Kate Kooyman this Thursday, Dec 12, Port 393, Holland, 7pm

Kate and I met yesterday at a coffee place in Grandville. We often meet there. Mainly, it’s conveniently placed between GR and Holland. It’s also a white Christian space. The music is Christian. The people are white. Bibles are out here and there. Such spaces feel strange to me right now. Actually, that’s not quite it. They don’t feel strange; they feel gross. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was just listening to an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, a thinker and a writer that I trust. I’m no longer into gurus. No one has it figured out, at least not anyone who is honest. If you are listening to someone who is certain, who claims to understand the truth, you are listening to a fraud, a liar. Coates never makes such claims.

At the end of the interview, Kara Swisher, the interviewer, asked Coates about this quote: “We have to guard against the temptation to accept that history is necessarily the limit of who we are as human beings.” This is Coates’ way of saying that it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no such thing as destiny. The world is whatever we make it.

The world that Kate and I want feels impossible right now. On Thursday, we will try to explain what it has been like to accept that, and to reject it.

We don’t have the answers, but we are willing to talk about what we have been feeling and thinking. I hope you’ll join us.