort of the dogs and cat as we settled into our new normal. The joy in those moments, big and small, salving my wounds, healing me, and carrying me forward.
Ask your questions, check in with your friends, and may you all find your joy.
Holding On
It’s hard to write after last week. All I can offer is natural beauty and a song lyric. I stopped on the way to work a couple of weeks ago to capture this unbelievable sunrise over the Potomac. Absolutely no filters or fanciness here. Just me and my iPhone. The song lyric running through my head these days is an Ani DiFranco classic, “The world owes us nothing. We owe each other the world.”
I hope you are able to find beauty and peace in your corner of the world.
2025
Well, the new year is here and I hope all your holidays went well! It was a quiet holiday season for me this year, and that felt perfect. I spent many nights hanging out by the light of my tree, which is what I most look forward to each year.
Today, I took the tree down, and I’m preparing/waiting for our big snow to start. I’m a little nervous about losing power again, but I’m not exactly mad about a snow storm slowing us down a bit right now.
Whatever is happening for you at the start of this year, I hope that you are able to find connection and peace throughout this year.
New Ink
Mostly writing to keep up the accountability again. It’s been an interesting week, and an entirely boring one.
The most interesting thing about the week is that I got a tattoo! It’s been several years since my last tattoo, and this one is a bit different than the others. I didn’t go into the process with a clear idea of what I wanted. I had my “inspirations”, a poem, a tattoo style, and my pack. I shared all those with the tattoo artist and she designed something for me. That meant I have known since September-ish that I was getting a tattoo, but I didn’t actually see this design until the day of my tattoo. All of you probably realize how far out of my comfort zone that took me.
It’s perfect, though. As I thought about the poem, Instructions on Not Giving Up, all I could see were the literal images in it. What I love about my tattoo, is that I feel all the energy and the ideas of the poem, without literal images from it. The bird with wings spread wide is neither a fist nor a leaf, but it is “unfurled” and “like an open palm.” And my pack is all represented in it in ways that are obvious to me.
The other interesting ideas floating around my world this week has to do with older ideas. Knowing what is enough. When is it okay to stop, to say “this is enough for me”? What is good enough? And the question behind all of that, “What do I want?” These questions in and of themselves aren’t really interesting. What’s interesting is that I am facing these questions from a much different place. They haven’t activated me. I don’t feel anxious or insecure about my answers to those questions.
Unexpected
No big thoughts this week, just posting for practice and accountability.
Going into this week, I didn’t have much of a plan for Thanksgiving. Knowing it would be just me, I planned a left-over Thanksgiving feast that substituted chicken thighs for turkey meat. Not thinking too far ahead, Wednesday night I headed out to the store to pick up a few last minute things.
My days working at grocery stores must have truly faded from my memory, because I was prepared for busy, but not outrageously busy. As I stood outside the store, taking a phone call, my Thanksgiving plans changed slightly. Instead of lounging in my pajamas, eating and drinking whenever I was ready to start the day, I’d be sharing my left-over style dinner with a friend. I figured that required slightly more home cooking than I’d planned. (Homemade stuffing vs Stovetop)
To keep my life a little simple, I’d planned to just pick up a pumpkin pie and some Rediwhip to go with dinner. Unbelievably, the grocery store was out of pumpkin pies. They had plenty of pecan and one sweet potato, but neither of those were an option for me. So, I picked up all the ingredients, and found myself baking a pie Thanksgiving morning.
The dinner came together well, and I think I have finally established my own Thanksgiving routine. Since my divorce, I’ve hosted a vegetarian – just the sides and desserts style Friends-giving, spent Thanksgiving with friends and their families, and had Thanksgiving catered by Wegman’s, so I could have the leftovers without having to cook. Each of those Thanksgiving’s was a joy in its own way.
This year, though, this year, I found my base. When left to my own devices, without other plans, I know exactly what I’ll cook and how I will plan for Thanksgiving – simply and loosely. I make chicken thighs and gravy all the time and mashed potatoes more often than I should. The stuffing I do only make once a year. What really made this meal special, though, was throwing it all in a deep-dish pie dish like a Shepherd’s pie. It’s special, because it all just tastes so good together, but also because it helped me be super flexible with my plans.
As I said until Wednesday night, I’d planned to enjoy my little meal by myself while I puttered about the house ignoring chores and watching whatever tickled my fancy. As I stood in the Publix parking lot listening to my friend, my plans changed. Realizing that my friend needed company and not to have to leave their place, I offered to share my Thanksgiving and suggested it would be easy to assemble then bring over to warm up.
Thursday afternoon, I packed up the dinner, the pie, and some wine and headed over to my friend’s house. Everything worked out wonderfully and this was a lovely and special Thanksgiving. The simplicity and flexibility of my cooking plans served my traditions and memories, but also allowed me to be present and share a lovely holiday with a friend. That is the element of this meal that I want to be the tradition. Perhaps next year, I will share it with more friends in my home, or maybe I’ll do something wildly different. Who knows?
What I learned this year is that I all really require from Thanksgiving is getting set up for my favorite holiday of the year, National Pie for Breakfast Day!
I hope that you all had wonderful Thanksgivings!
Change
In the middle way there is no reference point. ~Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
This is the time to sit with the anxiety, the ambiguity and the unknowability of our lives. This is the time to go down deep in to the deepest recesses of who we are, to find resources and riches we didn’t know were there. ~ Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
I am not sure how it was for all of you, but in my corner of the world everyone seemed to struggle this week. Major catastrophes didn’t seem to be the issue, but nearly everything that could be difficult was difficult. And, the wins of the week didn’t quite seem proportional to the challenges. Still there were wins.
Wednesday, I took the day off to attend to some appointments. After the last appointment of the day, I stopped by HomeGoods, where I found the coupe glasses I have been wanting for years. They aren’t exactly the same as the one in which the Cuban restaurant in Durham served me an amazing daiquiri in, but they are beautiful kin; and, now, four of them are mine.
A small win to be sure, but since I have been talking about/low-key looking for these for years, to finally find them for $20 is absolutely worth celebrating.
The middle place, the wilderness, the transition without certainty or reference points surrounds us all collectively right now. As our different wisdom traditions tell us, this is a difficult time. It’s hard to keep moving forward, to maintain hope, to maintain energy and engagement, when there’s no promise that things won’t get harder before they get better. Our own personal transitions and wilderness compound the difficulty of this moment. Whether it’s the changes of aging, the ending of a relationship, the work of a long-term relationship, a huge move, healing ourselves from past traumas and wounds, navigating career and work place changes, or some combination of all these things and more, we are all already unmoored in so many ways.
I wish I had some remedy to share, but – frankly – even saying something about focusing on our small wins feels anemic. Our personal struggles and our collective struggles are real. For me, the defining feature of this moment in time, is that there’s no more hiding; it’s impossible to look away, to numb the discomfort of being in this space. In the past, when things become uncertain collectively, I could focus personally to find firmer ground; or, when things were uncertain personally, I could shift my focus externally, collectively and find a reference point, a way to move forward. Right now, those old comforts are out of reach; yet, I (we) have to keep going.
Y’all know I have been through a few transitions, and that I think, and write, about this stuff more than the average bear. The transition period and the wilderness are productive and comforting metaphors for me, because they help me accept the difficulty of whatever I’m experiencing. Of course everything feels hard! Everything is hard in the wilderness. Everything is also possible in the wilderness. Accepting the difficulty and the discomfort it brings is always the first step for me, the first movement forward.
If everything is hard now, if you are without reference points collectively, personally, or both, please remember that this discomfort is normal. It’s okay to feel the sadness, the disappointment, the betrayal, the fear, the uncertainty, the ennui. It’s okay when the small inconvenience feels overwhelming and pushes you to tears or anger. It’s okay to feel lost and to question what brought you to this place. Be kind to yourself and let yourself feel and regulate those emotions, so that you don’t unintentionally unleash them on those around you.
The next step, the step towards healing, towards a new place will come when you are ready. Maybe it will be in community, in finding a collective. Maybe it will be in self-care and gratitude. Maybe it will be in stillness and meditation. Likely, it will be in come combination of all of these. It will come; don’t rush it.
For me this week, I’m still working through my big reactions and feelings to small inconveniences. And I’m drinking all my water and anything that looks pretty from my new coupe glasses. Sure, I have to get up often for refills, but I also smile a little whenever I pick up my glass. I am reading the women whose perspective and wisdom I’ve always found helpful, like Dr. Tressie McMillan-Cottom, Dr. Brene Brown, Dr. Roxanne Gay, etc. I’m turning to the traditions that have supported me in the past, re-reading Pema Chodron, reinstating my morning rituals, and delving into the On Being podcast and its rich library. As my dear friend Dr. Phoenix wisely says, “that’s not nothing.” Several small things this week also reminded me of wisdom from Octavia Butler:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
We all touch so much more than we imagine. Change will come.
D5 Creation