How To Save (part of) the World
I accidentally wrote a letter to myself, and it taught me how to save the world.
I wrote it more than a year ago, but never knew it was for me.
The letter came in a four pound box yesterday. I’d read it countless times, but this time held it like I’d never read it before.
I wrote this letter for other people, but I read it for the first time like it was for me.
I’ve had a tough time lately. I don’t need to tell you why. If you’re one of those kinds of people who cares about people, I don’t need to tell you why.
The weight. The weight of all of it. And so much at once, no matter if you focus close or far away. I want to help, but I cannot lift the world into all the spaces it should be. Sometimes I can’t even stand, it gets so heavy. I lay down and let it all crush me.
And yesterday, I got this letter I had written, which is a book. I wrote it for kids, for kids and classrooms who are struggling with so much sad they don’t know where to put it all.
The book is written from the brain of a kid named Bucket. They’ve got a group of friends who notice there’s a wall in the school where kids always go when they’re too sad for recess. They call it The Sad Wall.
There’s this quote from Kurt Vonnegut about artists, which he says are people who know they can’t fix the world, but say, “by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!”
The kids learn about this idea from their teacher, who is named after the best teacher I’ve ever known, and go and get supplies and ideas from their art teacher, who is named after the best teacher I’ve ever had, and they start making squares of art, of joy, of ways they have made one small part of the world better. The squares start to fill The Sad Wall.
I needed to remember all this, to read it like I didn’t know it.
If we wait for the world to be saved all at once, it never will be. If we all save all the pieces that we can, the weight becomes not so weighty.
The box of these letters, four pounds of these books, came yesterday, but the book won’t be released until August of 2025.
Yesterday, this letter I wrote was for me, was exactly what I needed to read. It’s for you too, maybe, or for kids you know or teach. Maybe you could use a story about how to make things better. I’m so damn proud of this book and I sure would love to share it with you.
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If you want to read it NOW, you can sign up for a NetGalley account and read the whole thing online.
If you want to make sure you pre-order it, the only spot to do so now is on Amazon.
If you want to be updated when it’s about to come out or other (very occasional) news, you could give me your email here (please!) and I’ll tell you.
