We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bird Cox a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Bird, so great to have you sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our readers and so let’s jump right into one of our favorite topics – empathy. We think a lack of empathy is at the heart of so many issues the world is struggling with and so our hope is to contribute to an environment that fosters the development of empathy. Along those lines, we’d love to hear your thoughts around where your empathy comes from?
Empathy was modeled to me by my parents, and the stories told in my household nearly always featured someone who pushed beyond their own edges to help someone else. I remember reading Tomie De Paola’s The Legend of the Bluebonnet many, many nights; it was a beautiful, heart-rending favorite. As for family stories: my maternal grandmother ran the country store in her tiny town after her husband, the store’s original owner, passed away in the 1950s. She provided necessities to community members for free or on interest-free credit when they were facing financial hardship, and she made space for people of color when others refused. Her daughter, my mom, taught in Martinsville Public Schools for 25 years, where she developed an anti-racism initiative that she added to her curriculum for her 7th grade English students. She connected with kids in an authentic, encouraging way that made them feel understood and appreciated (and still communicates with many of them to this day, in year nineteen of her retirement). She also created an after-school program for under-resourced kids with interest in the visual arts in which artists from the community worked with them to progress in their chosen media. My father has done community-building work with the Masons, and our family spent a number of holidays helping out with food preparation and service projects. The message was always, “Consider, deeply, what someone else’s reality feels like. What would you want or need if that were you?” I’m a mother now, and I think a lot about how to share this sense of loving curiosity with my son.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I think the best word I can use to describe what I do is ‘connector.’ My aim is to make spaces and programs that give people a chance to connect with each other, or with a deeper layer of themselves. My most recent space, Quarry, is an arts-focused community center where people participate in creative projects and discussions, but a main focus there is gentle engagement. I found myself wanting to reconnect after the pandemic, but with a specific lens: I wanted my energy to be part of a non-patriarchal, non-hierarchical, inclusive group that would accept me through my cycle of social and emotional needs. I wanted to engage with people of a wide age range, because intergenerational relationships feel rich with new understanding. The top priority for Quarry guides is that they offer experiences that enrich their own lives as much as that of their participants, and they don’t have to be experts in their fields – they simply have to be open to facilitating the experience of learning about their chosen project or medium. I had no idea what Quarry would become when I started it–whether the arts or philosophical endeavors or DIY learning or self-care practices or political gathering, etc., would prevail and define it–but I had a sense that taking that leap into the unknown would be what allowed it to breathe itself into its fullest existence. Trusting others to share their visions, their depths, rather than defining its purpose based on my own interests gave it so much more life. It is soft, diverse, non-neurotypical friendly, intergenerational, and just… fun. We’ve built in a daytime coworking group of fiercely supportive writers, too. I’m wildly proud of it and honored that people use it as a place to affirm and be affirmed in their authentic selves.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Create the thing that YOU want to see in the world. This is a hilariously deceptive concept. I feel that we’re conditioned by American society and capitalistic culture to internalize what everyone else wants as our own desire. Learning to listen to myself and my authentic impulses has made it possible for me to do things that make me feel proud, things that feel true. Those impulses come with an electric charge that I’ve learned to look for when I’m considering what’s right for me. They energize me. I sort of experience that as a connection to the collective consciousness – so no matter how weird the idea is, if it energizes me, I interpret that to mean that there are others out there feeling called toward that idea, too. I love going from ‘I don’t know, that’s really weird’ to ‘This is weird, but it will probably find its people’ to ‘Holy moly, I’m on this adventure now with amazing, like-minded souls.’
Outrageous optimism is a lifesaver. It’s an energy source. I am certain that others think I’m a fool for finding hope where it makes every bit of sense to be hopeless. I respect the hopelessness of others; the different ways in which we operate are all valuable and revelatory. We need to cope in different ways, as a species. I know that sometimes there will be crushing disappointment and sadness and rage. But when I reflect on the awful experiences in my life and recall that I moved toward them with the assumption that they would turn out well, I never regret that. I avoided dread and anxiety before the outcome, and thus, those days were less dark, I was more mobile, and maybe I was able to extend some lightness and support to those around me.
Lastly, I swear that learning a few design programs early on in life so that I could make my own flyers and social media posts did me SO RIGHT, ha. Play! Find your style! Be confident in your use of cute animals and bubble letters! Seriously!
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
The Little Prince, always and forever. It was read aloud to me by a very dear friend over the course of a single night when I was 15 years old, and its layered messages were emblazoned into the core of me. Loving care is our highest level of being. Complexity for its own sake is worthless. What we give to one life mirrors what we give to all life. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.quarryrva.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quarryrva/
Image Credits
Headshot of Bird by Candace Taylor
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
