Natalie Audelo

This planet is tended by innumerable invisible hands. When progress feels undetectable, I remind myself that much of life plays out on unseen stages. We must all tend to our inner gardens, as well as the gardens that we are but one small part of. To be human today is to exist at many scales at once, stories we can grasp and ones much larger than... See more

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred

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Compliments are an other-oriented token that don’t demand a response from the person they are directed to. They also don’t usually require the receiver to reveal anything — the compliment affirms that what they chose to reveal has been seen and noted.

I might have approached the librarian with something along the lines of, “I love your dress. I had... See more

There’s also something to be said about collating and curating in the slow writing process—facts, knowledge, smells, descriptions, stories, passport stamps, headlines—until the collection becomes part of the transformation process. Through acute and critical attention, away from the drive of production, toward the singularity of studying a branch,... See more

Your success here will depend entirely on how successfully you can tell stories, and how successfully other people can repeat those stories, both to themselves and others.Your North Star here has to be: are other people retelling this story successfully?Port cities around the world are more similar to each other than they are to their inland... See more

“We have lost a sense of play. After 2020 did her big one, we’ve been looking for play..... with Pickeball, with trivia nights, and frickin’... improv. And in reality, you can just leave your house and have a nice playful moment with someone else. [...] We live in a fear-based culture.”

Your vocation, in the mid-20th-century world I was born into, was your job title. This was such a diminishment of us. We are called not merely to be professionals but to be friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, citizens, lovers of the world. We are called to creativity and caring and play for which we will never be paid — and which will make life... See more