Monday Morning Required Listening. Today I bring you not something to read, but something to listen to. I've already told you of my love for spoken word poetry, so it should come as no surprise that I'm posting about it yet again. I don't know if it's normal to develop a celebrity crush on a spoken word poet, but I definitely have a crush on Phil Kaye. I think he is kind of adorable, and I admire his work deeply. If you are anything like me, when you hear him perform, you'll laugh, you'll be moved, and then you will get sucked into the vortex of YouTube listening to everything can find by him. Here's an entry point into that delightful vortex: Phil Kaye's "Beginning, Middle & End."

The biggest question I get anywhere I go, and this is five-year-olds and seventy-five-year-olds, is "how can I start?"...And there's this underlying question to that of "what book do I need to read?" "what certain life experience do I need to have?" "what's the right school I need to graduate from to start?" And my best, most simple advice is to completely throw that out, that that's not what it's about. People haven't been telling stories for thousands of years to all get published in Harper's. Let go of this idea of perfection. Because that's not what it's about. It is to connect, I think, it is to make sense of what it is to be human.

-- Phil Kaye, in this TEDx talk

Story lets us carve our initials into the wet cement of this moment.

-- Phil Kaye, in this TEDx talk

We tell stories to feel alive.

-- Phil Kaye, from this TEDx talk