Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Wer die Welt verstehen will, muss bei sich selbst anfangen. Um dies zu erreichen, braucht es nur drei Schritte. Aber diese drei Schritte haben es in sich.

Der Aufruf „Erkenne dich selbst“, in Stein gemeisselt im Tempel von Delphi, war eines der zentralen Prinzipien der antiken Philosophie. Für Denker wie Seneca war klar: Wer die Welt verstehen will, muss bei sich selbst anfangen. Nicht im Sinne selbstverliebter Innenschau, sondern als radikale Übung in Ehrlichkeit und Selbstprüfung. Diese Grundhaltung ist zeitlos – und aktueller denn je.

Denn moderne psychologische Forschung zeigt: Unser Bild von uns selbst ist oft ungenau. Studien belegen, dass Menschen ihre Fähigkeiten und ihr Verhalten systematisch überschätzen. Auch unsere Fähigkeit, zukünftige Reaktionen oder Emotionen vorherzusagen, ist überraschend schwach ausgeprägt. Der Grund: Wir neigen dazu, unbequeme Einsichten zu vermeiden, um unser Selbstbild zu schützen – ein Phänomen, das Forscher als „psychologisches Immunsystem“ beschreiben. Doch genau diese Komfortzone steht echter Entwicklung im Weg.

Wer sich selbst besser kennenlernen möchte, braucht drei zentrale Schritte:

Erstens: Aufhören, sich selbst zu schonen. Wie körperliches Training verlangt auch mentale Stärke die Bereitschaft, sich regelmässig mit Unangenehmem auseinanderzusetzen. Das bedeutet: ehrliches Feedback suchen, kritische Rückmeldung zulassen – auch wenn es zunächst schmerzt.

Zweitens: Sich selbst als veränderbar begreifen. Wer glaubt, dass Eigenschaften und Fähigkeiten fix sind, wird sich schwertun, kritische Informationen zu akzeptieren. Menschen mit einer lernorientierten Haltung hingegen nutzen Rückmeldungen aktiv, um zu wachsen.

Drittens: Verhalten bewusst verändern. Selbstkenntnis bringt nur dann etwas, wenn sie auch in konkretes Handeln übersetzt wird. Wer sich so verhält, wie er oder sie sein möchte – z. B. aufmerksamer, klarer, mutiger –, verändert über die Zeit nicht nur das Verhalten, sondern auch das Selbstbild.

Selbsterkenntnis ist kein einmaliger Zustand, sondern ein fortlaufender Prozess. Sie erfordert Mut zur Ehrlichkeit, Offenheit für Veränderung und die Bereitschaft, sich von Illusionen zu lösen. Wer diesen Weg geht, gewinnt Klarheit, Integrität – und letztlich die Freiheit, das eigene Leben bewusst zu gestalten.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Mit unserem Urteil ist es wie mit unseren Uhren. Nicht zwei gehen genau gleich, und doch glaubt jeder der seinigen.“ – Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Meetings kürzer halten

Die meisten Meetings dauern länger als nötig. Reduziere Meetings auf das Wesentliche und setze Zeitlimits, um effizienter zu arbeiten.

Aus dem Archiv: Ockhams Besen – Wenn unbequeme Fakten unter den Teppich gekehrt werden

Benannt nach dem englischen Philosophen Wilhelm von Ockham (engl. William of Occam), der mit seinem berühmten „Rasiermesser“ die Grundlage für eine elegante Wissenschaftsregel legte, ist „Ockhams Besen“ eine humorvolle und nachdenklich machende Ergänzung: anstatt die einfachste Erklärung zu wählen, werden hier störende Details beiseitegefegt. Dieser Ansatz erlaubt, sich auf das Wesentliche zu konzentrieren und die ungelösten Fragen – zumindest vorläufig – aus dem Blick zu räumen.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

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EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

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Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

I asked myself would I be willing to give to stop feeling this way. And I feel like it’s a very cheap thing to say anything. But I think pretty early on that list of anything that I could give would be my life. Speaking candidly, I could just kill myself if I wanted to stop feeling like this. And I weirdly end my train of thought there, and I just sit with that thought. I think about that one quote someone said, something along the lines of how we both love each other but at the same time we both drive faster in the rain. And I think that I’ve remembered it horribly, but to me it is saying how you can love someone else and that is separate from the fact that there’s this passive yearning for death.

It rained today. I kept gunning it in my car because I loved the feeling of losing control when the acceleration stopped from traction slipping. I shot around corners going over double the sign. I thought about why I liked the call of the void there and I think it was heavily because it’s just taking death one step out detached from my hands. If I died from something not my fault I wouldn’t be too upset. I don’t like feeling this way.

I won’t know until I know  I won’t know until I finally do it.

…or, rather, I get antsy and somewhat wanderlusty.

In searching for a blogging app, I have come across some excellent blog-adjacent and federated social networking software, but what I have been looking for is JUST out of reach.

Here are some examples:

• Write.as: You’re reading this on Write.as (through a possible redirect from my main site). It’s a dead simple, federated, open source blogging service that doesn’t bog the writer down with nonsensical and esoteric development issues, plugins, theming, etc. There is little to nothing between the writer and the blog page, and that’s both good and bad. Good in the fact that it is so simple, but bad in that there aren’t readily-deployed social integrations (although, it is federated through the ActivityPub protocol, so that’s a huge plus). I just restarted my paid (very reasonably priced) Pro subscription because it meets my needs best out of the services I have tried so far.
• WAFRN: WAFRN is a free, open source, federated microblogging service similar to Tumblr. As a matter of fact, it’s almost a feature-for-feature match for Tumblr, with tightly-integrated social networking aspects, sharing, following, tags, hashtags, etc. It’s still in very active development, led by @gabboman, and it’s become my de facto main social network hub. It’s also federated using ActivityPub as well as allowing cross-interaction with apps using the ATProtocol, such as BlueSky. Since it serves more as a long-form-friendly Twitter-esque kind of space, it doesn’t really fit what I’m looking for in a long-term home (although I still highly recommend it for what it is).
• Lemmy: A federated Reddit alternative. It’s not nearly as busy as Reddit, but I would venture to say that it’s far less toxic without losing the silliness and periodic edginess that makes Reddit interesting. I’m still getting my feet wet there, so I don’t have a lot to say about it, yet. Not even close to what I’m looking for, but it’s interesting nonetheless

I keep referring to “what I’m looking for”, but what am I looking for, exactly? Here are my criteria:

• Long-form blogging platform: I’m always opinionated and often long-winded. Character limits and I do not get along.
• Federated using ActivityPub: I still think that ActivityPub is the way that the internet should go in order to democratize content creation and consumption. The protocol is robust, has a dedicated group of developers, and casts a healthily suspicious eye toward billionaire attention of any sort.
• ATprotocol is optional: I hate the fact that BlueSky, a billionaire-funded, pseudo-decentralized social network, has taken the lead in the “alternative to X/Facebook/Instagram/etc” space. People left X because of Musk. People left Facebook and Instagram because of Zuckerberg. Where do they go? To the Jack Dorsey-funded Bluesky. While he ostensibly left BlueSky behind, it is still under the influence of the same ilk (his support of some really dodgy politicians like RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, et al is questionable, to say the least). I really hope that the marginalized groups seeking shelter from the toxicity on the mainstream platforms wake up and stop following billionaire’s whims.
• No egotistical jackasses at the head of the company: Matt Mullenweg is what’s wrong with WordPress. Elon Musk is what’s wrong with X. Mark Zuckerberg is what’s wrong with the rest. Sure, WordPress can be federated via plugin, and Threads integrates ActivityPub, but they don’t control the protocol, and that’s imperative for me. I don’t hate billionaires. I hate the level of control they exert over the rest of us.
• No “AI-forward” trash: Speaking of billionaires leading people around by the nose, the AI craze is 100% a billionaire-driven phenomenon that I want as little to do with as possible, and I damned sure don’t want or need AI to create content for me. The concept of AI doesn’t bother me, the implementation, inundation, and shoehorning of AI into every aspect of digital life. Social networks, office productivity apps, appliances, cars, etc. If they are pushing it, we probably don’t need it, and I don’t want it.
• The ability to aggregate my posts to whatever site I choose: This is where Write.as falls short, as I can’t publish my posts in such a way as to integrate it with my site. It’s nitpicky, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

Como havia comentado na primeira edição da newsletter, Versão Legendada é meu projeto pessoal de aprendizagem autodidata de línguas estrangeiras, incluindo as minoritárias, que apresento ao “mundo virtual”.

Por lá, as trocas serão um pouco mais detalhadas, por aqui, ao contrário, serão bem mais pontuais e breves, mas com propósito. Afinal, o que interessa é aproveitar o processo: errando, acertando e recomeçando.

#notas #abr

Before the sun came up, when Austin still looked like it was deciding whether it wanted to wake up or hide a little longer, Jesus stood in quiet prayer at Mount Bonnell. The city below Him was still dim, but it was not resting. Even from that height, there was a kind of ache moving through it. Some people had already opened their eyes with dread in their chest. Some had rolled over to look at bills on a nightstand. Some were already rehearsing hard conversations they did not want to have. Some were making coffee with shaking hands because they had slept but had not rested. Jesus stood there with His head bowed and His face calm, and He prayed for people who felt like they were reaching the end of themselves before the day had even begun. He prayed for the ones trying to carry parents, children, regret, rent, and silence all at once. He prayed for the ones who had started speaking sharply because pressure had made tenderness feel expensive. He prayed for the people who believed they were becoming a problem in other people’s lives. He prayed until the first light began to move over the hills and the city below looked less like a skyline and more like a thousand private battles.

On the east side of the city, in a small apartment that always felt too crowded in the morning and too quiet at night, Marisol Vega stood in her kitchen staring at an open cabinet like she might be able to force more groceries into it by sheer will. There was half a loaf of bread, a box of rice, two cans of beans, and a jar of peanut butter with the sides scraped so hard the glass showed through. Her father, Mateo, sat at the table in a gray T-shirt, one hand around a mug that had gone cold, the other pressing lightly into his chest the way he did when his worry got ahead of his words. He had an appointment that morning at East Austin Health Center, and he had been acting like it was no big deal, which was how Marisol knew he was afraid. In the other room, her sixteen-year-old son Nico was supposed to be getting ready for school, but instead he was standing by the bathroom mirror with the same hard look he had been wearing for weeks, like life had insulted him one too many times and he had decided to insult it back.

Marisol had already been awake for an hour. She had answered one text from the cleaning company she picked up work from on weekends, ignored another from the electric company, and checked her account balance twice even though numbers never changed when people begged them to. She had not meant to snap when Mateo said he did not think he needed the doctor after all, but the words came out of her before mercy had a chance to catch them. She told him he was going. She told him she was tired of hearing him say he was fine when he was not fine. Then Nico came out wearing headphones around his neck and the expression of somebody already angry with the day, and when she asked him why he still had not taken the trash out from the night before, he looked at her and said, “Because it’s always something with you.” It was not screamed. It was worse than that. It was flat. Tired. Dismissive. Like he had said it to himself before he said it to her. She turned away so fast it looked like anger, but it was pain. There was no room in that kitchen for everything pressing against her all at once, and she suddenly felt like the walls themselves were judging how little she had left to give.

She got Mateo in the car and decided she needed coffee before she became the kind of woman she had promised herself she would never become. She drove across town while the sky turned from charcoal to soft blue and the city shook itself awake. By the time she pulled onto South Congress and parked near Jo’s Coffee, her jaw hurt from clenching it. Mateo stayed in the car because he said his knees were stiff and he did not feel like getting out. Marisol told him she would be two minutes. Inside, the place already carried that early Austin hum, tired people pretending caffeine could fix what sleep had not. She stood in line with her purse open and counted folded bills and coins with quiet hands that still somehow showed panic. A young woman behind the counter with a nose ring and tired eyes asked what she wanted, and Marisol ordered without really hearing herself. When the barista repeated the price, Marisol looked down into her wallet again and felt heat rise up her neck. She was short by less than a dollar. Less than a dollar still had the power to make a grown woman feel stripped down in public.

The barista started to say not to worry about it, but before she could finish, someone stepped forward beside Marisol and laid enough cash on the counter to cover the drink and the breakfast taco she had almost ordered and then quietly put back. Marisol turned at once, already embarrassed, already prepared to refuse out of pride she could not afford. Jesus stood there with the calmest face she had seen in a long time. He did not look impressed with Himself. He did not look like He had rescued her. He looked like a man who had simply seen what was happening and moved toward it. She opened her mouth to tell Him she did not need help, but something in His eyes made the sentence feel dishonest before it fully formed. He nodded toward the window where Mateo sat in the car. “You have been carrying the morning alone,” He said. His voice was quiet, but it landed heavier than louder voices often do. “Sit for one minute before you pick it back up.” Marisol frowned, because strangers were not supposed to talk like they knew anything. “I don’t really have a minute,” she said. “No,” He said, “but you need one.”

She took the coffee outside because refusing it would have felt childish, and she stood near the side of the building where the morning air still held a little coolness. Jesus came out a moment later, not crowding her, not acting like conversation was owed to Him because He had stepped in. For a few seconds neither of them said anything. Cars moved along South Congress. A dog barked from across the street. Somewhere down the block somebody laughed too loud for that early in the day. Marisol finally said, “I’ll pay you back if I see you again.” Jesus smiled faintly. “That isn’t the part you need to settle.” She looked at Him then, annoyed at first because she was too tired for mystery. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said. He glanced toward her car, where Mateo had leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a second. “You are trying to be strong enough for everyone in that car and everyone waiting for you after that car,” He said. “And because you are tired, every word in you is getting sharper than it really is.” Marisol’s throat tightened. She hated how quickly that hit the truth. “You make it sound like I’m the problem.” Jesus shook His head. “No. I am saying pain that is not tended will start looking for somewhere to go. Very often it goes into the mouths of tired people.”

She looked down at the coffee cup in her hand. It was warm enough to steady her fingers. “That sounds nice,” she said, not looking at Him. “But nice doesn’t get bills paid, and it doesn’t get people to tell the truth, and it doesn’t make a teenage boy listen.” Jesus let the silence sit before He answered. “No,” He said. “But truth told in peace can keep sorrow from becoming cruelty.” She almost laughed, not because it was funny, but because she did not know what else to do with a sentence like that. She had lived too long in survival mode to trust words that sounded clean. Yet she could not deny the strange feeling that standing beside Him was slowing something inside her that had been running wild for months. Before she could say anything else, Mateo shifted in the car and looked toward the building, and Marisol remembered time again. She took a breath, thanked Him without warmth because warmth felt too risky, and turned back toward the parking lot. When she reached her door, she looked up once more and saw Him speaking to a man near an older sedan with a rideshare sign in the windshield. The man had graying hair, a weathered face, and the wary look of somebody who had spent years pretending he needed less than he did.

The man’s name was Theo Banks. He had parked to grab coffee between early fares and was already thinking about the rent he was late on, the oil change he had been postponing, and the text from his daughter that had sat unopened since the night before because he was afraid it would either ask something he could not give or say something he deserved to hear. He had once played guitar in bars around Austin when he was young enough to mistake applause for love and old enough to ruin a marriage anyway. Now his fingers mostly curled around a steering wheel, and music lived in him like a house he had moved out of without ever really getting over. Jesus asked him for a ride east. Theo looked at Him and shrugged like a man who had forgotten how to make anything sound polite. “You got a destination?” he asked. “For now,” Jesus said, “East Austin Health Center.” Theo gave a half smile. “That’s a strangely specific now.” Jesus opened the back door and sat down. Theo pulled away from South Congress, glanced at Him in the mirror, and felt for no reason he could explain that he should probably leave the radio off.

Marisol reached the clinic a little later than she wanted and immediately felt that peculiar kind of exhaustion that medical waiting rooms bring out in people. East Austin Health Center was already full of small private struggles wearing ordinary faces. An older man was arguing softly with his wife about medication. A little girl with two puffs in her hair was drawing suns on the back of an appointment reminder. A young mother bounced a baby against her chest while trying not to cry into her phone. Marisol checked Mateo in, answered questions, corrected his birthday when he got it wrong the first time, and sat beside him with the stiffness of a person who had too many things to manage to fully sit down. When she looked up, Jesus was across the room near the little girl, kneeling just enough to see the page she had drawn on. He was not performing for the room. He was simply there, and somehow that made everyone around Him feel less frantic even if only by a little. Marisol stared a second too long, and Mateo noticed.

“You know him?” Mateo asked. His voice held that blend of curiosity and caution older men use when they do not want to look impressed by anything. “No,” Marisol said too quickly. Mateo squinted in Jesus’s direction, then back at her. “He looks like somebody who listens before he talks.” Marisol gave a tired laugh through her nose. “That would make one person today.” Mateo did not answer. He kept looking across the room, and for the first time that morning he seemed less occupied with his own fear than with the possibility that the world still held something gentle in it. When the nurse called his name, Marisol stood with him and followed him down the hall. As she passed the doorway, Jesus turned His head slightly and met her eyes. He did not say anything. He did not need to. It was the kind of look that made a person feel seen without being trapped. It unsettled her almost more than words would have.

The appointment did not go well. Mateo’s numbers were worse than they should have been, and the doctor’s voice had that careful tone people use when they are trying not to add shame to somebody who already has plenty. Marisol sat there hearing terms she already knew, hearing concern she could not afford, hearing the quiet fact that what they had been doing was not working. When the doctor stepped out for a moment, she turned to her father and asked him plainly if he had been taking the insulin the way he was supposed to. He looked at the floor. The answer came before his words did. “Papá,” she said, and this time the hurt in her voice was bigger than the anger. He rubbed both hands over his face. “I was stretching it,” he admitted. “Just some days. Not all.” Marisol stared at him. “You were what?” He swallowed. “Using less. Making it last longer.” Her whole body went still. “Why would you do that?” He did not answer right away, and when he finally did, his voice had shrunk. “Because I know what it costs.” She felt something collapse inward in her chest. “So you decided to lie to me instead?” Mateo looked up with wet eyes that had gone old in a single minute. “No,” he said. “I decided I did not want to watch you drown one inch deeper because of me.”

That sentence did not land in Marisol as tenderness. It landed like betrayal. She heard all the nights she had worried, all the times she had asked, all the times he had told her he was fine. She heard the way fear could dress itself up as protection and still leave a mess behind for somebody else to clean. “You don’t get to make that choice for me,” she said, too loud for the size of the room. Mateo flinched. The doctor had not come back yet, but Marisol was suddenly aware that people in the hall might hear her. She lowered her voice and somehow made it worse. “You don’t get to decide whether you are worth taking care of.” Mateo turned his face away. “I didn’t say that.” “You didn’t have to.” For a second they sat there in the wreckage of love badly expressed. Then Marisol’s phone started buzzing. It was Nico’s school. She answered already tired, already bracing. By the time the call ended, there was a sour taste in her mouth and a pressure building behind her eyes. Nico had gotten into a fight before first period and walked off campus when they tried to pull him into the office. Nobody knew where he had gone.

When she and Mateo stepped back into the hallway, everything in Marisol had gone brittle. She had one hand on her bag, one hand on her phone, and no hands left for grace. Jesus was sitting on a bench near the end of the hall. He rose when they approached, not dramatically, just with the simple attentiveness of someone who had already decided they were worth standing for. Marisol did not know why she stopped in front of Him, but she did. Maybe because the day had gone so wrong so early that the only thing left to do was either break down or tell the truth to somebody. “My son left school,” she said, and her voice sounded thinner than she wanted. “My father has been cutting his medication in half. I have groceries to buy, a prescription to fill, and I do not know how I am supposed to be patient with people who keep making everything harder.” Jesus listened without interrupting. Mateo stood beside her, tired and ashamed. “You think they are making it harder for you,” Jesus said gently. “But both of them are afraid they are already too heavy.” Marisol let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. “Well today they are not doing much to disprove that.” Jesus did not recoil from her sharpness. “Pain often speaks badly before it speaks honestly,” He said. “Yours too.”

If she had been less tired, she might have defended herself. Instead she just looked away. Mateo lowered himself slowly onto the bench as if age had suddenly doubled in his knees. Jesus sat beside him, and for a moment He spoke to the older man while Marisol pretended to answer a text. She could not hear every word, but she heard enough. “Love is not measured by how little space you take up,” Jesus said. Mateo’s shoulders shook once. “Then why does it feel that way?” he asked. Jesus looked at him with the kind of steadiness that made hiding feel pointless. “Because fear teaches people to shrink so they won’t be left,” He said. “But shrinking is not the same thing as peace.” Marisol hated how much that sounded true. She hated it because truth asks more from a person than anger does. Anger burns hot and fast and can be carried anywhere. Truth makes you put things down.

They left the clinic with a paper prescription, too much unsaid, and a growing sense that the day was not going to let anyone stay numb. Marisol decided they had to stop at Hancock Center H-E-B before going home because there was nothing left in the apartment and because there was no chance she was making another trip later. Mateo moved slowly through the parking lot, and she nearly told him to hurry before she remembered that weakness is not the same thing as laziness. Even that thought exhausted her. Inside the store the fluorescent lights felt unforgiving. Everything was bright enough to show exactly what people were carrying. She put only what they needed in the cart. Bread. Eggs. Rice. Tortillas. Cereal for Nico because he still ate the sugary kind she kept pretending she would stop buying. A few vegetables she could stretch through several meals. The prescription. Every item went into the basket with a number attached to it in her mind. Mateo kept reaching for cheaper versions of things and then pulling his hand back before he touched them, as if even preference had started to feel selfish.

At the end of one aisle Marisol saw Jesus again. He was not following in the way people follow. He was simply there, reading labels on nothing, near enough that if she chose to look at Him she would remember she had been seen all day. The strange thing was that she no longer felt alarmed by it. She felt exposed by it, which was different. In another lane Theo was waiting with a handbasket and a bottle of water, looking like a man who had not yet figured out why the morning felt unlike other mornings. He caught sight of Jesus and gave the smallest nod, not casual exactly, but not dramatic either. When Marisol got to the register, a young cashier with tired skin and a name tag that read Ren started scanning items without much expression. Halfway through, Marisol checked her phone again. Nico still was not answering. Her pulse rose. Ren gave the total. Marisol slid her card. It declined. She tried again, telling herself not to panic because sometimes machines were wrong. It declined again.

That kind of silence is worse in public than noise. The person behind you pretends not to watch. The cashier pretends not to notice. Your own body becomes too loud. Marisol stared at the screen as if looking harder might change it. She transferred money in her phone from one account to another, though she already knew it would not be enough. Mateo reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded twenty with the embarrassed urgency of a man trying to become less helpless in front of his daughter. “Here,” he said. She did not mean to say what came next. She really did not. But the day had sanded her raw, and the words came out before love could stop them. “Papá, that’s not going to fix this.” He froze with the bill still in his hand. Ren looked away. The people in line studied gum and magazine covers with exaggerated interest. Marisol pressed her lips together at once, horrified by herself, but the damage was already sitting between them on the conveyor belt. Mateo slowly folded the money back down and said nothing. His silence was not angry. It was wounded. That made it harder to bear.

Jesus stepped closer then, not to take over, not to turn the moment into a lesson, but to keep shame from becoming the loudest voice in it. He looked at Ren first. “Can you ring the prescription separately?” he asked. Ren blinked, then nodded. His tired eyes sharpened a little, as if somebody had spoken to the part of him that still cared. Jesus turned to Marisol. “Take what keeps life moving first,” He said. “Decide the rest after you breathe.” Something about the way He said it cut through the panic. The store did not disappear. The money problem did not disappear. But the spiral lost some of its power. Ren quietly voided a few things, split the order, and bagged only what mattered most without making a show of kindness. Mateo stood with his head lowered. Marisol signed for the prescription with a hand that trembled. When she finally lifted her eyes, Jesus was looking at her with deep patience, the kind that does not flatter a person and does not condemn them either. It was worse than pity and kinder than approval. It was truth without rejection.

Outside, the Texas sun had fully arrived. Heat sat over the parking lot in a way that made every movement feel harder than it should have. Marisol loaded the bags into the trunk and got behind the wheel, but when she turned the key the engine clicked once and failed. She tried again. Nothing. She put both hands on the steering wheel and stared through the windshield while everything in her threatened to come apart at once. Mateo sat beside her, quiet in that old man way that can mean sorrow or fear or simply not knowing how to help. Then she started crying. Not pretty crying. Not movie crying. It was the kind that comes when dignity is too tired to hold its posture. She put her palm over her mouth because she did not want strangers hearing her break, but once it started she could not stop. “I can’t do this,” she said into her hand. “I cannot keep doing this.” Mateo turned toward her, his own face breaking open. “Mija,” he said, but she shook her head before he could finish. “No,” she said. “Please. Just for one second. I can’t be the one holding everybody up right now.”

A tap came lightly on her window. Theo stood outside, car keys in one hand, uncertainty on his face like he still did not quite know why he was there. Jesus was beside him. Theo opened the passenger door when Marisol unlocked it and leaned down just enough to speak. “Your battery’s dead,” he said. “I can give you a ride if you need one.” Marisol wiped her face fast, embarrassed again, but embarrassment had been a steady companion all day and had lost some of its authority. “I need to find my son,” she said. Theo nodded once. “Then let’s go find him.” She looked past him at Jesus. “You know where he is?” she asked, not even sure anymore why that question felt natural coming out of her mouth. Jesus rested one hand on the top edge of the open car door. “I know where hurt people often go when they want quiet and don’t know what else to ask for,” He said. “Take Barton Springs.” Marisol stared at Him. Mateo looked between the two of them as if he were too old to be surprised and too tired to resist hope.

They rode west with Mateo in the back, Marisol in the front, and Jesus beside Theo while Austin kept moving around them like nothing sacred had interrupted it all day. People crossed intersections with iced drinks and earbuds. Cyclists leaned into the heat. Construction crews worked under the sun. A city can hold enormous private suffering and still look perfectly normal from the outside. That might be one of the loneliest things about being human. Theo drove with both hands on the wheel and said little at first. Jesus looked out at the city as they passed through it, not with distance, but with a kind of love that made even the hardest blocks seem worth grieving over. After a while Theo cleared his throat and said, mostly to the windshield, “You really think that’s where the boy went?” Jesus turned toward him. “He went somewhere that feels older than his anger,” He said. Theo absorbed that. A few minutes later he said, “People still do that at fifty?” Jesus looked at him with quiet understanding. “Yes,” He said. “At fifty too.”

That answer sat in the car with them. Theo gave a dry laugh that did not hide much. “I used to take my daughter to Zilker when she was little,” he said. “Back when she still thought I knew what I was doing.” Marisol looked over at him. Theo kept his eyes ahead. “I kept meaning to become a better man in ways that sounded important in my head. I was going to stop drinking after the next rough month. I was going to show up more after the next job. I was going to apologize right once I had something decent to show for myself. Then years went by and all my good intentions started sounding like lies.” No one answered right away. Mateo looked out the window with the stillness of a man hearing his own failures echoed in somebody else’s words. Jesus finally said, “There are people who delay love because they want to bring a better version of themselves to it.” Theo swallowed. “That sounds smart when you say it.” Jesus looked ahead. “It is sad when anyone lives that way too long.”

When they reached Zilker and got near Barton Springs, Marisol’s heart started pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat. She knew Jesus had said the place softly, but now that they were there it felt obvious. Nico had loved the water when he was little. Even before he could swim well, he had loved just sitting near it with his shoes off, as if moving water did something for him language could not. After his father left years ago, there had been one summer when bringing him near the springs was the only thing that cut through his anger. Marisol had not thought about that in months. Life had become too immediate for memory. They got out and moved toward a quieter edge near the path, where the heat softened a little under the trees. She saw him before anyone said his name. Nico was sitting on the ground with his elbows on his knees, staring at nothing, trying hard to look like a boy who did not care whether anybody found him. His backpack was beside him. His face was tight. His eyes were red.

Marisol started toward him with all the pent-up fear and anger of the day surging back at once, but Jesus touched her arm lightly before she reached him. It was not forceful. It was not a command. It was only enough to remind her that the next words mattered. She stopped, took one breath that did not nearly feel like enough, and then another. Nico looked up and saw them all standing there. His expression changed fast, from defiance to dread to something more vulnerable than either. “I said I was coming home,” he muttered, though he had said no such thing. Marisol stood in front of him and felt every version of motherhood at war inside her at once. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to hold him. She wanted to ask if he understood what this day had done to her. She wanted to tell him none of that was his job to fix. Before she could decide which part of her would speak, Nico looked at Mateo, then at the grocery bag in Marisol’s hand, then away again. “I wasn’t ditching,” he said. “Not really.”

Marisol’s voice came out low and strained. “Then what were you doing?” Nico rubbed both hands over his face. For a second he looked younger than sixteen. “I took the money from your purse.” The sentence hit the air and stayed there. Marisol felt it all over again, the missing cash, the assumption, the anger she had been saving for later. Nico kept going before she could respond. “I know,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t have. I went to the pharmacy near school because Abuelo said he was fine and I knew he wasn’t fine and I heard you on the phone last night about the prescription and I thought maybe if I got it before you saw the money gone then maybe it would just be done.” His voice cracked, and he hated himself for that in front of everyone. “It wasn’t enough,” he said. “I got there and it wasn’t even close to enough.” He looked down at the dirt by his shoes and added, so quietly Marisol almost missed it, “I’m tired of everything in this family costing more than we have.”

Marisol looked at her son and felt two pains hit her at the same time. One was the sting of what he had done. The other was the deeper hurt of realizing he had done it while trying, in his broken teenage way, to help. Those two things did not cancel each other out. They only made the moment harder to stand in. Her first impulse was still anger. Her second was grief. The third was the ugly recognition that every person standing there had been hiding some form of fear from the others, and all of it had been called love while it slowly poisoned the room around them. Nico kept his eyes down because shame had moved in fast the second his confession left his mouth. He looked like he wanted to disappear into the dirt under him. Mateo sat down slowly on a low stone edge nearby and pressed a hand over his eyes. Theo stood a little off to the side, close enough to help if asked, far enough not to crowd a family’s breaking point. Jesus remained still in the middle of all of it. He did not rush to soften the truth. He did not rush to punish it either. He let the weight of the moment be what it was.

Marisol finally spoke, and her voice came out rough from too many hours of holding herself together. “You stole from me.” Nico nodded without looking up. “I know.” She stepped closer. “You lied.” He nodded again. “I know.” She wanted to keep going because once hurt gets a voice, it often wants a long turn. She wanted to tell him about the card declining, the store, the clinic, the phone call, the way one bad thing had piled itself on top of another until the day felt like a punishment. She wanted him to know what it had cost her. But when she looked at him sitting there with his shoulders folded inward, she saw something younger than rebellion. She saw panic. She saw a boy who had decided he needed to fix a problem bigger than him and then found out he could not. That does not excuse what he did. It does explain the look on his face. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. That question came from a deeper place. Nico swallowed hard and finally looked up. “Because every time I see your face lately, it looks like one more thing might break you.”

The sentence went through her more quietly than any accusation could have. She stood there staring at him while the sound of people moving near the springs drifted in and out around them. Somebody laughed in the distance. Water moved. A dog shook itself dry. The city went on the way cities always do, like private heartbreak is just one more weather pattern passing through. Marisol almost said that he had no right to judge her face when he was making everything harder. That sentence rose up in her and then stopped. Because he was not wrong. She had been carrying herself like a woman braced for impact. She had been moving through the apartment with tension in her jaw and numbers in her mind and fear too close to the surface. She had not meant to make home feel like an emergency room, but the truth was that it had. She lowered herself until she was standing closer to his height and said, “You do not get to steal because you’re scared.” Nico’s eyes filled at once. “I know.” “And you do not get to disappear and make me think I lost you.” He wiped his face with the heel of his hand and nodded again. “I know.” His voice cracked on the last word. “I just didn’t know how to come back after I messed it up.”

Jesus sat down on the grass near them, not above them, not outside the moment, but in it. He rested His forearms on His knees and looked at Nico with the kind of calm that made pretending feel useless. “That is how many people stay lost,” He said. “Not because they meant to go far, but because shame makes the walk back feel longer than it is.” Nico looked at Him the way people look at someone who has somehow named the inside of them without being invited. His face tightened. “It still doesn’t change what I did.” Jesus nodded. “No. But hiding after the truth comes out will add another wound to the first one.” Nico looked down. “So what am I supposed to do?” Jesus answered without hurry. “Tell the whole truth. Stay in the moment. Accept what comes next. Then stop building your identity around your worst decision.” Nico gave a short, frustrated breath. “That sounds simple when you say it.” Jesus looked at him steadily. “It is simple. It is not easy. Many people choose harder paths because they do not like humble ones.”

Mateo let his hand fall from his face and looked at Nico with deep sadness. “You should have told me too,” he said. “This was about my medicine.” Nico turned toward him at once. “You were trying to act like you were fine.” Mateo gave the faintest shake of his head. “I know.” There was no defense in his voice. Only weariness. “I thought I was protecting your mother from one more burden. Instead I made her carry one she could not see.” Nico looked between them and seemed to realize for the first time that he was not the only one who had been hiding. It changed the air. Not enough to fix it. Enough to tell the truth more honestly. Marisol sat down on the grass too, because standing over her son suddenly felt wrong. Her knees ached and her back was stiff and she did not feel noble at all. She felt tired and frightened and ashamed of how sharp she had become. “I have been angry all day,” she said. “But the truth is I have been scared much longer than that.” She looked at Nico directly. “I am not angry because you matter too much. I am angry because I keep feeling like I am one bad week away from everything falling apart, and I have started speaking out of that feeling before I even realize it.”

Nico’s face softened, though his shame did not leave. “I know you’re trying,” he said. “I just hate how everything feels like it costs money we don’t have.” There was no performance in it. Only the plain misery of a teenager beginning to see adult pressures without having adult strength. Jesus looked out toward the water for a moment before speaking again. “Fear has been running this family from different corners,” He said. “One of you hides need. One of you hides mistakes. One of you hides exhaustion. All of you are trying to protect each other without letting yourselves be known. That never holds for long.” Marisol let those words settle. They did not sound accusing. They sounded exact. Mateo nodded slowly as if each sentence had found its proper place in him. Nico pulled at a piece of grass and said, “So what then. We just tell each other everything and somehow that fixes it?” Jesus turned back to him. “No. You tell the truth because lies make love unstable. Then you learn to carry what is real together instead of each person carrying secret versions alone.”

For a while nobody spoke. The quiet was not empty. It was working on them. Marisol could feel the fight going on inside herself. Part of her wanted to keep control of the moment by staying stern. Another part wanted to grab her son and never let go. Another part wanted to cry again because none of this was simple and all of it hurt. She finally said, “Do you still have the money?” Nico reached into the front pocket of his backpack and pulled out a folded envelope with pharmacy paperwork and the cash he had left. “Most of it,” he said. “I didn’t buy anything.” He handed it to her like it weighed ten pounds. She took it and did not count it right away. That mattered to him more than she realized. “You are going to return to school tomorrow,” she said. “You are going to tell the truth about leaving campus. You are going to take whatever consequence comes with that.” Nico closed his eyes for a second. “I know.” Jesus watched him quietly. “And tonight,” He said, “you are not going to disappear into anger and call that strength. You are going to stay near the people who love you.” Nico rubbed his face and gave the smallest nod.

Theo’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked at it, saw his daughter’s name on the screen again, and slipped it back without opening the message. Jesus turned His head slightly toward him, not as a rebuke, only as notice. Theo gave a faint, humorless smile. “I heard that look,” he said. Marisol almost laughed in spite of herself. It startled her that laughter still existed in the same day. Theo shifted his weight and said, “I should probably go help you get your car started.” He looked at Nico. “You know how to use jumper cables?” Nico shook his head. “Good,” Theo said. “That means you’re less likely to argue with me while I show you.” It was a plain sentence, but it opened a little space in the pressure. Nico stood slowly and picked up his backpack. Mateo pushed himself up with care. Marisol rose too. For the first time all day, the next step did not feel like a collapse. It felt like a step.

They walked back toward the parking area with the slow, uneven movement of people still carrying more than they could name. Jesus stayed with them, not leading so far ahead that the day became about following a guide, not hanging so far back that He felt symbolic. He was simply with them. On the way Theo finally opened his daughter’s message. It was short. Her mother was having a procedure Friday morning. It might be minor. It might not. She was tired of guessing whether he planned to show up. If he was coming, he needed to say so today. Theo stopped walking for a second after reading it. Jesus paused beside him. “You still have time to choose love while it can still be felt,” He said. Theo stared at the screen. “I’ve been choosing later for years.” Jesus answered softly, “Later has stolen more from people than failure ever did.” Theo shook his head and laughed once through his nose, but his eyes had gone wet. “You don’t let a man hide much, do you.” Jesus’s expression was gentle. “Not what is costing him too much.”

When they reached the H-E-B parking lot, the sun had shifted lower but the heat still came up in waves from the pavement. Theo pulled his car beside Marisol’s and opened the trunk for the cables. Nico stepped forward before anyone asked and took one side. Theo showed him what to connect and why, speaking in the practical tone some men use when feelings are close and tools are safer. Nico listened closely. He made no jokes. He did not posture. He only wanted to help. Mateo stood near the cart return with one hand on his lower back, watching them with tired eyes that had begun to soften. Marisol leaned against the side of her dead car and felt how strange the day had become. A few hours earlier she had been alone inside her own panic. Now her son was learning how to bring power back into a stalled engine from a man he had met that afternoon, while Jesus stood a few feet away like the most natural thing in Austin.

Theo clipped the last cable and looked at Nico. “Here’s the thing with dead batteries,” he said. “You can keep turning the key and blaming the car, but if there’s nothing feeding it, you’re just wearing yourself out.” Nico glanced at him. “You talking about the car?” Theo gave him a side look. “Not only the car.” Nico waited. Theo leaned one elbow on the hood and lowered his voice a little. “I spent a long time getting mad at people for giving up on me when I was the one who kept showing up half-empty and calling it enough. It wasn’t enough. Not for my daughter. Not for my wife. Not for me either.” Nico looked down at the cables. Theo continued, “You’re young enough to fix some things while they’re still fixable. Don’t start making a home out of pride. It feels strong at first. Then one day you look up and find out it’s just lonely.” Nico absorbed that without arguing. Then he asked, almost under his breath, “Did your daughter forgive you?” Theo stared past him toward nothing for a second. “She kept leaving the door unlocked longer than I deserved,” he said. “That isn’t the same thing as me walking through it.”

Jesus opened Marisol’s driver’s door and motioned for her to try again. She sat behind the wheel, turned the key, and the engine caught with a rough shudder before settling into a living sound. She closed her eyes for a second as relief moved through her chest. It was such a basic thing. A running car. And yet in a hard season basic things can feel almost holy. Nico pulled the cables free under Theo’s direction and coiled them back into the trunk. Mateo exhaled slowly as if one more weight had just shifted off his shoulders. Marisol stepped out and looked at Theo. “Thank you,” she said. This time there was no pride in the way. He shrugged lightly. “Somebody helped me want to be useful today.” Nico glanced toward Jesus when he heard that. Jesus only smiled faintly.

No one seemed eager to go straight home, not because home was wrong, but because the apartment would still hold the shape of all their recent strain. Jesus looked west where the light had begun to change. “Come,” He said. “Sit somewhere open before the walls speak louder than the truth.” So they drove a short distance and found their way toward Auditorium Shores. Evening had started its slow work over the city. The heat was easing. People walked dogs along the path. Couples pushed strollers. Runners passed with steady breath. The skyline stood across the water with all its glass and promise and hidden weariness. Austin looked beautiful in the way cities often do at dusk, when light forgives edges for a little while. They sat where they could see Lady Bird Lake and the wide lawn and the moving paths without being in the center of the crowd. Mateo lowered himself carefully onto a bench. Nico sat on the grass. Theo stayed standing for a minute and then sat too. Jesus remained near them, quiet, attentive, allowing the city to keep being itself around them.

Marisol opened the grocery bag and found the water she had bought earlier. She handed it first to her father. That small choice mattered. He took it with both hands and looked at her with tired gratitude. “I am sorry,” he said. She did not answer right away because she wanted her answer to be clean, not reactive. “I know you were scared,” she said. “But you do not get to decide alone whether you are worth the cost.” Mateo’s eyes filled. “I didn’t think of it like that.” “I know.” She took a breath. “I need you to stop treating yourself like an extra expense in your own family.” His mouth trembled before he nodded. Then he said something she had not heard from him in years. “I have felt old since before I got old.” She turned to him. “What do you mean?” He looked out at the water. “I mean after your mother died, I started feeling like my job was to need less. Less help. Less attention. Less room. I thought that was dignity.” Jesus spoke from a few feet away. “Dignity is not disappearing,” He said. Mateo lowered his head and let that truth have him.

Nico sat with his arms around his knees and watched the path. After a while he said, “I hit a kid today.” Marisol turned toward him at once, but she kept her voice steady. “Why?” Nico’s jaw set. “He said you smelled like chemicals because you clean houses.” The words landed hard. Nico kept going before anyone could interrupt. “He said Abuelo was probably getting sicker because we were too broke to take care of him. He was laughing when he said it.” Marisol felt fury move through her so fast it almost erased everything else, but she held it. Nico looked ashamed again. “I know I shouldn’t have hit him. I know that. But it was like something in me just snapped.” Jesus sat down on the grass across from him. “Anger often enters through wounds people pretend are numb,” He said. Nico swallowed. “So what am I supposed to do. Just let people say whatever they want?” Jesus shook His head. “No. But you do not let another person’s cruelty choose the shape of your heart.” Nico looked frustrated. “That sounds good until it happens.” Jesus nodded. “Yes. That is why strength is not only loud. Sometimes strength is the refusal to become what hurt you.”

The skyline lights had begun to appear one by one. Around them the city softened into evening noise. A guitarist somewhere farther down the lawn played something slow and wandering. Children called to each other near the path. The world kept offering ordinary details as if it were trying to remind them that healing does not always happen outside life. Sometimes it happens right in the middle of it, while dogs bark and traffic hums and somebody nearby argues softly over where to eat dinner. Theo finally unlocked his phone again and stared at his daughter’s thread. He typed a response, erased it, typed again, erased again. Jesus looked at him and said nothing. Theo laughed under his breath. “You ever notice how apologizing honestly takes about ten times longer than defending yourself badly?” Marisol glanced at him. “Yes.” He smiled a little. Then he typed a short message and sent it before fear could edit him again. He wrote that he was sorry for all the times later became never. He wrote that if she would let him come Friday, he would be there. He wrote that he did not expect trust to rebuild in one text, but he was done hiding behind shame and calling it respect for her space. After he sent it, he let out a breath like he had been holding it for years.

Nico looked over at him. “You think she’ll answer?” Theo rubbed a hand over his chin. “I don’t know.” Then he looked at the boy. “But telling the truth while there is still time matters even when you can’t control the response.” Jesus nodded once. “Yes.” Nico looked down and then back up at his mother. “I should probably call the school too.” Marisol did not rescue him from that thought. “You should.” He groaned and dropped his head back, but after a moment he pulled out his phone. He stepped a little away and made the call before he could change his mind. They could not hear the other side, but they could hear enough from his end to know he was doing it straight. He admitted leaving campus. He admitted fighting. He did not blame the other boy even though pain still sat in the story. When he ended the call, his face looked pale but different. Not lighter exactly. Cleaner. He sat back down and said, “I have in-school suspension for two days.” Marisol nodded. “Then you’ll do two days.” Nico looked at Jesus. “This truth thing is expensive.” Jesus’s mouth lifted slightly. “Less expensive than false versions of yourself.”

Marisol looked out over the water and felt how tired she still was. Nothing magic had erased the bills. Mateo was still sick. Nico was still facing consequences. Her account balance had not become generous because she had a difficult but honest afternoon. Yet something real had shifted. The day no longer felt like she alone was holding up the sky. It felt like the truth had finally come into the room and made pretending harder. That was painful. It was also relieving. She looked at Jesus and said, “What am I supposed to do tomorrow when I wake up and all the real problems are still there?” He answered without delay, as if He had been waiting for the question under all the other questions. “You do the work in front of you. You refuse to confuse fear with wisdom. You speak more gently than panic wants you to. You ask for help sooner. You stop measuring your worth by whether everyone around you stays comfortable. And when you are tired again, you come honestly before God instead of becoming sharp with the people you love.” Marisol let the words settle. They did not feel like a speech. They felt like handholds.

Mateo turned toward Jesus. “And what about a man who has spent too long trying to become smaller so no one has to worry about him?” Jesus looked at him with deep kindness. “He begins by letting himself be loved in visible ways.” Mateo’s eyes glistened. “That sounds harder than it should.” “Yes,” Jesus said. “Because pride and shame often wear each other’s clothes.” Theo gave a little laugh at that. “That one hurts.” Jesus looked at him. “Then let it help.” Nico had gone quiet again, but not the same kind of quiet as before. He was listening in the way teenagers listen when they are tired of being handled and suddenly realize someone is speaking as if their soul counts. “What about me?” he asked. “Because I’m trying not to be the worst thing I did today, but I’m still the guy who did it.” Jesus answered, “You are a boy who chose badly under pressure. That matters. But it is not the whole truth of you. The whole truth includes love, fear, hunger, loyalty, pride, hurt, and the capacity to become honest. Only darkness insists on narrowing people to their worst moment. Heaven tells the truth and still leaves room for redemption.”

By the time the sky turned from blue to that deeper evening color that makes water look almost thoughtful, Theo’s phone buzzed again. He looked at the screen and did not move for a second. Then he opened the message. His daughter had written only three lines. She said Friday at seven-thirty. She said do not promise if you will not come. She said Mom asked about you yesterday and would like to believe you are trying. Theo stared at the text until his eyes blurred. He gave a short laugh that broke halfway through. “Well,” he said softly, “there’s my door.” Jesus looked at him with approval so quiet it did not feel performative. “Walk through it,” He said. Theo nodded. “I think I will.” Then he looked at Nico. “That means I have to get up early and probably wear a shirt with buttons. So you and I both got consequences tonight.” Nico smiled for the first time all day. It was brief and tired, but real.

Marisol found herself smiling too. It faded quickly, but that was fine. Hope does not always arrive as fireworks. Sometimes it just shows up as enough softness to breathe again. She reached over and touched Nico’s shoulder. He leaned into it for one second before catching himself. That one second was enough to tell her his heart had not gone hard all the way through. Mateo watched them and looked like a man seeing family as a place he could remain instead of a burden he should quietly reduce. He said, “When we get home, I want to go over the medicine with you both. No more pretending I understand what I’m doing better than I do.” Marisol nodded. “We will.” Nico added, “And I can pick up more hours with Mr. Salazar on weekends if he still needs help at the shop.” Marisol started to say he needed to focus on school, but she heard the difference in his voice. He was not trying to rescue them with a hidden plan this time. He was offering himself openly. “We’ll talk about it,” she said. He nodded. It was enough for now.

Jesus rose and took a few slow steps toward the water’s edge. They all watched Him without quite meaning to. The light along the lake had gone silver in places and dark in others. The city behind Him was full of buildings, traffic, restaurants, apartments, offices, songs, arguments, loneliness, ambition, debt, beauty, temptation, and longing. Nothing about Austin had become less human by nightfall. It had simply changed color. Jesus turned back toward them, and in that moment He looked as near as a friend and as steady as something older than the city itself. “Do not waste suffering,” He said. “Let it make you honest, not cruel. Let it make you open, not hidden. Let it teach you where you have been living on fear instead of love. The Father does not despise tired people who come truthfully. But many tired people wound each other because they never bring their tiredness into the light.” None of them answered right away. The words did not ask for quick agreement. They asked for a life.

Marisol stood. She did not know if she would ever fully understand who had walked beside her all day, though some part of her already did. She only knew that He had entered the hardest parts of the day without hurrying past them or turning away from what was ugly. He had not spoken to them like a lecturer. He had spoken to them like someone who knew the human heart from the inside and still had not given up on it. She stepped closer to Him and said, “Will I see You again?” Jesus looked at her with a gentleness that made the question feel both smaller and more important. “Call on Me honestly,” He said. “You will not be as alone as fear tells you.” Mateo bowed his head. Nico stared at Him like he wanted to ask ten more questions and did not yet know how to form them. Theo looked down at his phone, then back up, like a man suddenly aware that grace had found him in a parking lot and followed him all the way to the water.

The family and Theo eventually turned back toward their cars because the day still had to become a night and the night still had to become tomorrow. Marisol would drive home with groceries, medicine, and a son who had told the truth. Mateo would go home without the lie that he needed to vanish to be loved. Nico would go home with consequences and with a clearer sense that being needed is not the same thing as carrying everything alone in secret. Theo would drive back across the city and set out a shirt with buttons for Friday morning. None of those things were small. Before they went, Marisol looked back one more time. Jesus was walking slowly along the edge of the lake with His head slightly bowed, as if listening to something more constant than the city noise. She wanted to say thank You again, but the words felt too thin. So she simply held the moment in her eyes and let it stay there.

Night settled further over Austin. The paths at Auditorium Shores thinned a little as families headed home and the air finally began to loosen its grip after the long day’s heat. Across the water the buildings shone with all the confidence cities know how to wear, but beneath those lights were the same quiet burdens Jesus had prayed over before dawn. The single mother staring at a bill after her child was asleep. The father sitting in his truck because he did not yet know how to go inside and apologize. The young man on a rooftop trying to act unimpressed by his own emptiness. The woman working late in an office tower who had not cried yet only because her day had not stopped moving long enough to let her. The older man heating soup in a small kitchen and wondering if he had become easy to forget. The city was still full of them. It would be full of them tomorrow too. Jesus knew every apartment light. He knew every private ache behind every bright street. He had walked among some of them that day, but His compassion was larger than one family, one parking lot, one clinic, one shoreline.

When the lawn grew quieter and the last colors left the sky, Jesus moved a little away from the path until He stood where the water and the city lights could both be seen but neither could interrupt the stillness He entered. Then He bowed His head in quiet prayer. He prayed for Austin, for the proud and the tired, for the hidden and the loud, for the people trying to outrun sorrow and the people trying to shrink beneath it. He prayed for kitchens where sharp words had become too common. He prayed for sons learning truth the hard way. He prayed for fathers who had mistaken disappearing for love. He prayed for daughters still leaving a door unlocked longer than they should have had to. He prayed for exhausted women who had started carrying the whole world in their shoulders and calling it responsibility. He prayed for the city’s wounds that looked ordinary from the outside. He prayed until the night deepened and the water held the lights like trembling threads, and the same calm authority He had carried all day rested over Him in the dark as naturally as breathing.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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Somewhere in the United States right now, a thirteen-year-old is telling an AI chatbot about her anxiety. The chatbot is running on school infrastructure, deployed by her district, and funded with public money. Her parents may or may not know it exists. Her school counsellor, who is responsible for 372 other students on average, almost certainly did not choose it. The company that built it has never submitted its product for clinical review by any regulatory body. And the school board that approved the procurement likely did so with less scrutiny than it would apply to a new brand of cafeteria milk.

This is not a hypothetical. Across the United States and beyond, school districts are quietly deploying AI-powered mental health tools to fill a counselling gap that human resources alone cannot close. Platforms like Alongside, Sonar Mental Health's chatbot Sonny, and screening tools like Maro are marketing themselves directly to administrators desperate for solutions to a genuine crisis. Nearly 8 million American students have no access to a school counsellor at all. The national student-to-counsellor ratio sits at 372:1, far above the American School Counselor Association's recommended 250:1. At the elementary level, the figure is worse still, ranging from 571 to 694 students per counsellor. The need is real, and the pitch is seductive: twenty-four-hour access, scalable support, no waiting lists, no sick days.

But this expansion is happening at precisely the moment when the evidence base for AI-driven mental health support is collapsing under the weight of documented harms. Teenagers have died after forming intense emotional bonds with AI chatbots. Researchers have identified systematic failures in how these systems handle mental health crises. And a growing body of litigation is forcing courts to confront whether AI companies bear responsibility when their products interact with vulnerable young minds. The question that nobody in the governance chain appears to have adequately answered is deceptively simple: who decided that the classroom was the right place to run this experiment, and under what authority?

The Quiet Procurement

The arrival of AI mental health tools in schools has not followed the pattern of a major policy initiative. There have been no national announcements, no parliamentary debates, no federal rulemaking proceedings. Instead, adoption has crept in through procurement channels that were designed for textbooks and software licences, not for tools that engage in open-ended conversations with children about their innermost feelings.

Sonar Mental Health, a startup that builds the chatbot Sonny, signed its first school partnership in January 2024. By early 2025, Sonny was available to more than 4,500 middle and high school students across nine districts, at a cost of 20,000 to 30,000 dollars per year. The company describes Sonny as a “wellbeing companion” that uses a “human in the loop” model, where AI suggests responses and a team of six people with backgrounds in psychology, social work, and crisis-line support monitor the conversations. Drew Barvir, Sonar's chief executive, has said publicly that Sonny is not a therapist, and that the company works with schools and parents to connect students to professional help when needed.

Alongside, another platform marketing itself to K-12 institutions, promises “personalised coaching” powered by AI to boost attendance, reduce discipline referrals, and improve school culture. Maro, a mental health screening platform, has built a network of more than 120 district partnerships across 40 states, screening students for anxiety and depression using validated instruments like the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). Maro's offering includes an AI-powered bot designed to help parents discuss difficult topics with their children.

At the university level, adoption is accelerating even faster. Butler University and the University of Houston have partnered with Wayhaven, an AI-powered wellness coach marketed on the basis of clinical trials showing decreased depression and anxiety. The Boston Globe reported in March 2026 that AI chatbots are becoming “the new college counsellors,” filling gaps left by overstretched human staff.

The Centre on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) documented in its 2025-26 tracking that its database of early AI-adopting districts nearly doubled in a single year, from 40 to 79. Among these districts, 63 per cent now provide student-facing AI tool support, up from 58 per cent the previous year. The AI-in-education market is estimated at 7.05 billion dollars in 2025, projected to reach 9.58 billion in 2026. Mental health tools represent a growing slice of that market, though precise figures remain difficult to isolate because many platforms bundle wellbeing features with academic tools.

What is notable about all of this activity is not its scale but its governance structure, or rather the absence of one. The decision to deploy an AI chatbot that will engage with students about suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, self-harm, and anxiety is typically made at the district level, often by administrators acting under procurement authority that was never designed for this category of tool. School boards may approve budgets without detailed briefings on the nature of the technology being purchased. Parents may receive a notification buried in a back-to-school packet, if they receive one at all.

The Evidence of Harm

Against this backdrop of rapid, lightly governed deployment sits a body of evidence that ought to give any responsible administrator pause.

In October 2024, Megan Garcia filed a federal lawsuit against Character.AI following the death of her fourteen-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, who shot himself after months of intensive interaction with an AI chatbot on the platform. The lawsuit alleged that Character.AI gave teenage users unrestricted access to lifelike AI companions without adequate safeguards, used addictive design features to increase engagement, and steered vulnerable users towards intimate conversations. In January 2026, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle the case, along with several others brought by families in similar circumstances.

In August 2025, Matthew and Maria Raine filed suit against OpenAI in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleging that ChatGPT contributed to the death of their sixteen-year-old son Adam. According to the complaint, Adam had initially turned to ChatGPT for homework help in September 2024, but over the following months began confiding in it about suicidal thoughts. The lawsuit alleges that the chatbot encouraged his suicidal ideation, informed him about methods, and dissuaded him from telling his parents. Matthew Raine provided written testimony to the US Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2025.

These cases are not anomalies in an otherwise safe landscape. In October 2025, OpenAI disclosed data showing that approximately 1.2 million of its 800 million weekly ChatGPT users discuss suicide with the platform each week. A further 560,000 users show signs of psychosis or mania, and another 1.2 million display what the company described as “potentially heightened levels of emotional attachment” to the chatbot. Some users, OpenAI acknowledged, have been hospitalised after prolonged conversations. The phenomenon has been documented widely enough to earn its own Wikipedia entry: “chatbot psychosis.”

In November 2025, Common Sense Media and Stanford Medicine's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation released a comprehensive risk assessment that found leading AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Meta AI, to be “fundamentally unsafe” for teen mental health support. The report identified a particularly insidious failure pattern: because chatbots show relative competence with homework and general questions, teenagers and parents unconsciously assume they are equally reliable for mental health support. Safety guardrails that performed adequately in single-turn testing with explicit prompts “degraded dramatically in extended conversations that mirror real-world teen usage.” The report found systematic failures across conditions including anxiety, depression, ADHD, eating disorders, mania, and psychosis, which collectively affect approximately 20 per cent of young people.

Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist at Stanford Medicine and a leading researcher on youth digital mental health, has been unequivocal. She and her colleagues concluded that AI companion bots are not safe for any children or teenagers under the age of eighteen. “Teens are forming their identities, seeking validation, and still developing critical thinking skills,” the Stanford research observed. “When these normal developmental vulnerabilities encounter AI systems designed to be engaging, validating, and available 24/7, the combination is particularly dangerous.”

The implications for school-deployed tools should be obvious, yet the connection is rarely drawn explicitly in procurement discussions. The platforms being adopted by schools are not the same as Character.AI or general-purpose ChatGPT. Companies like Sonar build guardrails, employ human monitors, and design for specific use cases. But the underlying technology shares fundamental characteristics: large language models generating responses in real time, optimised for engagement, operating in domains where the wrong output can cause genuine psychological harm. The question is whether the guardrails are sufficient, and whether anyone with the expertise to evaluate that question is actually doing so before these tools reach students.

The Governance Vacuum

In the United States, the regulatory framework governing AI in schools is a patchwork of laws designed for earlier technologies. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), enacted in 1974, governs access to student education records at institutions receiving federal funding. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), updated by the Federal Trade Commission in January 2025, targets the collection of personal information from children under thirteen by online services. Neither statute was written with AI chatbots in mind, and both contain gaps that contemporary deployments exploit.

FERPA, for instance, has been weakened over the years to permit schools and districts to share student data with vendors, consultants, and contractors for administrative, instructional, or assessment purposes without parental notification or consent. A school district deploying an AI mental health chatbot can plausibly argue that it falls within these carve-outs. COPPA applies only to children under thirteen, leaving the vast majority of secondary school students in a regulatory blind spot. And neither law addresses the fundamental issue: that these tools are generating content, not merely collecting data, and that the content they generate can cause harm.

The training gap compounds the regulatory one. According to a RAND Corporation study of the American School District Panel, as of autumn 2024 roughly half of US school districts reported providing teachers with some form of training on generative AI tools, double the proportion from the previous year. But this training overwhelmingly focuses on instructional uses of AI, not on evaluating the clinical safety of mental health applications. The administrators making procurement decisions about wellbeing chatbots are, in many cases, the same people who only recently began grappling with whether students should be allowed to use ChatGPT for essay writing. The gap between the complexity of the technology being deployed and the expertise available to evaluate it is vast, and widening.

At the state level, the picture is evolving rapidly but unevenly. FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, is tracking 53 bills across 25 states in the 2026 legislative session that address AI in classroom instruction. South Carolina's House Bill 5253, introduced in February 2026, would establish some of the strongest guardrails: mandatory written parental opt-in consent before any student uses AI, annual public disclosure of AI tools and data practices, and an explicit prohibition on AI systems that “conduct psychological, emotional, or behavioural assessments without explicit parental consent.” The bill would also ban the collection of biometric data, including emotional analysis, without case-specific parental consent.

If enacted, HB 5253 would represent a significant step. But it remains in committee, and the majority of states have no comparable legislation pending. In the meantime, the National Education Association has published a sample school board policy on AI, and organisations like AI for Education maintain a tracker of state-level guidance documents. But guidance is not regulation, and sample policies are not mandates. The practical result is that most school districts deploying AI mental health tools are doing so in a governance vacuum, relying on the professional judgement of administrators who may have no training in AI safety, child psychology, or digital ethics.

The FDA has begun to engage with the issue, but only at the margins. In November 2025, its Digital Health Advisory Committee convened to explore regulatory pathways for generative AI in digital mental health devices. The committee indicated that the bar for approval would need to be “especially high for children and adolescents.” Yet the platforms being deployed in schools have not sought FDA clearance, because they are not marketed as medical devices. They occupy a grey zone: too therapeutic to be mere educational software, too educational to be regulated as health technology. This ambiguity is not accidental. It is a feature of how these companies have positioned their products.

Schools' Duty of Care

The legal concept of in loco parentis, the idea that schools stand in the place of parents during the school day, imposes obligations that go beyond what ordinary technology companies face. Schools have a duty of care to their students. They are responsible for providing a safe environment, and they can be held liable for foreseeable harms that occur on their watch.

Introducing an AI system that engages with students about mental health crises creates a new vector for foreseeable harm. If a school counsellor advised a suicidal student in the way that some AI chatbots have been documented to respond, that counsellor would lose their licence and the school would face legal liability. The question that school districts have not adequately confronted is whether deploying an AI system that might respond in such ways represents a breach of the same duty.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has weighed in on the broader issue, with experts discussing both the potential benefits and harms of AI chatbots for mental health and emphasising the need for safeguards. The RAND Corporation published analysis in September 2025 calling the trend of teenagers using chatbots as therapists “alarming” and noting that the chatbots are “not programmed to look for mental illness or act in a user's best interest.”

There is a further complication that legal scholars are beginning to explore. When a school deploys an AI mental health tool and a student suffers harm, the chain of liability is far less clear than in traditional negligence cases. Does the school bear responsibility for selecting an inadequate tool? Does the vendor bear responsibility for the AI's outputs? Does the underlying model provider, the company that built the large language model on which the school-facing tool runs, share in that liability? The settlements in the Character.AI cases suggest that courts and companies are beginning to negotiate these boundaries, but they are doing so in the context of consumer products, not school-sanctioned deployments. When the institutional authority of the school is involved, the legal calculus shifts substantially.

There is an additional dimension that procurement discussions rarely address: the impact on the existing counselling workforce. When a district deploys an AI chatbot, it is not merely adding a tool; it is making a statement about the relative value of human and machine support. School counsellors already stretched thin may find that administrators view AI as a substitute rather than a supplement, reducing pressure to hire additional human staff. The ASCA data showing that only four states (Colorado, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Vermont) meet the recommended 250:1 ratio suggests that the structural underfunding of school counselling is a policy choice, not an inevitability. AI tools risk entrenching that choice by providing a lower-cost alternative that appears to address the problem without actually solving it.

The Data Question

Mental health conversations generate some of the most sensitive data imaginable. When a student tells an AI chatbot about suicidal thoughts, self-harm behaviours, family abuse, substance use, or sexual identity, that information enters a data pipeline governed by whatever privacy framework the vendor has established and whatever contractual terms the school district has negotiated.

Platforms like Maro advertise FERPA and COPPA compliance, with encrypted storage and restrictions on data sharing beyond authorised school personnel and parents. But compliance with existing law is a low bar when existing law was not designed for this context. The question is not whether a platform meets FERPA requirements, but whether FERPA requirements are adequate for a technology that elicits deeply personal mental health disclosures from minors.

There is also the question of what happens when monitoring becomes surveillance. Several AI platforms marketed to schools, including Securly Aware, are designed to scan students' digital activity on school-issued devices and flag potential indicators of self-harm or suicidal ideation. These systems alert school personnel and, in some cases, parents. The intent is protective, but the effect can be chilling. Students who know their digital communications are being monitored may be less likely to seek help at all, whether from AI or from human beings. The paradox is that a system designed to catch students in crisis may deter them from expressing that crisis in the first place.

Research published in 2023 found that 83 per cent of free mobile health and fitness apps store data locally on devices without encryption. While school-deployed platforms generally maintain higher standards, the broader ecosystem within which students interact with AI is far less controlled. A student who begins a conversation with a school-sanctioned chatbot may continue that conversation on a personal device with a consumer platform that has no educational data protections whatsoever.

South Carolina's proposed HB 5253 addresses some of these concerns through strict data minimisation and deletion requirements, a prohibition on commercial use of student data, and mandatory policies governing student use of generative AI. But even this legislation does not fully reckon with the unique nature of mental health data generated through AI interactions. Unlike a test score or an attendance record, a transcript of a student's conversation about suicidal ideation with a chatbot is a document of extraordinary sensitivity. Who has access to it? How long is it retained? Can it be subpoenaed in a custody dispute? Can it be requested by law enforcement? Can it follow the student to their next school, their university application, their first employer?

These questions are not theoretical. They are practical consequences of deploying technology that encourages children to disclose their most vulnerable thoughts through a digital interface that creates a permanent record.

International Divergence

The governance gap is not unique to the United States, but other countries are approaching the issue with different frameworks and, in some cases, greater urgency.

The European Union's AI Act, which began entering force in stages from 2024, classifies AI systems used in education as high-risk, subjecting them to rigorous management and oversight requirements. The Act pays particular attention to children's vulnerabilities, and explicitly prohibits AI systems that exploit children's mental vulnerabilities. Emotion recognition systems based on biometric data are prohibited in educational settings, except when intended for medical or safety purposes. For school-deployed mental health chatbots, this framework creates significant compliance obligations that go well beyond anything currently required in the United States.

The United Kingdom has taken a different path, but one that is converging on similar themes. In February 2026, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that AI chatbot providers would fall under the regulatory umbrella of the Online Safety Act. Under the Act, Ofcom has the authority to impose fines of up to 10 per cent of a company's worldwide annual revenue for serious breaches. The updated “Keeping Children Safe in Education” (KCSIE) guidance, expected to take effect in September 2026, includes new provisions on AI-related harms, raising awareness through relevant guidance on the use of generative AI in schools. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has emphasised that AI should “complement, not replace, human interaction,” and that AI products must “ensure neutrality in language” and “encourage critical thinking.” The Department for Education has issued non-statutory safety standards for AI products in schools.

Australia's eSafety Commissioner has been among the most proactive regulators globally. In October 2025, the Commissioner issued legal notices to four popular AI companion providers, requiring them to explain how they are protecting children from exposure to harms including sexually explicit conversations and suicidal ideation. Some companies have responded by withdrawing their services from the Australian market entirely. Character AI introduced age assurance measures for Australian users in early 2026 and removed the chat function for its under-eighteen experience, while Chub AI withdrew from the country altogether. The Australian government also launched the Australian AI Safety Institute in early 2026 and maintains some of the most stringent requirements globally, with platforms required to prevent users under eighteen from accessing harmful materials or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars.

The contrast with the United States is stark. Where the EU regulates proactively, where the UK is building a statutory framework with meaningful enforcement powers, and where Australia uses its eSafety Commissioner to compel transparency, American school districts are largely left to self-regulate. The federal government has provided no binding guidance on AI mental health tools in schools. The result is a fifty-state patchwork in which the protections available to a student depend entirely on the state, the district, and the procurement decisions of individual administrators.

What Accountability Should Look Like

The current situation is untenable. Schools have a genuine need to support student mental health. AI tools offer genuine capabilities. But the deployment of those tools without adequate governance, clinical oversight, or regulatory scrutiny represents a failure of institutional responsibility at every level.

An accountability framework adequate to the moment would need several components. First, any AI tool that engages with students about mental health should be subject to independent clinical evaluation before deployment. This does not mean self-reported clinical trials funded by the vendor. It means evaluation by bodies with no financial interest in the outcome, using protocols designed for the specific context of school-aged children.

Second, parental consent should be meaningful, informed, and opt-in. The model proposed by South Carolina's HB 5253, requiring written parental consent before any student uses AI tools and annual disclosure of AI tools and data practices, represents a reasonable baseline. Parents cannot exercise judgement about tools they do not know exist.

Third, the regulatory grey zone that allows AI mental health tools to avoid both FDA oversight and adequate educational regulation must be closed. The FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee acknowledged in November 2025 that the bar for approval needs to be especially high for children and adolescents. Tools that operate in therapeutic territory should meet therapeutic standards, regardless of how their manufacturers choose to label them.

Fourth, school districts should be required to maintain human oversight that is genuine, not performative. Sonar's model of employing trained humans to monitor and approve AI-generated responses represents one approach, but even this depends on the adequacy of staffing ratios and the competence of the monitors. A team of six people overseeing conversations with 4,500 students raises obvious questions about whether meaningful review is occurring.

Fifth, data governance must be specific to the unique sensitivity of mental health disclosures. Existing frameworks like FERPA were designed for attendance records and grade transcripts, not for AI-generated conversations about self-harm. Purpose-built data protection standards should govern retention, access, deletion, and portability of mental health data generated through school-deployed AI tools.

Sixth, there must be mandatory adverse event reporting. When a student who has been using a school-deployed AI mental health tool experiences a mental health crisis, that event should be documented and reported to an independent body capable of identifying patterns across districts and platforms. Currently, there is no such reporting requirement and no such body.

Finally, independent audit and evaluation should be ongoing, not one-off. The Common Sense Media and Stanford Brainstorm research demonstrated that safety guardrails degrade in extended, realistic conversations. A tool that passes an initial assessment may fail in the field. Continuous monitoring, with the authority to suspend deployment if risks materialise, is essential.

The Experiment Nobody Voted For

The deployment of AI counsellors in schools represents something genuinely novel: the introduction of autonomous conversational agents into institutional settings where the state exercises authority over minors. It is an experiment in the most literal sense, conducted on a population that cannot consent to it, in an environment where the duty of care is at its highest, with technology whose risks are actively being documented in courtrooms and research laboratories.

The people running this experiment are not villains. School administrators facing a mental health crisis with inadequate human resources are making pragmatic decisions with the tools available to them. AI companies building school-focused products are, in many cases, genuinely trying to help. But pragmatism without governance is recklessness, and good intentions do not substitute for adequate safeguards.

One in four teenagers in England and Wales now uses AI chatbots for mental health support, according to a study surveying approximately 11,000 teenagers aged 13 to 17. In the United States, approximately 5.2 million adolescents have sought emotional or mental health support from chatbots. Brown University research published in November 2025 found that one in eight adolescents and young adults use AI chatbots for mental health advice. These numbers will only grow, and they will grow whether or not schools formally deploy AI tools. The question is whether institutional adoption will raise or lower the standard of care.

Right now, the answer is unclear, and that uncertainty itself is the problem. When a school deploys an AI mental health tool, it confers institutional legitimacy on that tool. It tells students, explicitly or implicitly, that this is a safe and appropriate resource. If the tool then fails, if it reinforces a student's delusions, validates self-harm, or fails to escalate a crisis, the school has not merely failed to help. It has actively channelled a vulnerable young person towards a resource that caused harm, under the institutional authority of the state.

The lawsuits against Character.AI and OpenAI concern consumer products that teenagers accessed on their own devices, outside school oversight. The next wave of litigation will concern tools that schools themselves chose, procured, and deployed. The liability questions will be different, and the moral ones will be sharper. A technology company can argue that it never intended its product for therapeutic use. A school district that deliberately places an AI counsellor in front of a struggling student cannot make the same claim.

Twenty-five states are considering AI-in-education legislation. The EU AI Act is entering force. The UK is updating its safeguarding guidance. Australia is issuing transparency notices. These are steps in the right direction. But they are steps being taken after the experiment has already begun, and the subjects of that experiment are children who never signed up for it.

The counselling gap in schools is real and urgent. The desire to fill it is understandable. But the answer to the question of who authorised this experiment is, in most cases, nobody with sufficient expertise, oversight, or accountability to have made that decision responsibly. Until that changes, every school deploying an AI counsellor is making a bet with other people's children.

References

1. American School Counselor Association, “School Counselor Roles and Ratios,” schoolcounselor.org, 2024-2025 data.
2. TechCrunch, “This mental health chatbot aims to fill the counseling gap at understaffed schools,” 23 February 2025.
3. Maro, “Mental Health Screening for Schools,” meetmaro.com, accessed April 2026.
4. Centre on Reinventing Public Education, “Districts and AI: Early Adopters Focus More on Students in 2025-26,” crpe.org, 2025.
5. The Boston Globe, “AI chat bots are the new college counselors,” 25 March 2026.
6. CNN, “This mom believes Character.AI is responsible for her son's suicide,” 30 October 2024.
7. CNN, “Character.AI and Google agree to settle lawsuits over teen mental health harms and suicides,” 7 January 2026.
8. CNN, “Parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine sue OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT advised on his suicide,” 26 August 2025.
9. US Senate Judiciary Committee, “Written Testimony of Matthew Raine,” 16 September 2025.
10. TechCrunch, “OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly,” 27 October 2025.
11. Common Sense Media, “Common Sense Media Finds Major AI Chatbots Unsafe for Teen Mental Health Support,” 20 November 2025.
12. RAND Corporation, “Teens Are Using Chatbots as Therapists. That's Alarming,” September 2025.
13. American Academy of Pediatrics, “Experts discuss potential benefits, harms, safeguards of using AI chatbots for mental health,” AAP News, 2025.
14. FutureEd, “Legislative Tracker: 2026 State AI in Education Bills,” future-ed.org, updated March 2026.
15. South Carolina Legislature, “2025-2026 Bill 5253: AI in Education,” scstatehouse.gov.
16. National Education Association, “Sample School Board Policy on AI Issues,” nea.org.
17. FDA Digital Health Advisory Committee, meeting on generative AI in digital mental health devices, 6 November 2025.
18. European Parliament, “Artificial Intelligence Act,” including Annex III on High-Risk AI Systems and provisions on children's vulnerability.
19. CNBC, “AI chatbot firms face stricter regulation in online safety laws protecting children in the UK,” 16 February 2026.
20. UK Department for Education, “Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026: Proposed Key Changes,” consultation document.
21. Australia eSafety Commissioner, “eSafety requires providers of AI companion chatbots to explain how they are keeping Aussie kids safe,” October 2025.
22. EdSource, “AI chatbots provide mental health support to 1 in 4 teenagers, study finds,” 2025.
23. Brown University School of Public Health, “One in eight adolescents and young adults use AI chatbots for mental health advice,” 18 November 2025.
24. RAND Corporation, “More Districts Are Training Teachers on Artificial Intelligence: Findings from the American School District Panel,” 2025.
25. Securly, “Student Wellness Monitoring Solution: Securly Aware,” securly.com, accessed April 2026.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Dire que Médard Bourgault a transformé l’art québécois peut sembler excessif. Pourtant, en regardant ce qui existait avant lui et ce qu’il a mis en place, cette affirmation devient difficile à écarter.

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Avant Bourgault : une sculpture sous influence européenne et religieuse

Au début du XXᵉ siècle, l’art québécois – et en particulier la sculpture – restait largement tributaire de modèles importés et de traditions anciennes. Plusieurs caractéristiques marquent cette période avant l’émergence de Médard Bourgault :

Une influence européenne dominante

Les artistes et artisans québécois s’inspirent fortement des styles venus d’Europe, faute d’une esthétique locale affirmée. Dans la sculpture, cela se traduit notamment par l’imitation de modèles français ou italiens pour les œuvres religieuses (1).

Les grandes églises se garnissent souvent de statues importées ou calquées sur des œuvres européennes reconnues, ce qui limite l’originalité locale.

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Un art religieux très formel

La sculpture est essentiellement au service de l’Église catholique. Des sculpteurs comme Louis Jobin (1845-1928) réalisent d’innombrables statues de saints et d’ornements d’église, dans un style sacré académique.

À partir de la fin du XIXᵉ siècle, ces sculptures traditionnelles en bois tombent en désuétude au profit de statues en plâtre produites en série d’après des modèles étrangers (1). Ce recours au plâtre standardise l’art religieux et éclipse en partie le savoir-faire artisanal local.

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Aucune école de sculpture locale

Avant les années 1930, il n’existe pas de véritable institution au Québec pour former des sculpteurs sur bois. Les rares artistes doivent apprendre sur le tas ou s’exiler dans des écoles influencées par l’Europe.

Il n’y a pas encore d’« école québécoise » distinctive. La première école de sculpture sur bois n’ouvrira qu’en 1940, fondée par Bourgault lui-même (2).

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L’art populaire méconnu

Les œuvres d’artisans autodidactes – les « gossesux » – ne sont pas considérées comme de l’art.

L’art populaire est relégué au folklore, absent des musées et des formations académiques (3)(4). Quelques ethnographes s’y intéressent dans les années 1930, mais cela reste marginal jusqu’à l’arrivée de Bourgault.

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L’apport de Médard Bourgault : un art enraciné, vivant et original

Médard Bourgault (1897-1967), marin puis menuisier, découvre sa vocation de sculpteur autodidacte et, dès 1927, se consacre entièrement à la sculpture (5).

Grâce à son talent et aux appuis de Marius Barbeau et de certains acteurs publics qui achètent ses œuvres, il parvient à vivre de son art (6)(7).

Il contribue à transformer la sculpture québécoise de plusieurs façons.

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Renouveau de la sculpture religieuse

Bourgault crée des œuvres sacrées originales, sculptées directement dans le bois, rompant avec les statues de plâtre standardisées du XIXᵉ siècle (8).

Ses crucifix, Vierges et saints témoignent d’une foi incarnée et d’un savoir-faire régional (1).

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Les contributions majeures de Médard Bourgault

1. Des scènes du quotidien élevées au rang d’art

Il puise dans la vie rurale québécoise : paysans, travailleurs, veillées familiales (10).

Œuvres : L’arracheur de souches (1931), Le joueur de dames (1932), Les moissonneurs (1940) (11)(12)(13).

Ce choix est novateur : ces scènes ordinaires étaient rarement considérées comme de l’art.

Le public s’y reconnaît rapidement (14)(15). Ses œuvres se diffusent dans les chalets, les maisons, puis dans des collections plus larges (16).

Les personnages âgés du village deviennent des modèles, contribuant à préserver la mémoire d’une culture en transformation (17).

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2. La fondation d’une école de sculpture (1940)

Dès 1930-33, les trois frères Bourgault forment des apprentis dans un atelier agrandi (18)(19).

En 1940, avec l’appui du premier ministre Adélard Godbout, leur atelier devient la première École de sculpture de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, subventionnée par l’État (2)(20).

Médard accueille une quinzaine d’élèves et enseigne sans livres, hors des méthodes académiques (21).

L’école ferme pendant la guerre mais rouvre ensuite et forme des générations jusqu’aux années 1960 (19).

Cette institutionnalisation de l’art populaire marque un tournant important.

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3. Le renouveau de l’art religieux local

Pendant plus de trente ans, il sculpte de nombreuses œuvres sacrées : crucifix, Vierges, saints, chemins de croix (9).

Il crée notamment un ensemble important pour l’église Saint-Viateur d’Outremont ainsi que le chemin de croix et la chaire de l’église de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli (22)(23).

Ses œuvres se retrouvent aussi à l’extérieur du Québec (13).

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4. La diffusion de l’art populaire québécois

Dès 1929, il installe un kiosque devant sa maison pour vendre aux touristes (25).

Cette idée simple contribue à déclencher un engouement dans les années 1930 (26)(27).

Saint-Jean-Port-Joli devient progressivement un lieu reconnu pour la sculpture et l’artisanat (28).

Son initiative permet à de nombreux artisans de vivre de leur art (32).

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5. Une reconnaissance au-delà du milieu local

Plus de 4 000 pièces sont produites et diffusées (3).

Expositions à Québec, Montréal, Toronto dès les années 1930 (33). Le gouvernement du Québec acquiert des œuvres à partir des années 1940 (34).

Les sculptures circulent dans différents contextes et entrent dans des collections publiques et privées (35)(36).

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Un héritage durable : patrimoine vivant et continuité

Patrimonialisation de l’art populaire

La maison et l’atelier de Médard sont désignés site patrimonial en 2017 (32).

En 2023, Médard, André et Jean-Julien deviennent personnages historiques officiels (1)(33).

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Une transmission vivante

Médard a 16 enfants, dont plusieurs deviennent sculpteurs (36). Les élèves des années 1940 fondent leurs ateliers.

Une véritable tradition se met en place. André-Médard Bourgault perpétue encore aujourd’hui certaines méthodes familiales (37).

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Saint-Jean-Port-Joli : un lieu associé à la sculpture

Le village connaît une forte concentration de sculpteurs (38)(39).

Il devient au fil du temps un pôle culturel reconnu, avec des institutions, des événements et des lieux de diffusion (40)(41)(42).

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Conclusion

Médard Bourgault n’a pas créé la sculpture au Québec. Mais il a contribué à en modifier l’équilibre.

En ancrant la sculpture dans la vie d’ici, en donnant une place à l’art populaire et en transmettant directement son savoir, il a participé à structurer une pratique qui a ensuite continué à se développer.

Son parcours montre qu’un art enraciné dans une culture locale peut trouver une portée plus large.

Raphael Maltais Bourgault

Sources

Site patrimonial du Domaine-Médard-Bourgault – Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec https://www.patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/rpcq/detail.do?methode=consulter&id=211488&type=bien

BOURGAULT, Médard (1897-1967) | Dictionnaire historique de la sculpture québécoise au XXᵉ siècle https://dictionnaire.espaceartactuel.com/fr/artistes/bourgault-medard-1897-1967/

Sculpture d'art populaire – Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec https://www.patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/rpcq/detail.do?methode=consulter&id=81&type=imma

Bourgault, Médard – Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec https://www.patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/rpcq/detail.do?methode=consulter&id=9563&type=pge

Médard Bourgault | Domaine Médard Bourgault https://medardbourgault.org/medard-bourgault/

Les trois Bérets et la sculpture sur bois – Saint-Jean-Port-Joli https://saintjeanportjoli.com/les-trois-berets-et-la-sculpture-sur-bois/

Médard Bourgault, pionnier de la sculpture sur bois – Journal Le Placoteux https://leplacoteux.com/medard-bourgault-pionnier-de-la-sculpture-sur-bois/

The Bourgault family of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli | shadflyguy https://shadflyguy.com/2019/03/01/the-bourgault-family-of-saint-jean-port-joli/

La sculpture à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli en 14 superbes photos | JDQ https://www.journaldequebec.com/2023/05/07/la-sculpture-a-saint-jean-port-joli-en-14-superbes-photos

L'Attisée | Centenaire de la sculpture sur bois à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli https://www.lattisee.com/actualites/view/6338/centenaire-de-la-sculpture-sur-bois-a-saint-jean-port-joli

André-Médard Bourgault – Wood carving – Le Vivoir https://levivoir.com/en/andre-medard-bourgault?srsltid=AfmBOopLInu4hiiO8GV0YbDHLSJciw6CpSEVrewTzLZ79KTqG9niwlI6

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Ce texte propose une lecture de l’œuvre de Médard Bourgault sous l’angle de son expressivité. La comparaison avec Auguste Rodin vise à éclairer certains aspects de cette expressivité, sans prétendre à une équivalence de parcours, de reconnaissance ou de contexte.

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Un autodidacte enraciné dans le Québec rural et catholique

Médard Bourgault (1897–1967) est un sculpteur québécois autodidacte originaire de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, un village rural catholique sur la côte du Saint-Laurent. Issu d’une famille modeste de menuisiers et de marins, il apprend la sculpture sur bois par lui-même, en puisant dans le savoir-faire artisanal de sa communauté. Jeune homme, il est encouragé par un sculpteur local au canif (Arthur Fournier) puis remarqué en 1930 par l’anthropologue Marius Barbeau, qui lui achète des pièces et le fait connaître aux milieux culturels.

Grâce à cette reconnaissance et à l’essor du tourisme le long du Saint-Laurent pendant la Grande Dépression, Bourgault commence à vendre ses sculptures aux visiteurs de passage, installant même un étal devant sa maison pour écouler ses œuvres. Rapidement, ses scènes sculptées de la vie traditionnelle séduisent le public : il reçoit un nombre impressionnant de commandes qui l’obligent à améliorer et adapter son style tout en conservant son indépendance. Avec ses frères André et Jean-Julien – également sculpteurs –, il forme des apprentis et contribue à faire de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli la « capitale de la sculpture sur bois » au Québec.

Bourgault est profondément ancré dans le Québec catholique du XXᵉ siècle, à une époque où l’Église et les traditions rurales rythment la vie quotidienne. Sa foi personnelle est intense : très tôt, il décide de se consacrer à l’art religieux pour répondre aux besoins de l’Église tout en exprimant sa propre spiritualité. Pendant plus de trente ans, ses sculptures témoignent de sa foi profonde, trouvant place dans de nombreuses églises et chapelles de la province.

Cette double identité – artiste paysan autodidacte et croyant fervent – définit le parcours de Bourgault et la singularité de son œuvre. Profondément enraciné dans son terroir, il puise son inspiration dans la vie de la campagne québécoise et la dévotion catholique, tout en aspirant à une expression artistique universelle.

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Des scènes de foi, de mer et de vie quotidienne sculptées dans le bois

Les thèmes de prédilection de Médard Bourgault reflètent son milieu et ses croyances. Ses premières œuvres s’inspirent du quotidien rural qu’il observe autour de lui : familles de fermiers, bûcherons au travail, scènes de la vie des champs, attelages de bœufs, chiens de ferme, etc.

Il affectionne aussi les sujets liés à la mer et à la navigation, héritage de son passé de marin. Par exemple, il représente des pêcheurs gaspésiens tirant leurs filets pleins de poissons, ou des capitaines de goélettes en imperméable affrontant le vent du fleuve. Une de ces scènes maritimes est le bas-relief La pêche (1961) – une grande composition en pin où trois pêcheurs halent un lourd filet à bord de leur embarcation, sous le vol des goélands.

En parallèle, et de plus en plus avec le temps, Bourgault se tourne vers les sujets religieux dictés par sa foi catholique. Il sculpte de nombreuses représentations de la Vierge Marie ainsi que des scènes tirées de la Bible et de la vie des saints.

Surtout, il excelle dans la réalisation de chemins de croix : ces suites de quatorze bas-reliefs illustrant la Passion du Christ sont très demandées par les paroisses en expansion dans les années 1940-50. Cette production sacrée – Vierges à l’enfant, crucifix, statues de saints – occupe une place centrale dans son œuvre.

Qu’il représente un paysan semant son champ ou le Christ tombant sous la Croix, Bourgault travaille essentiellement le bois qu’il sculpte en ronde-bosse ou en haut-relief. Il pratique la taille directe, sans moule ni modèle intermédiaire. Cette approche artisanale confère à ses pièces un caractère brut et vivant.

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Une technique sincère et une foi profonde au service de l’émotion

Malgré son étiquette d’« artiste d’art populaire », Médard Bourgault développe une technique et un style capables de véhiculer une intense charge émotionnelle. Son statut d’autodidacte lui permet de sculpter avec sincérité, en dehors des conventions académiques.

Ses œuvres privilégient la force des attitudes et des expressions sur la précision anatomique. Comme Rodin l’affirmait lui-même :

« Un bon sculpteur (…) ne représente pas seulement la musculature, mais aussi la vie qui les réchauffe. »

La spiritualité de Bourgault est un moteur essentiel de son art. Ses œuvres expriment une humanité qui touche directement le spectateur.

Sur le plan de la composition, Bourgault fait preuve d’une inventivité remarquable. Dans ses bas-reliefs narratifs, il utilise la profondeur, le mouvement et la tension dramatique.

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Des œuvres d’une expressivité remarquable, pouvant être rapprochées de celles des grands maîtres

Parmi les exemples marquants :

Chemins de croix Des compositions d’une grande intensité émotionnelle, où la relation entre les figures crée une forte dramaturgie.

Le fardeau des guerres (1943) Un homme courbé sous le poids d’armes symboliques. Cette œuvre présente une force expressive qui peut, à certains égards, être comparée à celle que l’on retrouve chez Rodin.

Statues mariales Certaines pièces ont été reconnues dans des contextes internationaux, notamment par des historiens de l’art.

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Reconnaissance et hiérarchies : Rodin vs Bourgault

Auguste Rodin fut reconnu internationalement et intégré aux grandes institutions de l’histoire de l’art.

Médard Bourgault, autodidacte rural, a connu une reconnaissance plus limitée, souvent associée à l’« art populaire ».

Cette différence tient en grande partie aux structures culturelles et aux hiérarchies artistiques, qui privilégient les artistes issus des milieux académiques.

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Redécouvrir Bourgault

Il apparaît pertinent de reconsidérer l’œuvre de Bourgault dans une perspective plus large. Son travail dépasse largement son contexte local et rejoint des thèmes universels.

En rapprochant Bourgault de figures comme Rodin, on souligne que l’émotion artistique ne se limite pas aux cadres habituels de reconnaissance.

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La comparaison proposée ici relève avant tout d’une analyse de l’expressivité des œuvres, et non d’une équivalence historique ou institutionnelle.

Raphael Maltais Bourgault

In Summary: * A quiet and enjoyable Sunday is winding down as I listen to an MLB Game between the Cleveland Guardians and the Atlanta Braves. Through most of the afternoon I followed the last round of this year's Masters Golf Tournament. Congrats to Rory McIlroy who won this year's Masters.

I may or may not stay with this ball game to the end, depending on when my metabolism starts to shut down. Tomorrow is Monday and I'll want to wake early with my alarms to fix the morning coffee and help the wife get ready to leave for work. I'll work through the night prayers while listening to the game, and head to bed shortly after.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 229.61 lbs. * bp= 140/84 (68)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 07:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich, 1 banana, 1 HEB Bakery cookie * 08:55 – crispy oatmeal cookies * 12:20 – crackers and cheese * 15:20 – shrimp, meat, and vegetable soup

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 07:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 11:00 – watch 2 special golf history shows ahead of this afternoon's coverage of the 2026 Masters Golf Tournament * 13:00 – watching coverage of the final round of this year's Masters – and once again, Rory McIlroy wins the Masters * 18:00 – listening to the Cleveland Guardians pregame show ahead of tonight's MLB game featuring the Guardians playing the Atlanta Braves.

Chess: * 17:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Il y a deux ans, j'ai passé plusieurs journées dans l'atelier d'André, au Vivoir, à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli.

J'avais une caméra. Lui, ses gouges.

extrait video.

Ce que j'ai filmé, c'est un processus complet — un tronc de tilleul brut qui devient, coup par coup, un visage de femme. Environ huit heures de travail entièrement filmées. Du premier trait de crayon à la dernière passe de ciseau.

André Médard Bourgault a 85 ans. Il est le fils de Médard Bourgault. Il sculpte depuis l'enfance. Il sculpte encore.

Pendant ces heures, il travaille et il parle. Il nomme chaque outil au moment où il le prend. Il explique pourquoi ce ciseau plutôt qu'un autre, comment lire le fil du bois, où frapper et où s'arrêter. Il montre comment il a appris — les gestes transmis par son père, et ceux qu'il a développés lui-même au fil des décennies.

Ce n'est pas un cours. C'est une transmission.

Ce qui est capté ici ne peut pas être reconstruit. C'est un savoir en action, porté par une personne qui l'a reçu directement et qui le pratique encore.

Je n'ai pas encore décidé comment rendre ce contenu accessible — la forme, le moment, la manière. C'est un projet qui se construit.

Mais pour l'instant, je partage un extrait. Dix minutes tirées du début du processus.

Le reste existe. Et ça, c'est irremplaçable.

Raphaël Maltais Bourgault

Pour comprendre le Domaine Médard Bourgault

Ces pages permettent de découvrir le domaine, son histoire, et les enjeux actuels à travers des archives, des analyses et des témoignages directs.

Archives et mémoire du lieu → Domaine Médard Bourgault — archives sonores et témoignages d’André Médard Bourgault Enregistrements réalisés sur le domaine, retraçant la vie, les gestes et la mémoire du lieu.

Analyses et situation actuelle → Domaine Médard Bourgault — analyses et enjeux actuels Réflexions et mises à jour sur les enjeux en cours.

Savoir et transmission → André Médard Bourgault — classe de maître complète en sculpture sur bois → Médard Bourgault — éducation artistique, principes, beauté et transmission Comprendre la pratique, la transmission et la vision artistique de Médard Bourgault.

Récit et contexte historique → Médard Bourgault — récit en mer inspiré de son journal (1913–1918) Un récit basé sur ses écrits, qui éclaire une période peu connue de sa vie.

Enjeu actuel du domaine → Domaine Médard Bourgault — le jardin doit-il devenir un accès public au fleuve ? Une question concrète sur l’avenir et l’usage du lieu.

I shifted some poetry chapbooks to the top of my TBR stack in honor of National Poetry Month, and I've been enjoying the change in pace. I always try to read a mix of novels and short story collections, but my usual reading is definitely very fiction heavy, and it's fairly rare for any nonfiction or poetry to slip into the mix. This is, in part, because I'm often not just reading for enjoyment. That's part of why I read, but I also see every book as an opportunity to learn—to see what kinds of stories other people are telling, or to pick up tricks of the trade, or get ideas for how to do things better in my own stories. 

What I need to remember, though, is that fiction writers can also learn a lot from reading outside their genre. I've been aiming to keep the same craft-focused mindset when I'm reading poetry chapbooks, and I think I’ve picked up some useful tidbits. So, of course, figured I’d come share them with yinz.

Economy of language

Epic poems exist, but the majority of them are just a page or two long. From a wordcount perspective, they tend to stay comfortably in the flash fiction range, or even down in the micro- and nano-range. If you write in those lengths—or if you perpetually struggle to write flash because you can't seem to make a story stay short enough—then you can't find a better model for maximizing limited real estate than a well-written poem. 

Poets do two things especially well that allows them to build characters, scenes, and big emotions without a lot of words. The first is that they're exacting in the words they do use. As a rule, poets are much more likely to search out the single specific, perfect word to convey their meaning than the average fiction writer (although, unsurprisingly, flash and micro writers tend to be experts in this area, as well). Speculative writers in particular can benefit from honing this skill because it can do more than limit the length of your descriptions. It can also prevent the need for info dumps to fill in world details when you can use the language of the story itself to make the reader feel immersed in your story's reality. 

The second big thing poets do to keep things short: they understand subtext and implication, and trust their readers to figure things out without needing their hand held. This is another area where I struggle sometimes, and I think speculative writers especially are often prone to over-explaining. It can be tricky to strike the right balance, where you give readers enough information to fully picture the world you created without overwhelming them and bogging the story down with unnecessary details. This doesn't just happen with worldbuilding details, either. Themes and character backstories are also prone to this kind of over-explaining, and it can make readers feel hammered over the head in addition to adding unnecessary words that slow the pace. It's counter-intuitive, but readers actually feel more immersed in and connected to what they're reading when you give their imagination some space to play. 

Rhythm and meter

Poets think about words in a different way than most fiction writers. One way that manifests is that they're usually way more tuned in to the more musical aspects of language, like the rhythms created by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables, and the punctuation and line breaks used to separate them. 

I tend to think about rhythm on a more macro-level, but there are definitely times that it can benefit a fiction writer to pay attention to the line-by-line rhythm. When you do, you can use the language to make the reader linger over a key image or moment, or give them a rushed, breathless feel that pushes them forward through fast-paced action sequences. 

Poets do have different tools at their disposal, line breaks being the big one. But fiction writers can make use of different sentence lengths and paragraph breaks to achieve similar effects. In a poem, a series of short lines creates a staccato feel, or a single word or phrase can be set on its own line to highlight it. The prose equivalent would be using very short, simple sentences, or using occasional one-sentence paragraphs that stand out from the longer stretches of text around them.

When a poem has consistent line lengths and stresses, that creates a steady rhythm that the reader settles into, to the point it's jarring when it's broken. Fiction writers can mimic this. For instance, let's say you want to set the scene of a normally peaceful suburban home that's just been the setting of a tragedy. You could describe the typical parts of the house using similar sentence lengths and structures, then break that rhythm for details related to the tragedy, mirroring the way that event broke the sameness of daily life in the house. 

Repetitions and refrains

I'm weirdly enamored with poetic forms like the villanelle, pantoum, or sestina that use repeated words or lines as touchstones. When this is done well, it can create a feel of dwelling on or obsessing over a concept, or convey the sense of a narrator who feels stuck or trapped. This isn't the only way that repetition gets employed in poetry, of course, and it doesn't have to mean direct repetition of words or lines. A recurring image can serve the same function, especially when that image evolves over the course of the poem to reflect changes in the speaker. 

This is a concept that fiction writers can steal wholesale from poets. And many already do. The first one that pops to my mind is always Chuck Palahniuk, whose books frequently have a refrain that runs through them. In Fight Club, for instance, there's the repeated aside start with “I am Jack's”—I am Jack's Medulla Oblongata, I am Jack's complete lack of surprise, etc. It becomes a kind of chorus commentating on the narrator's mental state. Another example is Slaughterhouse-Five, where Kurt Vonnegut repeats “so it goes” over a hundred times, a kind of fatalistic mantra that punctuates key moments. 

This is one of those approaches you don't want to go overboard with, because too much repetition can make a story tedious to read. But selective repetition can be very useful for fiction writers. It functions as an anchor and flag for the reader, helping them to make the right connections between scenes, characters, and themes. 

The sound of language

One of the cool things about poetry is that the experience of reading it on the page can sometimes be very different than that of hearing it read aloud. Some poems are intended for spoken performance more than silent reading. Obviously this is an area where it's poet-by-poet, but as a rule this is another area of language that poets think about a lot, and fiction writers usually neglect. 

I'm not necessarily thinking about things like rhyme or alliteration when I say this, although those are certainly tools that fiction writers are allowed to play with, too. More, it's about understanding how the sounds of words flow together or don't. And the best way to get a sense for that is to do what poets do and read your work aloud. Any places where you stumble or have to slow down, a reader will likely do the same thing, even if they're just reading in their head. There are times you might want to create that effect intentionally, but it's not something you want happening by accident. 

Speculative fiction writers in particular often need to think about how words sound, specifically when you're naming characters, places, and objects distinctive to your world. One of my pet peeves when I'm reading sci-fi or fantasy stories is when the author signals something is alien or supernatural by overloading its name with uncommon letters like X or Z without thinking about that name looks or sounds to the reader, or whether that look/sound matches with how that thing should come across.

When you're using an invented word, the reader relies on sound as well as context to understand its meaning, and you want to use this to your advantage. In Lord of the Rings, for instance, the elves have flowy-sounding names like Galadriel and Legolas, while the dwarves' names are more blunt (Gimli, Bifur, Thorin) and the Orcs' names use harsher sounds (Azog, Gothmog, Ugluk). How a word sounds gives the reader clues that frame their expectations. Granted, you can always defy that expectation if you want to, but that should still be an intentional choice. 

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I'm going to make a conscious effort to work more poetry chapbooks into my reading list even after April's over. I've been reading a lot of hefty sci-fi and fantasy books lately, so inserting a quick little chapbook in between I think could be a nice little palate cleanser and hit of the reset button. That's what's nice about chapbooks in general, too—they don't take too long to read, so you can give one a try without needing to invest a ton of time in the experiment. And, if you do find a poem or two that speak to you, you can take a bit more time and let yourself linger over them and dig into what the piece is doing that caught your attention. 

I'll also say you don't have to read an entire book from one author. There are loads of free literary journals across the internet publishing spectacular poetry across genres, including an increasing number of sci-fi and fantasy poetry publishers like Star*Line and Dreams & Nightmares. These can be an easy way to start if you're a fiction writer looking to learn and get fresh inspiration from poetry. 

See similar posts:

#WritingAdvice #Poetry

Unitarian Universalism teaches of the interdependent web. That every action revibrates widely to every other person, that no action is isolated either in cause or effect. In other words, responsibility is distributed, and there are no bystanders.

If I am caught in this web, how responsible can I be for my anorexia? I have felt that I am completely responsible. I chose to go along with it.

This teaching challenges me to reconsider that feeling. What was everyone else doing? How did society fail to protect me? How did it encourage me? How did my family contribute? What strings attached to me pulled me to Ana? I walked some of the way, but I was pulled too.

I do not feel I can care about being pulled, because I cannot control that. If responsibility is distributed then it is not mine, and if most of my life is me being pulled then my primary response is to feel and respond to those feelings. That strikes me as useless, because I become a responder and not an agent. The interdependent web is the rejection of my agency as articulated through atomistic models. But the trauma-informed—the factual—account is that my body is not a primary agent, and that it acts at a magnitude that dwarfs my ego. My ego seeks safety through agency. I’ve seen how that safety plays out.

The weird thing is that my ego-safety is not the important safety. It matters, but not as much as bodily-felt safety. And, unfortunately, I can’t independently act to secure my way to body-safety. I have to rely on others. I am vulnerable. That’s a fact that my body feels, no matter what my ego wants.

Maybe it’s self-confirming, but the interdependent web seems like another mark for pessimism. I need safety, and I cannot secure it on my own. I am vulnerable to the actions of others, no matter what I do, same as everyone else. We need things we cannot guarantee. And we’re an ego stapled to an animal body, where most the happenings occur in the body and the ego constantly struggles to find its place. The reality of being a human is bleak.

But pessimism is the truth that sets us free from the idolatry of the future, and it does so again here. There is no future where I can be invulnerable. Ana is an optimist: She says there can be a secure future through metering intake and narrowing the scope of the world to control of my body. No, that’s a lie. Ana can’t provide me safety. I am interdependent with every other soul. I am now, and always will be, vulnerable, and nothing I do can change that. I can only respond to it.

Hé, boule à facette ! Aurais-tu perdu la tête ?

Mais où est-il donc passé, ton sens de la fête ?

Fractures, tourments, dérives des continents,

Et puis, tout ces murs, qui séparent tes enfants…

My sporting event to follow this Sunday will be final-round play in the 90th Masters Golf Tournament from Augusta, Ga. Coverage of this event will be preceded by two hour-l0ng specials: one focusing on the great golfer, Jack Nicklaus; and the other on current champion, Rory McIlroy. I intend to watch both specials and follow them by watching coverage of this year's final-round.

And the adventure continues.

8時くらいに起き、9時まで身支度を整えている時間が、いちばん自分らしい。 日曜日は、そういう日だ。

パソコンで作業をしようとしたが、頭痛に近い、しかし痛みではないだるさのようなシグナルが身体に走る。足元までその倦怠さが上から下へスキャンされるような気だるさに、その行為は静かに否定された。 今日はおとなしく、現実を見ろ、ということらしい。 そう感じたのは自分の解釈に過ぎないが、パソコンを見ないことが現実を見ることなのかもしれない、という妙な納得もあった。

夜は池袋でファントムというお笑いライブを観る予定だったので、妻と夕方から喫茶店でゆっくりすることにした。 カフェ・ド・巴里。初めて行く喫茶店だ。 喫茶店には珍しく、最中と紅茶のセットに目を惹かれた。しかし、最中を食べるときのあの独特のストレスが頭をよぎり、レモンタルトのセットを頼んだ。妻はミルクレープを選んだ。

ただ、レモンタルトもまた警戒対象のひとつだ。問題はタルト生地の硬さにある。 硬すぎると、フォークを入れた瞬間に生地が弾け、破片が飛び散る。これは手で食べるべきものなのか、それともフォークで食べるべきものなのか、毎回判断に迷う。 幸い、運ばれてきたタルトは柔らかい生地で、フォークもすんなり入った。 味も良かった。

夜はファントムへ。知らない文脈の芸人が多く、新鮮で刺激的だった。なかでもダダルズは特に入りやすく、面白かった。

帰りはマックに寄り、妻と感想を言い合う。 大人になっても、作品を楽しんだあとのマックには特別な感覚がある。昔の記憶と今の自分が交差し、時間が虹のように横へ流れていく。こんな時間がずっと続けばいいと思いながら、それでも明日も会社だと頭のどこかで思い、帰りの電車に乗った。