Keely Adler

Lower the bar. All the way to the floor.

Let the bar for your practice be so low you can trip over it on your worst days.

Because stories are spells; they change things. When they hook us and reel us into their magic, they change us. It’s stories that will save us, in the end. Not just the stories we read or tell, or the stories we want to be in, but the ones that live inside us and the ones we live inside. The stories we invite in, those that we choose to inhabit.

What would it mean, instead of being an elderly woman, to be an elder woman? Because to be an elder implies something rather different — it implies authority

here in the contemporary West, we don’t really do elders: instead, we have “the elderly.” The connotations are quite different.

Myths and stories such as these help us not only to understand life as it is, or was, but to dream life as it ought to be.

I have no intention of being invisible. But I’m quite prepared to be inconvenient.

Symbols of care can be generated infinitely and for free in our new reality, and now the only thing that holds value is verifiable cost - proof that something scarce was spent on you. Presence. Time. Reputation. Body. Risk. lt’s real when it carries consequence.

And that goes way beyond the “human-made”. Proof of care doesn’t mean something was made without machines. It means it was made with intention and a hard emotional cost. It was created for connection, whether that be in work, in love, in business or in art. It was produced through someone’s sacrifice.

It is a gift. This is the rebirth of the gifting

Nobody really knows how to rewrite all of these contracts, both the minuscule and the grand, and yet it has become our single most important (and invisible) job.

Some of this is exhilarating. New markets, new families, new political imaginations all become possible because the old defaults stopped doing their work, and power gets redistributed.

But