a habit of hope issue 1 - lunch counters and miracles

This is a crosspost from Rain's Substack newsletter "A Habit of Hope."

Hello all you beautiful subscribers!

I'm delighted to publish the first issue of A Habit of Hope. You can read the introduction to this newsletter, which explains the whole concept, here. The format is simple, but hopefully the repetition of it will be useful in building a practice of optimism and joy:

This brief weekly newsletter, with a dose of inspiration and a method for accountability
A simple daily planner to track the work of hope, optimism and good trouble (here's a rough draft of the instructions until I get the pretty ones from my designer!)
A weekly zoom for community and more accountability (NEW TIME: Mondays from 5:00 to 6:00 pm PST -- signup info below)
An occasional in-person gathering (TBD)

Thank you so much for joining me in this experiment. Without further ado, here we go!

This week our musical inspiration comes via Smokey Robinson and the Miracles on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1968. The harmonies! The interpretation! Watching Smokey listen to and lock in with the guitar and the backup singers is something to see. Sigh.

We'll have accountability.

For me to build a habit, and I suspect for you too, I need accountability. I use all kinds of personal productivity methods to hold myself accountable, and often I also deploy people in my life to hold me accountable for harder things.

So, I have three options for you in your practice of hope and optimism.

1. With a designer friend I'm currently developing a cute little daily planner with instructions, but there's no need to wait because you can use your own notebook or paper. Here's the rough draft of the instructions, and here is a link to the QR codes that will be in the final version.

2. If you'd like to be accountable to others, you can use the notes section of this Substack, above, to share and discuss with our group. My dream is that we create a community here that can support and encourage each other. Each week I'll post threads for each topic, and you can just hit "reply" to the ones you'd like to weigh in on. (Obviously, please keep it positive and supportive.)

3. If you want another level of community, I'm going to host a weekly hourlong zoom for simply talking about how we fared in terms of joy, creativity, and grief, etc. Depending on how this goes I may come up with a more official signup system, but for now simply email me for the zoom link to the next one, which in this case is Monday, December 9, at 5 pm PST.

Then we'll meet a role model!

There is much to learn from leaders, activists, problem solvers and creators who pave the way. Each week we'll get to know someone who inspires. This first week, it's civil rights leader Diane Nash.

As a young college student in the spring of 1961, as part of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Nash helped organize the Freedom Rides and served as a liaison between the press and the Department of Justice. She was also instrumental in desegregating the lunch counters of Nashville. Not a fiery orator like MLK Jr. or Jesse Jackson, Nash is an example of a kind of quiet, steadfast bravery that is the hard work of fighting injustice. I'm humbled, thinking about those college kids studying the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, role-playing a nonviolent response to assaults, and writing their wills before boarding buses to Mississippi. She is quick to point out that the press got it wrong when they called these young activists "fearless" -- she says they were terrified the whole time. But they did it anyway.

She coined the phrase "agapeic energy" as an alternative to the term "nonviolence," because she didn't just want to be against something, she wanted to be proactive, inspired by the radical notion of brotherly love.

If you'd like to quickly get to know Diane Nash, here's six minutes from a PBS documentary about her.
If you want to go a little deeper, here's a 20 minute speech where she talks about the SNCC strategy of "hate the racism, not the racist" and explains the concept of agapeic energy. Here's a summary of a similar talk, if you prefer.
If you'd like to really dig in, here's a book by Wesley Hogan about SNCC and their strategy. I just bought it and it looks excellent.

A quick story about how I found out about Diane Nash:

A couple of years ago, I didn't know a thing about her. I was looking for a cover tune for my most recent record, A White Album. I'd written most of the songs, but I felt it needed some kind of civil rights anthem to round it out. I didn't want one that everyone else had sung, so "A Change is Gonna Come'" or "People Get Ready" were out. I was googling lists of songs of social justice and I stumbled on Solomon Burke's stunning recording of "None of Us Are Free" by Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil and Brenda Russell. I'd heard the song at some point in one of its many interesting covers, from Ray Charles to Maria Muldaur to Lynyrd Skynyrd, but it's not a song that everyone's heard a million times. Perfect. So I asked Austin singer-songwriter BettySoo to sing it with me, she agreed, and we cut the song!

In the middle, there's a musical breakdown where my producer Mark Hallman and I felt some kind of spoken word clip would be cool. But again, I didn't want to use something everyone had heard, like "I Have a Dream." So again I went looking. And in my googling, I came upon a civil rights activist I'd never heard of: Diane Nash. So I excerpted a little of her "agapeic energy" speech and stuck it in there.

After we listened a few times, we ended up giving up on the idea and replacing it with a brief guitar part. But I was happy that it gave me the opportunity to learn about Diane Nash!

Here's the final version. Here's a rough mix of the Diane Nash version.

And finally: In person gathering!

After the holidays, I'll schedule something local -- a time and place to get together for community and creativity. I'll keep you posted!

Rain Perry