[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRDXTA3Tcxk&w=560&h=315]
Snow melt and unusually warm days have the maple sap flowing fervently in the Northeast. It is hard not to feel as though, Winter it may still be, the growing season is upon us. Possibilities abound plentiful as the sap. And is there anything quite so delightful and quite so paralyzing as possibility?
It's a good time for a pep-talk. And since all of our best mentors are poets, it feels right to introduce Sonya Renee Taylor, the award-winning poet, activist, founder and director of The Body is Not an Apology, an organization that promotes radical self-love and body empowerment as the cornerstones of global transformational social justice. (Can I get a heck yes?) But Sonya, oh dang: this woman speaks for herself!
If the first video is a little shot-to-the-arm pep talk (and, trust me, it is), the second video, a recording of the 2015 commencement speech at Hampshire College, is like meeting a medicine man in the woods, is a bath in the river Jordan, is a steady infusion of exactly that which you most needed. This is twenty-five minutes that you definitely have. Not to mention, there's a bonus tutorial on paying back your student loans!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR0jptby664&w=560&h=315]