‘Sorry We Missed You’ Makes Its Mark
What follows is a review adapted from a lecture I gave to the delightful Westchester film club, now relocated to the Emelin Theater. Perhaps it is of note that I dressed as Emma Goldman to deliver this. Perhaps instead I should have gone full hog and climbed a table bearing a UNION sign. Either way, I now petition you to see this in theaters when you can; it opens in New York today at Film Forum.
For 50 years, director Ken Loach has made films championing the British working-class. They’ve always been acutely observed but as he’s aged they’ve become brilliant. Sadly, that’s partly because they’re driven by a greater urgency–they connect almost too well to the social drama of these fraught times.
His last project, I Daniel Blake, brilliantly confronted the benefit and welfare systems. Now, at 82, he’s indicting the gig economy with this film about a Newcastle family whose delivery driver dad, home aide mom, and two kids live precariously check-to-check. This is the kind of movie that is as worthy as it is wrenching–not just for the social messages it delivers, pardon the pun, but for the portrait it paints of familial love in the face of larger pressures. Continue Reading →
Now We Must Listen
Here in the last stretch of Mercury Retrograde, which officially ends March 10, we are mere weeks from Ostara (March 19)–the astrological new year as well as the beginning of spring, glorious spring. During this quiet nascent time, the line between death and life is as blurred as the line between winter and spring. Notice it in the stirring of the air, suddenly fresher, suddenly sweeter; in the quality and length of daylight; and at dusk–magic hour, my favorite hour, when we are held by everything to come as well as what’s come before.
It is as Alexander McCall Smith writes: The voices of the dead—you can hear them still, if you listen hard enough. Late people talking, like children after lights-out: the faint, distant voices of our ancestors.Now is not the time to act. It is the time to listen–to the earth, to the ancestors, to each other. For any true-soul guidance in these dark times.
March into the Future, Bird by Bird
I’ve learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won’t stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown.—Madeleine L’Engle
Hello March! Sometimes, especially in the dreary last days of winter, my clients want to hear about a future that is magically better than their present. It’s human nature to crave a “Santa Clause.” But the truth is that our lives are a mixture of fate and free will—-the culmination of our choices in the face of factors beyond our control.
And entropy is change, too. To avoid it we must work our problems as we sow seeds and till fields. Sun rises, sun sets, 
but only when we consciously channel its light do we grow something from our shit. This is practical magic at its core–change we manifest rather than passively await and observe. This is love as a verb. This is the self-reckoning that is the foundation of radical self-care.
How I can help is to divine a path on which you thrive—-marching bravely forward (bird by bird step by step) into a future conjured with the good wind of the universe on your back.
To find a path of your own, get in touch. Art (left-right); Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippen.