Last night was the second dinner, and it was a Mama Dinner. Five women — including me — who have known each other for years and are intertwined, largely through our kids. Kids who met doing theatre. Kids who became step siblings. Kids who are each other’s BFF’s.

It was a lovely, meandering conversation that kept returning to said offspring, though we took detours into how fucked up the medical system is, ideas for more communal living in our elder years, and the truth that one person noted: Many people are weird. Many people are not self-aware. The combo is not good.

Toward the end, as we somehow got on a down note, I invited people to share one good thing happening in the world. I really tried to frame the question as The World — greater than here, beyond us, out there. The answers were all kid-related. Incredibly sweet, heartfelt responses that came straight from mama bear hearts.

A tiny bit of me was frustrated — I wanted to hear broader stories. But on waking today, I thought this may be a symptom of our current state more than an inability to follow my hostess prompt. The goodness is right here, close in. The goodness is what we love so dearly. The goodness is what we allow ourselves to see because everything else hurts too much. A longer gaze is apt to take in too much pain.

The recent disaster in Nepal, for example. The videos are terrifying — beyond comprehension. If you’ve seen the show Paradise, you’re familiar with an apocalypse scenario that begins with a mega-caldera exploding, melting part of the Arctic ice shelf and causing a giant tsunami — walls of water impossible to comprehend and that can only be CGI.

But watch video from Nepal and it’s as shattering — much more so, of course, because it’s real. In one video, the person holding the camera is looking across a river of fast flowing mud toward a series of buildings. Through a gape in the wall, you can see a large group of people, no doubt wondering — what the hell? what now? where to? are we safe? It seems like the person making the video is trying to gesture to them to move. Suddenly, the building — really more a series of buildings — crumples and falls into the water. All traces of it, including those people, are whooshed away.

Our minds cannot comprehend.

So we stay close in. We understand teens in emotional distress. We understand 23 year-olds getting their first jobs. We understand weddings and funerals. We don’t understand glacier and rock collapses that trigger massive flooding — which is what scientists think happened in Nepal.

In my last post, I mentioned overhearing a conversation in which one person described a documentary about the melting of the glaciers in Iceland, and the other person somewhat dismissing it, saying that if the person in the documentary was so sad about them melting, he shouldn’t have become so attached to them. (Time and Water, by the way, is a great watch!) My heart heaved listening to this conversation. The person speaking said he wasn’t a climate denier but “a realist;” everything ends, he said. I was intrigued by the way what he was saying had threads of Buddhism and Octavia Butler in it, and yet … would any realist want what happened in Nepal this week to befall their community? To chalk it up to the natural order of things? Like children and parents dying out of order, we are well beyond the natural order of things.

[This post from Bill McKibben regarding last week’s events in Nepal speaks to this. Importantly, he writes: “Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American. More than 99 percent of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower (though much of that capacity was wiped out in last week’s floods). They are not causing the crisis that is killing them: we are.”]

A dharma friend has been posting about devastating fires in her home of northern New Mexico. In a recent note she describes what is happening — a fire that I imagine relative few of us are following, our hearts and minds distracted by so many other frightening headlines, or choosing not to look at any of it:

I want to zoom in on this: “I try to hold the heartbreak alongside a commitment to be present for those in need of support (material, emotional, spiritual). I want to learn what climate justice groups need to make headway. Things seem impossible, but there are always openings for skillful actions.”

We need to keep returning to, to intentionally reorient our gaze to the here and now of the world’s pains. As the great Buddhist eco-philosopher Joanna Macy taught, grief is the other side of the coin of love. When we suppress uncomfortable emotions to maintain an illusion of “everything is okay” — at least right here, right now, in my world — we don’t only diminish our capacity for grief, we dim our ability for love, joy, and beauty. Numbness results in paralysis, which keeps us from acting.

Last night, after my prompt, we never made it around the table. Our conversation veered off, wonderfully and happily, to a story of a child becoming an adult, advocating for themself. What I would have shared was this:

This week, I walked out of my house for an evening dog walk. The sky was lavender, the giant moon was rising — an egg yolk just clearing the tree tops. Five deer — two mamas and three spotted fawns — were grazing in the open lot. They looked up at us, decided we were harmless, and returned to nibbling. Down the street, I could hear a few kids laughing. In yards all around, glorious late summer abundance: zinnias, a loaded pear tree, prairie plants. An owl hooted in the distance, as the breeze and the quality of the light suggested fall is coming, but not quite yet. I was overcome by love for this place, this block, this moment, all living things in this ecosystem. I wanted to put my knees on the ground and offer a prayer. Feeling too exposed to do so, I instead stopped, brought my hands to my heart, breathed deeply, and gave thanks.

Currently filling my brain with …

I am reading Lightning Flowers by Katherine Standefer. This memoir is about her experience of learning in her early 20s that she has a cardiac abnormality that requires her to get a defibrillator placed in her body. For someone whose life is lived in her body — mountaineering, running, playing soccer — it’s not a small decision. She becomes curious about this device — what’s inside of it, what was entailed to make it — and goes to Madagascar to see the mining that is needed to extract the metals. It is a story of a) the medical community failing her in 10 ways to Tuesday, from egregious payments to overly confident doctors and snappy staff, b) the horrors of extraction and the ethical questioning of what the minerals and precious metals mined from the earth — disrupting the surrounding communities (to put it mildly) allows — in the author’s case, it allows life, c) who’s life matters more? how dare we even wonder this, but if we pay attention, we must, and d) at the end of the day, what is a good life.

Highly recommend it!

I’ve been listening to Dolly Parton’s America — a 9-part podcast with Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad, who grew up in Tennessee worshipping all things Dolly. It’s a great listen — with Dolly interviewed throughout, as well people who have worked with her, fans, and academics. A lot of fun!

Less noise. Less hand-wringing about the end of the world. Less aimless talk going no where. Less incendiary words. Less self-congratulations Less empty chatter. Less name dropping. Less spite and malice.

Less fake food. Less cinnamon roll M&M’s. Less chicken and waffle Oreos. Less butter dipped ice cream. Less protein sodas.

Less development. Less “sub-division coming.” Less “build here.” Less cornfields with for sale signs. Less knocked down trees making way for a Scotter’s, a BP station, a Caribou, a Chipotle, an Avid motel.

Less denial. Less “If he was going to be sad about the glaciers melting, maybe he should haven’t been so attached to them.” Less journalists asking scientists abut a fire/hurricane/heat wave: “Do you think climate change has anything to do with this?” Less carbon offsets. Less plastic “recycling” that goes into the dump. Less flying. Less asking ChatGPT.

Less extraction. Less lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, tungsten and copper pulled from the earth. Less empty economic promises. Less flash-in-the pan boomtowns. Less gaping holes. Less clearcuts. Less corporate propaganda. Less fleece vest-wearing tech bros flying into town to check on the latest project.

Less chemicals. Less applications to farmland of glysphosate and atrazine and acetochlor and chloropicrin and dicamba. Less ethanol masquerading as a positive alternative. Less phthalates and PFAS and BPAs in packaging.

Less noise.
Less clutter.
Less bravado.
Less bullshit.
Less money.
Less profit.
Less individualism.
Less short-term gain.

More . . .

Spaciousness . . . mutual aid . . . slowness . . . clean water . . . trees . . . time . . . solace . . . truth . . . carrots . . . rest . . . birdsong . . . insects . . . cover crops . . . prairie . . . public lands . . . reading . . . shared meals . . . caring for our elders . . . respect . . . listening . . . caring for our wounds . . . bread making . . . repair . . . baths . . . skinny dipping . . . getting lost . . . poetry . . . candle light . . . long tables . . . respect and money for teachers . . . artists . . . scientists . . . farmers . . . paid caretaking . . . prevention . . . local . . . communal . . .

Once in O’hare, we immediately tried to find a gate agent or help desk. They’ve done away with the latter, and the former were scarce. The only United personnel we connected with pointed toward a QR code. No assistance. No “sorry.” No friendly skies. Just a QR code. Which took us to a bot.

We decided to try to figure out over a meal at the closest restaurant. We kept looking for a server. Finally, a guy who was clearing a table pointed us wordlessly to a QR code.

We rescheduled ourselves and then got on standby. We waited for hours while watching the list via the app. Simultaneously, we were watching the weather app for the forecast in NYC — bad weather there was the supposed cause of our cancelation — but it showed only sun. Our hopes buoyed as we climbed to #2 and #3 on the standby list. But as the flight time neared, we slipped all the way to 14 and 15. I tried to find a person to explain why. Simultaneously, Tobey looked for answers online. Reddit proved more helpful than the non-existent gate agent, enough so that we gave up trying, booked a hotel, and made our way into the city for dinner.

In the dark of Lincoln Park, walking off a great meal — one that included not a single app or anything sub-human, featuring pitas that we watched someone form and pat and bake in a large stone oven — and the frustration of the day, two lights came toward us. Bikes? Scooters? It glided closer, an R2-D2-sized delivery robot. The two of us looked at each other in disbelief and hardly exchanged words before running at the thing with gleeful vengeance. Forcing it to stop, we yelled at it: We hate AI! Fuck robots! Go away!!! We don’t want you!!

Ultimately, the contraption went on its way, undaunted by our tantrum. “Do you think we were just filmed?” I asked my son. “Oh, without a doubt,” he said. The outburst was ridiculous but it provided a much needed release and gave us a momentary sense of autonomy. An entire day of being a puppet to algorithms had made us feisty, and this weird two-eyed robot that seemed more Wallace and Gromit than Doomsday was our undoing.

I heard a query this week that keeps rolling around in me: What is mine to do? A friend shared it in regard to a small school he works with that has gone into a staff retreat to consider this question — wondering if they are on the right track and doing the work that is theirs to do.

I am in a similar place as my life has opened up in a way I could not quite have foreseen even a year ago. I’ve been seeking the right question at the heart of all this spaciousness. It’s not, what can I do — because that’s a very very large set of possibilities. It’s not, what should I do — because should is a very slippery word that comes cloaked in cultural expectations.

It’s really What is mine to do. This perfect question recognizes there is some action, a doing that will unfold no matter what. A good life is one in which we intentionally harness our unique skills and way of being in the world to navigate this doing.

AI, however, muddies this question. What is mine to do may have been a gate agent offering kindness and sage assistance. It might be someone bringing food to a person in need late at night. I am not saying that many people aspire to be in either of these two jobs — job titles is not at the heart of the question. What I am saying is that there are people who can do these jobs well, and who find ways to excel in them, bringing their whole selves to the work involved. There are people who enjoy navigating complexity, and providing clarity and options to people who feel helpless.

A friend who works in palliative care and has a PhD in medical ethics, who has decades of experience gained at the bedside of dying people, was recently asked to give a presentation to a group of oncology nurses. He was asked how soon he could get the presentation together. Considering everything else on his plate, he estimated a week. The person doing the asking bulked: We need it tomorrow.

The only option was to use AI. My friend admitted that ChatGPT created a decent presentation, though he went in and edited some information and added others. The whole process took less than two hours.

What does it mean when speed is valued more than the creating? When efficiency trumps a thoughtful compilation of knowledge by one human in service of other humans?

It’s hard not to hold on to some small and admittedly smug sense that certain things I do and my kids do cannot be replaced by AI. Providing presence to the grieving. Cooking a detailed and precise dish. Teaching kids to draw and paint.

This smugness does not serve me as I’m certain each of these actions is currently being practiced in a lab somewhere by an algorithm my brain can’t begin to comprehend. I worry about what happens when what makes each of us us, the “us-ness” that is ours and only ours to give to the world, is not needed because there’s a bot or an app doing it in our stead.

“You’re not needed,” is the message. “Go find something else to do.” But what if THIS is yours to do. This is where your heart sings, and your creativity expands and flutters its wings.

I am watching my kids at 23 and 25-years old dive into the world. The guardrails of home and school are gone. The possibilities sometimes overwhelming — they could live here, go there, try this unexpected thing, fall off that cliff. At the other end of life’s spectrum, I have my own open container — sufficient income, no relationship to tie me to a place. The practice at both times of life is to return to the question: What is mine to do? There is a never-ending discernment, the point of which becomes sharper and more exact as we listen.

I return to a poem I keep taped to a cabinet in my kitchen:

Clearing
by Martha Postlethwaite
Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself to this world
so worthy of rescue.

This listening and discernment is the great work of a human life. It is aching and beautiful and ultimately defines how we embody our time here. But what happens if when we get to the clearing in the dense forest we find a robot? What if we wait patiently to hear the song, and instead we hear the hum of a data center and the notes of algorithms echoing through time and space?

Like the Sirens singing a promise of all hidden knowledge, AI offers temptation song of efficiency and exactitude. It’s a song that lulls us into believing the presentation created one day is always better than the one that took a week. It’s a song that favors the financial success of a few over meaningful work for many. It’s a song that scares me.

RECENTLY INSPIRING ME

The documentary Time and Water is about Andri Magnason, an Icelandic writer who has been capturing his family on video since he was a kid. His grandparents are dying and, with them, their memories of exploring the country’s glaciers. It never occurred to them that the glaciers could disappear. It never occurred to Magnason until it began to happen.

“Glaciers hold the Earth’s memories,” the writer/narrator says while footage appears on screen of a scientist pulling an ice core from deep in a glacier. Within such a sample is information about weather patterns, volcanic eruptions, and human input across thousands of years.

To a person, everyone I told I was going to see this movie made a little grimace face and said that it sounded hard and depressing. Why spend your time with that? Yes, it is a hard film at times, but it is also very life giving. Reminiscent of the documentary about the life and death of poet Andrea Gibson, there was incredible joy and tingling aliveness knitted through the entire film. This is what we have to lose, it demands of us.

In 2019, the writer/narrator was asked to provide a eulogy for the first glacier — Ok Glacier — in Iceland to no longer be a glacier. There was a sort of memorial service for it and these words were posted on a plaque:

A letter to the future

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as glacier. In the next 200 years all our main glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

August 2019, 415 ppm CO₂

We know what is happening and what needs to be done. Sit with this. Don’t look away. And yes, shit, it’s a lot. But don’t look away. Are we doing it? Am I doing it?

And now I’m home. There’s a growing grocery list at my side to make up for the relatively bare fridge. It’s pedestrian — cheese, fruit, milk. Other items on today’s to-do list include cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming, picking tomatoes and restaking some vines, and feeding the sourdough starter.

It’s straight forward. Even dull. And exactly where I want to be.

Since this trip was with my 23-year old son, I experienced NYC through his eyes a bit. He’d been in the city previously, but it had been years. Now, he was directing us through the subway, admiring architecture, and choosing the restaurants. He was energized by the crowded sidewalks and the sinuous routes between subway lines. All of which was fun for a few days but eventually was exhausting me. I had flashes of disappointment in my self to be livelier, to go more, embrace the zest! To not be 60. To not be introverted.

But I am. And fuck it, living my truth is no longer something to feel bad about it. I’m built for a slower pace. Home is more than okay. This middle of the country spot is fine, in the best sense of that word.

Given that my life is opening up — both my kids moving out and away, one just up the road to another town, the other down to New Orleans — and I could go anywhere, I’ve considered many possibilities. A camper van and the road. The long longed-for California. France. Heck, the Driftless area in Wisconsin! But I roll the idea around in my mind and return to this plot of land, this house, this neighborhood.

On the road from the airport last night, I experienced a familiar let down. My mood was still on NYC time, buzzing, wanting the next delicious thing, the next cool sight for my eyes. Really, I chided myself, I live here? This place with so many wrongs — the chemical soup of our water, the second highest cancer rate, and the second highest rate of book banning (was very bummed to miss Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jason Reynolds at the 1619 Freedom School Read-In a few weeks ago).

But when we pulled on to our street in a neighborhood with its copious hostas and mulberries staining the sidewalks, canopies of giant maples and intentionally overgrown lawns, I felt my system relax. All of me began to settle, like a shaken jar of pond water, the sediment slowing, slowing, and coming to rest.

I choose here. There’s something radical about that. Just like we choose a person and stay with them through messiness. We choose to keep showing up for them, to love them the best we can, while also asking them to love us back. I think of Wendell Berry, who has written so much about how a home is not as an accident of birth, but a deliberate, lifelong discipline of stewardship to a specific place. It is showing up for the land, small businesses, and people. And in turn, it shows up for you.

In the months surrounding my mom’s illness and death, this place loved me back. It held me in a network of friends, some of whom I hardly know. Food showed up. Cleaning and sorting help showed up. Professional expertise showed up.

Without a doubt, millions of people choose NYC. I’m sure it loves them back in certain ways. But my jostled nervous system knows where it wants to be. Rooted. Connected. Right here, right now.

You think I’d learn — put them in different places, develop a plan. But life is busy and I get by. I trust my brain more than I should to make the right call. (Perhaps it says something about me that I also have salt and sugar bowls on my counter that look dangerously similar.)

I’ve had the pleasure of birding with a friend lately and though her trained eye and ear can quickly differentiate between birds, I’m still a lost jumble of … Raven or crow? Thrush or finch?

All of which leads me ever so naturally (!) to politicians. Do you ever find yourself reading about an individual or an organization and it’s unclear which side they’re on? More than a handful of times, I’ve searched: Is so-and-so conservative or liberal?

There are such strange bedfellows these days, it can sometimes be hard to decipher. Case in point: When I went to D.C. in April for a lobbying fly-in with the National Organic Coalition, we visited a Midwestern rep’s office and met with a staffer. The Congressman is all about healthy food and has signed on to several bills that support organic farming. Organic farming doesn’t have a ton of champions in D.C., so this was great — we were happy to meet with his team.

The staffer was sitting in her office behind a big ol’ clunky desktop computer, the back of which (facing us) was covered in stickers. It was hard not to read them. A few were obvious — no words, just guns. An AK-47 and a handgun. One in pinky Barbie script said: Proud Anti-Feminist. Another that I had to read several times said: No one is born in the wrong body. I lost track of the conversation as I weighed whether this related to abortion or trans and marveled that it could be either and both options were equally upsetting.

Still, the rep loves fresh, healthy food! The rep is an ally. Right?

It felt a little like those tubes on my counter — from a certain angle, it’s hard to tell them apart.

So it’s refreshing to find a politician who doesn’t sound like one. Who isn’t trying to hoodwink anyone. Who doesn’t seem to walk in two different directions at once. Who isn’t really a politician but just a human who cares enough about something to put their time and energy into finding a path to change. And here, I give you Chris Jones. The fact that his two syllable name comprised of one of the most common first names and an almost laughably common last name suits him perfectly.

Chris is running for Secretary of Agriculture in Iowa. When I recently got to fill in the oval by his name during the primaries (he was running unopposed on the Democratic side), I literally did a little whoop that got me some side-eye from the election volunteer sitting nearby. He is a water engineer who has a great resume that spans from academia to government to nonprofits. And he’s been ringing the bell about the poor state of Iowa’s water for a long time — to the point where, in 2023, his blog that was housed in a university server was shut down by the University of Iowa. Several days later, he resigned, ostensibly pushed out.

He proceeded to publish the blog in a book, The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality, and continue it; it’s now on Substack under the same name. He formed a nonprofit, The Driftless Water Defenders, that seeks to “confront head on industrialized agriculture’s assault on our water resources in the Driftless Area of northeast Iowa and statewide” and is “intent on changing public policy, engaging citizens and, when necessary, litigating matters to protect and enhance Iowans’ access to clean water for personal, business and recreational purposes.” The group has brought legal actions against a meat processor and a CAFO.

I’ve met Chris a few times. I contacted him when I first became interested in working on the topic of environmental grief for my graduate thesis project. He generously met me for coffee when he easily could have had a short phone call or email exchange. He then shared names of people I might contact. I also went to a small book reading he did in which he spoke about his writing. I asked him who he counts as his literary inspirations — the answer: George Orwell and Upton Sinclair, with a dash of Mark Twain.

Listen to Chris speak and you’ll hear the dry humor of the latter. But mainly what I hear is approachable, straight forward information that calls a spade a spade without flourish and has little patience for self-aggrandizement. Chris knows the stakes are incredibly high. Iowa is already a mess in terms of what we’ve allowed to occur in the name of “feeding the world” — a dangerous phrase that has brought on the fastest growing cancer rate in the country, lakes and ponds that no one in their right mind will swim in as they’d basically be wading into a mixture of chemicals and feces, and the hollowing out of rural towns as agriculture becomes ever more consolidated into the hands of a few — a story excellently captured by anti-trust scholar and Iowa native Austin Frerick. His book Barons is one I recommend frequently. (Here is a great interview with Austin that was done by Nina Elkadi, who grew up in Iowa City and went to school here at the same time as my kids; she’s doing very solid work writing about ag.)

Here is Chris speaking a few days ago. At about the 3:15 mark, he speaks to the outrage that is finally awake in our state. It’s taken years, but it’s here. Back when he was writing his university blog, many people didn’t quite get the immensity of the problem or what was at its root. Certainly, Chris’ work has done a lot to wake people up to the issues around water in Iowa, myself included. But statewide awareness and disgust has been a gradual process. I’ve watched the scale tip from numb ignorance to national headlines and enough people showing up to public meetings that organizes need to scramble to find larger spaces.

This talk isn’t so much a stump speech as a clear summary of what’s happening in Iowa and many other states — mono-crops that have squeezed out diverse crops, restricted water use by the state’s largest city due to nitrates, jobs in the ag sector that have disappeared as data centers spring up.

If Chris is voted into office, it will be a miracle. And right now, it feels like a miracle that’s in reach. I live in a blue bubble, so I may be hearing and seeing what I want. But it does feel like people are sufficiently sick — literally — of the status quo. They no longer want to be confused by the tubes on their counter or to accidentally choose salt when they really wanted sugar. They want real difference. They want clean water. And to want that means to want diverse and human-scaled farms, to use government funds to monitor water — something stripped by the legislature, to support farmers in growing food for local schools, to fund ag research into healthy soil, to support government programs that help people who want to get into farming instead of giving handouts to humongous farms that are growing corn for ethanol.

I could keep going, but I feel my blood boiling. I am outraged. I grew up swimming in Iowa lakes and ponds, tubing down the Iowa River. These are dangerous acts today. Which is utterly awful, ridiculous, and just plain wrong. Of course, like you, I am outraged by so many things in our world right now. Things that I feel completely hopeless to do much about. But in the form of Chris’ campaign I feel hope. I have a sense of being on the cusp of change.

Consider giving to Chris’ campaign. If you do, let me know. I’ll do my best to match it.

I see our national parks as our ongoing struggle as a diverse people to create circles of reverence in a time of collective cynicism where we are wary of being moved by anything but our own clever perspective... The nature of our national parks is bound to the nature of our own humility, our capacity to stay open and curious in a world that instead beckons closure through fear. For me, humility begins as a deep recognition of all I do not know. This understanding doesn't stop me, it inspires me to ask more questions, to look more closely, to feel more fully the character of the place where I am. ― Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

Yellowstone. I drove through years ago on my way from Seattle to Iowa with a puppy on my lap and my then-husband at the wheel of a U-Haul truck. It was fall and the elk were bugling. We stayed in a little park cabin near Old Faithful. We saw it gush. We crept eastward out of the park, through the winding roads. That’s all I remember.

This time I was with Bella. Nothing to haul. Just things to let go of — the heaviness of the winter, the continuing unraveling of grief as it moves through my system. We came with curiosity and no agenda. Stayed in a glamping tent where we listened through the canvas ‘wall’ to a father explain the evils of pesticides to his kid, and why they only ate organic. Got a tour from Brian, a man who is doing exactly what he was made to do: share the place he loves while chatting, driving, and peeling his eyes for wildlife. Ate pizza at the strangest restaurant run by a Chinese couple with limited English, the waiters from Africa and Mexico. The pizza was surprisingly good. It was as though I’d moved to Japan, opened a ramen shop, employed people from Peru and Denmark. And none of us spoke very much Japanese

We were gone for a week, starting and ending in Jackson, looping up to Montana and down through Idaho and back to Wyoming. Along the way — many tourists and many transplants. Like Brian, who was originally from New York state; or Brennan, our river guide, who was from Alaska; or a shop owner who had just moved from Vermont; or the barista we talked with two days in a row whose accent placed her from Alabama or thereabouts. We shared a hottub with a couple who had driven over from Orange County, CA. And our first morning in the tent village, a heavily pierced Fiona, told me how she’d just arrived to work there for the summer from New Jersey. Had never been West before.

Along the way, there were a lot of Jesus shirts and Jesus tattoos and Jesus bumperstickers. There were many American flags — some of them all black and worn as a patch on a sleeve or stuck to a back car window, others upside down on the rim of a trucker hat, and still others classic and bold across expensive looking sweaters. There were entire families traveling across generations, pushing a wheelchair up a bumpy path near the Grand Prismatic geyser, hauling babies in strollers and backpacks, using canes and holding each other’s hands. There were dogs on leashes and off — bounding, panting.

Everyone was there for the wild. Hoping to spot an animal. Pulling over to the side of the road anytime anything larger than a marmot appeared. We were united in our hunger for the untamed, for NATURE. United in our time away from malls and screens. United in some ancestral pull to be humbled by the non-human world.

Standing in the rain on the observation deck of the Old Faithful Inn was the most American moment I’ve had in a long time. There was a little boy to one side of us eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream — until he got too cold and abandoned it to his mom. His face was smeared with it, brown and sticky. To our other side were two other boys, about seven or eight, who had met right there and were already fast friends, one upping each other with stories of their accomplishments: “I did a really inappropriate thing. When my teacher was talking, I said ‘boooorrrring!’” He laughs at himself in a nose-sniffling snorting way; the other boy widens his eyes, impressed by the audacity. They both know that teacher, they both know what it’s like to be bored in school. In a few minutes, they’ll watch the geyser erupt. They’ll part. And never think of each other again.

We all wait, oohing whenever there’s what seems like a start. Some of us are getting soaked. Some of us squeeze under the half of the deck that’s covered. Many cup hot drinks in their hands. Parents coax kids to be patient, it’s going to happen soon. And when it finally does — the hot water forcing its way through a narrow pipe, shooting up to 8,000 gallons of water 150-feet high — there’s quiet. Perhaps we feel small in the best way — our tiny human self in comparison to this hourly occurrence, older than any of us, than all of us combined. We may have come just to cross a site off a list, but that hush gives away an instinctual reverence.

What I found surprisingly moving was that we all watched it together. We waited with good humor on a chilly wet day in just-bought plastic ponchos and expensive mountain gear. Made room for little ones to get a better view. Gave grace to those who needed a seat. Laughed at each other’s jokes. No matter what kind of tattoos or t-shirts or hats we were wearing. We waited in unison. And when it was done, we clapped.

I used to. A lot. Vividly. Wildly.

Lately - very little. They might come into focus for a moment upon waking and then drift away.

What I do have more frequently are memories. I’ve tended to be someone who lives very much in the present. I wish I could credit this to years of Buddhist practice, but I think it’s just the way I’m wired. In fact, my recall is often crap, as my kids can attest. “Remember when …?” they’ll ask, and the answer is almost always no. Sometimes this embarrasses me. But I try to tell myself there’s just more space for current information.

My wiring for the present became apparent when I lived with a partner who seemed to be always half in the past. His conversation points came from the Way Back Machine — college, high school, childhood. He told stories of the kids who lived on his block, calling them by their full names — Billy Jones, Mike O’Hara. They were like a Greek chorus, as were the members of his extended family — crazy uncles, a brilliant cousin — and the rambling group of college friends who went to Grateful Dead concerts with him.

All of these people seemed to be as vividly present to him as anyone in his current life. Just as interesting. Just as worthy of his attention and time.

While I am not dwelling in the past, I’m increasingly having specific people and places arise. The summer in Maine with April. A walk down Broadway, the main drag of Capitol Hill, the neighborhood where I lived in Seattle. I hear my roommate Maria’s voice and laugh, though I haven’t seen her in decades — she lives in New Zealand now. Or I feel the wind on my face as I ride my bike to swim practice on an early summer morning.

It’s memory as Pointillism — each micro memory creating a portion of the canvas.

It’s common for people in their final days of life to have conversations with people from the past — an already deceased sibling or spouse. That may have been true for my mom, but mainly what she spoke aloud seemed to be her reliving mundane but happy moments. “Oh, I heard it’s good. It got very good reviews. You should go.” she said to someone in a tone that conveyed she knew what she was talking about (she usually used that tone, doubt was not big in her repertoire). In the last week, as I sat near her bed working on my computer, she ordered a tuna salad sandwich. I assumed she was sitting at the counter of the long-gone, much loved Pearson’s Drugstore, where the back counter served the best chocolate malts and tuna salad sandwiches. Miracle Whip and crunchy iceberg lettuce.

Her memories were, it seemed, pleasant and easeful. Nothing complicated or emotionally messy. Just what I would order up for my final days.

Memories that are easy for me to conjure are of the spring and summer of 1976. I was 9 going on 10. We were all preparing for the Bicentennial. Everything was focused on it in the greater world — cereals, mini-series, pop music. Take the longest Coke ad ever.

So, of course, the teachers went all in on this historic moment. We made art. Read books. I think even dodge ball was turned into the Yanks v. the Brits.

We worked for what now seems like months on an all-school production — a sort of oral history play in rhyme. Each grade took on different parts of our nation’s history, which had yet to come under much scrutiny. Along the hallways, we displayed the box portraits we’d made of historic figures — imagine Betsy Ross made out of a shoebox and an oatmeal container with yarn hair and crayon eyes.

On a May day toward the end of the year, we performed to an overflowing crowd of parents in the cafeteria-gym, working through 200 years of arrival, conquest, and joyful rise to power. (Well, probably more like 150 years, since the recent past always gets shunned by teachers who either don’t have time or are too timid to wrestle with still tender divisions.)

I recall three things about the actual performance: 1) sing-speaking a poem-song about the boll weevil and cotton (cringe), 2) the entire school chanting the names of Native American tribes (double cringe), and 3) multiple kids fainting in the late spring heat of the packed gymnasium as teachers stage whispered: “Don’t lock your knees,” though none of us understood what that meant.

Now, it’s 50 years later, and I’m way less enthusiastic about any kind of nationwide celebration. Fireworks overwhelm me these days — and my dogs. And though I still love a potluck and yard games, the thing at the center of it can no longer be ignored. As Frederick Douglass put it well, “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.” Distances that have only grown more extreme. A distance on view as the president says he doesn’t care about the financial reality of everyday Americans.

It occurred to me yesterday that I can go elsewhere this early July. I don’t have to stick around. I could drive far north and find a hidden cabin. Fly to Mexico. Seek out the desert. None has captured my imagination, but the idea of leaving definitely feels right. Refusing to participate is always an option. Even the Commodores just said “no” to being included in the macabre spectacle planned for Washington, DC.

I’m curious what others are thinking as we creep closer to July. Where will you be? How will you be responding to a day that will surely be coopted to the hilt by those whose narrative is narcissistic at best and authoritarian at worst. What memories will be made on this day for the current 10-year olds who, for better and worse, cannot blithely sing about picking cotton or make box art of the founding fathers. Maybe it will be something like Coke’s “Drink-in America” ad, which is even longer than its predecessor.

The friend who asked if I dream is much younger than I am — just finished his BA/MA combined. Is starting his first job. Celebrates his mixed race heritage. Is full of joy and gratitude and self-awareness. Is truly an amazing human.

What would it be like, I often wonder these days, to be 20-something. I don’t mean this so much in the way of what would be my hopes and fears, my experience of finding work, my relationship to climate … But how would I be different from the inside out if I had grown up in this century and not in the last. How would my assumptions about the world, my internalized cultural biases be different? What would be my sense of gender and sexuality? I’m pretty sure I would have considered other options than two faulty marriages that were built on a foundation of patriarchy, no matter how aware we claimed to be.

And then there are the kids being born now, in the midst of the rise of AI. What will their memories be? When they reach old age, what will be their memory of an easeful, mundane day? What will be the memories they truly made compared to those held in the cloud, formulated by algorithms and trillionaires?

Does AI dream? Here is its response to this question: “AI does not dream in the conscious, biological sense. It has no emotions, subconscious, or inner life. However, certain AI systems operate in ways that are remarkably similar to how humans dream, relying on processes like associative recombination and digital hallucinations.”

And when asked to produce a hallucinogenic image of the US bicentennial, here is what it created.

Interesting that the Reflecting Pool, now in the news is there. The VW bus, which looks stuck in an earlier decade, seems like a singular attempt at anything happy. The face is pulled from Magritte — AI conflating “hallucinogenic” and “surrealism".” The stallion is straight out of a Napoleonic scene. The Twin Towers look like they are smoking, an intimation of their collapse and the beginning of nation building’s end. The astronaut points to our recent return to the Moon, grasping at greatness. All the people atop the head are white men. The background is a burnt earth.

It all feels oddly real. Just add a fighting cage in front of a destroyed White House and you’re here. Now. In the hallucination that is today. No memories of the past. Just the utter surrealism of the present.

Need a Pick-Me-Up?

Watch this new Allison Russell song performed with a bunch of kids. (Be sure to watch all the way through for the kids’ part!)

“Calling all birds from across the Nation
Yeah, we got a brand new murmuration
We don’t gotta fly in your old formation, no!”

Watch: Marty, Life Is Short

One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting. - Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

When you’re a word person, you tend to become curious about, enamored by, and attuned to language that captures the current moment. You notice a word or phrase and think: Yes, that’s it, that articulates what it feels like to be alive in this moment. And you put it in your pocket and rub it like a worry stone. You think you’re clever to have noticed this word. It’s momentarily yours. You notice it again, and think, Oh, that person is clever, too; they’re “in,” they get it.

I imagine this must be how it feels to be a fashion person who finds a new combination of silhouette, color, and material — finds it exciting and somehow apropos, only to find it showing up a month or a year later in Old Navy.

Similarly, word people see the gradually increase in usage. What was only found in crevices is suddenly out in the open.

It was this way with liminal. And polycrisis. And mycelial. All words which I admit to rather proudly using when most people were yet unfamiliar with them. We word people are just as prone to smugness as someone who has “discovered” a yet-unknown band.

Currently, for me, the word is interstitium. Or its adjective form: interstitial. It’s been on my radar for the past few years. I first encountered it via a Radiolab show and an accompanying essay Last week, it came around again via a NYTimes animated piece. The word comes from anatomy and is a space/place in the body that is both invisible and everywhere all at once. It moves information, protects, regulates, and sometimes makes illness move faster.

The interstitium was discovered so recently — with initial scientific papers appearing in 2018 — that the medical community is still trying to classify it — is it an organ? a system? It wasn’t found via new technologies but by re-training our eyes and becoming curious about something hiding in plain sight. That is, to Western eyes. Other systems of medicine and mind-body mapping have been aware of it for centuries — namely acupunture, which works on the body’s meridian channels.

Defined as “a contiguous, body-wide network of fluid-filled spaces located between your skin, internal organs, and muscles,” the interstitium had been shrugged off by Western medicine as something not worth noticing or delving into. It is fractal in appearance, taking up a honeycomb pattern that it exhibits no matter the scale. It carries four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system — so you have four times more interstitial fluid than blood!

My mom’s cancer, Sarcomatoid carcinoma, an aggressive cancer that is a mix of carcinoma and sarcoma cancer types, was found as a large mass in the interstitium of her chest. Physicians had a difficult time explaining this to us (perhaps because it’s only recently been added to medical textbooks?). The descriptions always included inexactitudes, e.g., “It’s like the space between things.” “A sort of cavern.” I imagined the mass growing out of thin air, the way a mushroom appears after a rain, seemingly from nothing - though of course, from everything, sprouting from a vast network of threads running under the ground, out of sight.

It’s morbid, I know, but I wish there had been a tiny camera inside my mom that captured the start and spread of cancer in her body. Where it exactly it began, is unknown. However, it likely traveled through the interstitium, which turns out to be a superhighway for cellular movement. My mom’s cancer movie would have been a high-speed chase — Keanu Reeves or Tommy Lee Jones leaping from one train to another with a gun in hand, and a mission to succeed at any cost. By contrast, many cancer movies are plodding eastern European art films with no hero and an indiscernible plot creeping toward an intentionally unsatisfying denouement.

Winding myself back toward the word and why it captures this moment: The interstitium is what we all need to feel/understand/recognize right now in order to save ourselves. We need to really see and acknowledge the networks of connection — especially of the natural world of which we are a part — that have been disregarded in favor of imposing our will through chemicals and technology and systems that seem so true and concrete they cannot be undone.

These networks aren’t woo-woo, invisible, or hoped for. They’re quite real and proven. We have collectively chosen to become oblivious to them. We have chosen amnesia. We must wake back up to the fact that we are mutually connected to everything, and that every living thing, from the tiniest bug to the tallest tree, from the most monetarily impoverished person to the most seemingly indestructible corporation, matters.

We are in that high-speed car chase movie right now. The cancer is spreading at an alarming rate. The pile-ups are occurring everywhere around us. People are futilely revving their engines, trying to power themselves over or around others through sheer strength. When what is really needed is finesse, subtlety, and collaboration. (Thanks to my friend Andy, who introduced me to the traffic jam metaphor.)

When I am overtaken by angst or sorrow, I try to remind myself of all that is true and yet unnoticed, all that might be available to my limited human senses were I to slow down and notice versus all that is pounded and blared into me on any given day.

Some questions that sustain me:

• What am I not seeing due to my geography, class, race, gender, age …?

• What is emerging from the collective?

• What is here all around me that I’m taking for granted by not fully recognizing it? Answers include: air, water, the functioning of my body, seasonal changes.

• Who else on Earth is feeling similarly to how I’m currently feeling? (e.g., I’m not alone in this feeling.) Who is in more pain? (e.g., Re-connect to compassion for suffering.) Who is experiencing joy? (e.g., Re-connect to sympathetic joy — our pleasure in others’ pleasures.) How am I connected? (e.g, Despite my seeming isolation, how and where am I part of a greater network of community.)

I try, in other words, to recall the realities that have been bred out of me by a culture hellbent on a specific vantage point. I try to reenter the interstitium — the flow of life — instead of getting trapped in a single organ and its seeming solidity.

I try to see what’s right in front of me.

RECENTLY REVIVED BY …

We Do Not Part is a novel that reminded me a bit of Lincoln In the Bardo, though where George Saunders’ novel is sprawling, creating a netherworld of many characters, the slim book by Noble winner Han Kang is quietly intimate. Both take us to a place that is neither here nor there, where death and living intermingle.

This talk by Zen teacher and psychologist Flint Sparks reminds us to recall our practice is to expand our ability to love, to become an ever larger vessel.

The prints of Mexico City artist Eduardo Robledo are witty, beautiful, and push one to see anew.

Last night, I ate multiple chefs’ dishes at a fundraising dinner. This morning, the one I want to eat again (and again!) was by Abe Gessesse of Hyacinth — grilled asparagus with big sprigs of fresh dill, shaved ricotta salata, a spicy verde sauce, and a smattering of hazelnuts. Damn!!!!

The part I dread is my body. The back pain. The hip pain. The knee pain. Eventually, even the ankles hurt.

The mind part, though, I can’t wait. I feel like an overly messy whiteboard. It’s so packed with dates and names — both of which keep peeling off and floating away. All of the tangled cords of my mom’s estate — phone calls to lawyers, bankers, financial planners, insurance companies (all of whom seem to prefer the phone to email); placing things on Marketplace, taking other things for resale, and others to a local charity; finding space in my house for what remains. The paper I still need to finish for my graduate program. The garden to be cleared out and readied.

And I can’t make it stop.

So this week: Silence. Stillness. No big moves. Gentle, small, whatever fits in my cupped hands. Right here. Precision. Intention.

Earlier today, I turned down a writing-related job that I usually would have jumped at, but I realized I was grasping. I said yes because part of me knew it would be fun; this part ignores the part that’s exhausted, that can’t pull a name out of my left anterior frontal lobe. The exhausted part is usually ignored by the rest of me because paying attention to it means not doing. It means less not more. Turning off the phone and down the invitation and away the knock at the door.

My mom’s condo is down to about a dozen large items — dining table, bed, an oil painting… and many small things that either don’t matter at all, like her random collection of small holidays puzzles (?) that probably just need to be tossed, or that matter tremendously but only to me, like the mint green ice cream scoop that we’ve had my entire life. My mom may have gotten rid of her landline just months before her death (RIP 4714), but she still had this scoop. And I am keeping it.

So this week, amid the bodily pain, I’ll be watching my mind jump from enormous items of concern — environmental collapse, war and suffering — to the smaller ones that really don’t matter and need to be on their way (are the neighbors upset with me? should I go to Minnesota in July?), or that do matter to me in some way that is worthy of my attention. This last group are like that scoop. They matter precisely to me. The people, ideas, creative projects, places I love. They matter, and they will all end. Which is becoming increasingly bittersweet.

I hope a big clog will be cleared. Like when you finally get wax removed from your ear and the process hurts and is the most satisfying thing ever. Pain worth signing up for. Stillness worthy of nothing.

You check your thoughts. Take a breath. Another. Close the screen. Walk away. Engage in the life you have here. Now. But the following morning you wake and immediately sense the residue of him in your dreams. For eight years, he’s been there, haunting your nights. There are periods of relief, periods when you think he’s finally been burnt entirely from your system, like the plantar warts you had as a kid that were frozen painfully out, leaving hollows behind.

But he returns. Ghost. Phantom. A persistent nag of a wound that will not close. You want it to close. You’ve therapized it. Prayed on it. Used sorcery. And still, it seeps and weeps — a perpetual scraped knee. Like in second grade when you showed up in the nurse’s office several times a week with one of the knees of your tights (those fucking tights!) ripped open from a playground scuffle and your skin, again, shorn. The smell of Bactine, sharp, and Bandaids, sweet. The return home to a disparaging sigh at the loss of another pair of tights (those fucking tights!). Until I outgrew it.

But this I can’t seem to outgrow. It is the grief that has not healed. I miss my father. My grandmother. Now, my mom. I grieve dogs — Arlo, who died too soon and too suddenly; Hannah, who I regret not putting down sooner, she was in too much pain. I grieve the children I carried but never carried. I am sorry for the friends I hurt, several of whom I don’t even know how I hurt, have never puzzled it out, but miss them deeply and wish I could bridge the gap. The fields that disappear on what had been the outskirts of town, turned into too-big houses. The depleted soil. The insects and birds all vanishing. I grieve.

But none like this. Sometimes I get close to forgiving him, but then I think of how he walked away without a word from two kids, my kids, who he raised for a decade. How one of them reached out to him a few years ago, and he ignored him. How one of his gurus and several of his friends supported him in lying to you about the affairs, one after another. How he works as a therapist helping others with their trauma. And yet, how he has never atoned for this injury — has, instead, focused on himself.

The bile is rising. I stop. Part of me is angry with myself. This is a choice; I am choosing to do this to myself. Self-flagellation. … And I breathe. Right now. I breath deep into myself. See the sun on the wall. Feel the rise and fall of breath of the small dog at my side. Hear the bamboo chimes on the front porch. Say the names of neighbors who are nearby, each an island of sanity. Forgive myself for not being able to heal this wound. Grace, grace, grace, I whisper into the morning. I forgive myself. I forgive.

REPRIEVE

The magnolia out back is opening, the pink buds pushing through the velvet pods. I decided this morning to throw it a party. In a few weeks. At its height. I was just in Washington D.C. and walked from Capitol to the Tidal Basin to see the cherry blossoms, though, honestly, it was the quieter garden around the Asian museum (still named after a drug pusher family whose name I won’t say) filled with magnolias that impressed me most. Really, it was that so many people came out to see trees. That is the beauty.

Empty handed I entered the world.
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going-
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.

– Kozan

Losing my dad when I was in my early 40s was much different than losing my mom as I approach 60. The first was all about him — sadness that he’d left too early, that he wouldn’t know my kids. But this loss is drawing me more inward to my own mortality. Frustratingly, it’s proving hard for it not to be all about me.

There was a moment in the midst of my mom’s illness when I got home very late from the nursing facility. Washing my face, I looked and saw an ancient reflection. Such a cliche: I’d aged overnight. Just weeks before I was feeling incredibly full — plunged into a life that was suddenly churning with the possibility a new job had brought. Here, though, was a downward turned face marked by grays and creases, blotches and dimness.

It’s two months since her death and light has returned to my face. But it’s changed. I will never look in a mirror again and see the face of someone whose mother is alive. I see a face that is closer to death than it’s ever been. Which, of course, is everyone’s face, every single day.

The profundity of mortality is something our minds are either pulled toward or resist. We obsess or we deny. Our inevitable death is a truth that is hard to locate a middle-of-the-road attitude toward. We veer to the poles, not the equator.

In recent days, I’ve spent more time than I’m proud to admit googling photos of youthful haircuts, considering my waistline, and contemplating how I might dress as I enter my next decade. Maybe I embrace a capsule wardrobe. Choose two colors and buy only those. Do I add color to my hair or shave it off?

Void — “absence, emptiness, vacuum.” And its sibling, Avoid, from the Middle English — "to empty, rid, take out, remove, discharge from the body, send away; eject or banish; destroy, erase; depart from or abandon, go away."

There is a twinned mental play that occurs in aging and facing death — anticipatory grief of the things you won’t get to see, and an almost equal relief of the things you won’t have to experience. Greece. A grandchild. The unwinning team’s win. But also destruction of beloved places and treasured ideas. Fracked mountaintops. Democracy.

Poles — not equators.

To be alive now and to be dying now — again, the same thing — is to be doing so alongside the ending of the world as it’s been known for the last several centuries. The end of a world of engines and unfettered progress. A world whose spine is made of fossil fuels that power us in planes and cars, plastics our daily lives with ketchup bottles and sweaters, fracks its way into our heating systems and powers our digital connectivity. It’s a world that is untenable. And even as it dies, it is pregnant with a new world. The old one smoldering down, composting itself, eating its own tail. The new one gestating toward something we can’t imagine (though we try hard, mainly coming up with worst case scenarios of apocalypse).

On Friday, I listened to a podcast that I follow — The Great Simplification, hosted by Nate Hagens, an expert in energy supply who explicates the unavoidable shift of our world from its peak level of extraction and energy use to one of more local economies. Along with guests, he explores our status-driven world, addictions, and collective aversion to making the changes needed to adapt for the future. It’s cheery. It’s hard medicine. And in this recent episode, he was more dire than usual, claiming that current events in the Middle East are accelerating global unraveling.

Islands of sanity is a theory the systems thinker Meg Wheatley put forth more than a decade ago. When I first read it, I resisted it. I avoided it. I shunned it. An island of sanity is “an intentional community or workplace that provided refuge, connection, and meaningful work amidst global chaos and societal collapse.” These spaces aren’t about escaping, but rather creating pockets of sanity—life-affirming, generous, and compassionate spaces—where people can stay together and do good work.

If you read this and roll your eyes or feel squeamish, chances are you’re in the space of avoidance. The space that wants to splash color in your hair and maybe spring for some Botox. And wow, do you have good company! Most of us on any given day will join you in this space of avoidance. Yet it’s a place we need to actively resist and move consciously toward reality. Because when we avoid death, we avoid life as it is.

During a conversation with others in my chaplaincy program, one person spoke of how much he resists doing the work of sitting in meditation, going to volunteer with people who are sick-dying-suffering. “Man, I don’t want to do this,” he said so honestly, a grimace on his face. “And yet I can’t not do it.”

Making the work irresistible is a tall order when you’re up against addictive screens and fast fashion and quick flights and and …. But we need to embrace change — aging — death — compost. To actively wonder how we can share skills and information with younger people — to be a bridge toward what is next. Rather than avoiding our own dwindling, can we be curious and creative about what is emerging?

Every time I go into my mom’s apartment, I feel resistance. It’s hard to even get up the energy to go, and once I’m there, I walk around opening doors and drawers, trying to recall what’s been cleaned out already and what is yet to do. The easiest items are packed. We’re down to cords and old tech, half-used cleaning supplies and eyeglasses, snapshots and datebooks. A sort of wall goes up in me: I do not want to deal with this, it says. Perhaps oddly, what helps is thinking of any of her items in new homes providing beauty or joy or comfort. I imagine someone else living in the walls of her condo, living into new stories. And there’s a sigh of yes, this.

I am yet undecided if I’ll cancel the hair dye session I booked. I’ve resisted buying a whole new wardrobe. I’m planting lettuce seeds today. And sharing newfound funds with those who might need it in the immediate moment . I’m trying every day to move from void to fecundity. To embrace my own inevitable cellular breakdown, to not fear my next becoming.

I am unbecoming a daughter and a mother. I am becoming an elder. I am unbecoming a consumer and becoming a gardener. I am unbecoming an owner and becoming a steward. I am unbecoming a body and becoming a cosmos of cells. I am unbecoming a collection of memories and becoming a constellation of nerves positioned to “Now.”

SANITIES & JOYS

A new friend asked me to be on his podcast, which is really just a public way in which he is gathering stories toward a film about the current environmental degradation of soil and water in Iowa. Here I am talking with Charlie Morris about the practice of bearing witness in the midst of Big Ag. Or watch it here.

I learned recently that in 1876 meat fell from the sky in Kentucky. This delighted me as proof that anything is possible.

I have missed Serena since then and haven’t gelled with any of the women players who have come up since. But I see a lot of her these days. Seems like every time I watch TV she’s there injecting her belly, upper arm, or thigh. I was just in Chicago, and she looked down at me from an expansive billboard. As always, she looks strong and cool. But now, instead of chasing the next win, she is announcing her weight loss and encouraging us to follow her lead.

I have SUCH mixed feelings about GLP-1s. Maybe you do, too. On the “wow” side, they are:

• a reminder of how much we can benefit from the natural world we are actively destroying;: GLP-1s are derived from peptides found in anglerfish and hormones in the gila monsters;

• beneficial for way more than weight loss and their originally studied purpose of controlling Type-2 diabetes, including substance use and psychotic disorders, seizures, neuro-cognitive disorders like dementia, multiple cancers, and several respiratory conditions. As one science writer said, a decade from now, weight loss may be viewed as a secondary reason for taking GLP-1s, with brain health and cancer protection much higher.

My issue is not with the drug. It’s with the marketing of it, the capitalizing on our collective fear of and disdain for fat. It’s with the belief that easier is nearly always preferable. And, most of all, with our stubborn refusal to look at root problems.

The root problems not being considered in Serena’s ads are acceptance that most women gain weight as they age and, especially after having children — she’s had two. Women are praised for looking “amazing” if they’re back to their former size within months — sometimes weeks — of giving birth.

It’s that larger bodies are denied the right to be sexy and successful in the public spotlight. That women are encouraged to be strong in a narrow way — sleek and biceps, yes; thick and looks like she could kick anyone’s ass in an alley fight, definitely not. Serena looked like the latter at that last US Open — and it was thrilling. Now, she’s safely in that first category. Boxed back into an acceptable kind of strength.

There’s also Trump-like nepotism going on as she peddles the key product of a company in which her husband is a major investor. There’s the root problem of where companies like Alexis Ohanian’s (he founded Reddit) choose to spend their money, often rubbing sand into our collective anxieties and capturing our attention rather than in addressing our underlying pains.

Imagine if Serena were looking down from that billboard with her two daughters with a message of strength for women and girls, a message calling out the sexualization and abuse of female bodies in our world that’s come to a zenith with the Epstein files. Or if the billionaire couple was buying land and giving it to black and indigenous farmers, trying to right the extreme unequal distribution of land.

My mom died of a very rare cancer two months ago. What caused it will never be known, though years of smoking were likely the main culprit. It is a cancer that’s not usually discovered until it’s too late for any kind of full recovery. In hindsight, though, one of the symptoms was her loss of appetite.

This was much harder to notice because she’d gone on GLP’s a year or so earlier to to address pre-diabetes. Her appetite disappeared overnight. Someone who had always had enthusiasm for food now nearly reprimanded waiters when they delivered her meal: “That’s too much!” She loved desserts but stopped ordering them. Her refrigeration was often quite empty, minus beverages.

By this winter when other symptoms — exhaustion, a pain in her shoulder — were appearing, we’d all grown so used to her lower appetite that we didn’t mention it. It wasn’t until I realized that she hardly eating — a single container of pudding constituting her main meal — that her food consumption, or lack thereof, was officially noted to doctors.

The drug masked a very real problem. We live in a world of so many masks — people who aren’t what they seem, companies touting easy fixes, euphemisms to help us forget the severity of our problems. In 2017, The Guardian revealed that staff at the US Department of Agriculture were instructed to blacklist terms such as “climate change,” “climate change adaption,” “reduce greenhouse gases,” and “sequester carbon.” Instead, they were instructed to use “weather extremes,” “resilience to weather extremes,” and “build soil organic matter.”

We’ve been sold ease. We’re addicted to it. All under the guise of fun characters, sleek celebrities, sugary relief from our woes.

We don’t even know the depth of our addictions until something pushes us to expose them. When the older woman from rural Iowa who shared a hospital room with my mom awoke from surgery, all she wanted was a Pepsi. The nurse explained repeatedly that she could only have clear liquids. “PEPSI!” she hollered and proceeded to throw in some impressive expletives.

I think about my mom’s many years of eating poorly. She loved McDonald’s and often went without meals in lieu of a Diet Coke and some cookies. Starches and red meat were more her style than salads and fresh fruit. And also - wine. What if she’d spent most of her life eating really healthy foods?

What if? What if?

The question arises after so many deaths. But it seems this question, which rears its head when I watch Serena pedaling RO, has tentacles far beyond my mom and her longevity. Because those healthier foods would mean healthier soil, more diverse and smaller farms that keep smalltowns alive and don’t reward the mass-scale monocultures that need glyphosates and other inputs to keep them growing - and which then flows into our waters and through our taps and into our bodies where it causes cancer.

Two weeks ago, I attended an organic farming conference. It was so energizing — so much talk of change and action and the word “revolution” used with sincerity instead of as a tossed out word gimmick.

It was unsettling, then, in the midst of all this enthusiasm to hear my state repeatedly brought up as the fallen child, the dark example of what can happen when you give agribusiness carte blanche. “We’ve seen what this looks like in Iowa…” “Iowa is the canary in the coal mine.” “It’s not too late to avoid becoming Iowa.”

Iowa: a full-throttle extraction economy is the truth.

Iowa: feeding the world through sunny farms, kids drinking out of hoses, fields of swaying-in-the-wind corn is the mask.

I crossed the state line from Wisconsin back into Iowa with a new heaviness. I saw this place that I already knew was in a bad way and wondered: Is it too late? What if? What if?

Inspiring Me

A new term I learned this week: watershed death spiral . This and other water stories are told by Zach Weiss on his ingenious Water Stories website that explains many aspects of our current and growing water crisis. Listen to his interview on the Green Dreamer podcast.

Tabitha Arnold makes labor-intensive art. Her largescale tapestries — up to 7-feet tall — depict the radical past and ongoing struggle of working people. She’s inspired by the history of the labor movement, as well as her own direct experiences as a worker, organizer, and artist coming of age during a wave of unionization and class-consciousness.

“…the futures we imagine are based on our lived experiences and what we can possibly extrapolate from them.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs

It’s one of those questions that gets pulled out in a late night conversation when the beer has grown warm. Or on a cross country drive as you shift in your carseat and look for a new topic. “What would you do if you do if money was no issue?”

I always go blank when it appears. I want to have an answer that rises to the occasion. Start an elephant sanctuary. Travel around the world entirely by waterways.

I assume that others have these responses at the ready and can spring into action if and when the money appears. Not me. I pause before responding “Travel?” with an upward lilt that suggests the person asking might be able to tell me my true answer.

Most of us have a list of practical things we’ll do if and when the next chunk of money comes in. For me, this means trying to address the swampland that is my backyard. Or replacing the 30+ year old carpeting in my bedroom that is probably harboring god knows what micro creatures and icks me out tremendously.

This question mainly makes me feel that I have a deficit of imagination. What’s wrong with me that I can’t imagine bigger, better, bolder?

The other night, I was gifted a ticket to a documentary about the writer-activist Toni Cade Bambara. It’s a great watch — including amazing footage from a writers’ retreat in the Bahamas in the 1980s with Bambara, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Sonia Sanchez, and one amazing writer after another. This was a woman of imagination. Of action. Of open-hearted generosity. Toni Cade — or, Miltona, as she was born — met a person in need on the street and invited them into her home. She learned filmmaking skills so she could tell the story of the 1985 military attack on the heart of Philadelphia’s African American community. She named herself. She taught and mothered and fought and never lowered her gaze.

The movie led me down a rabbit hole of searches (I’ll spare you the clicks that took me from one character in the film to another), which came to an abrupt stop when a question arose. The question was leveled by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and it goes like this: What would you be like if there was no capitalism?

Not, what would the world be like. Or how would your life be structured differently. But what would you — that internal combination of emotions, sensations, thoughts, and preferences — be like. How might it feel to be you in such a world? Would it alter your fears? Subdue your anger? Allow you to stop comparing and measuring and feeling helplessly attached to noticing who has more and who has less? Free up space in your being as you exhale deeply?

This strikes me as a more important and wildly more interesting question than what would you do if money were no issue. That question is grounded in capitalism, in a transactional and hierarchical world. This other more surprising question invites me to feel into my tenderest parts and pick out the bones that were left by the supposed Truth of the three-headed god of Supply, Demand and Profit. It pushes me to get curious about innate being v. learned behavior. About how much of what feels like “me” is actually constructed by a system that is not all that old, in the grand scheme of things.

I’m doing that right now: taking a deep breath. (Try it. It always always helps.) I am so thankful for every interaction I had this week that opened my imagination. I am incredibly there were several such conversations, each surprising, energizing, and full of mutual respect. I am grateful for this wealth of connections with people who ask less likely questions, the kinds that open a grate in the mind you’d never noticed and rock your sense of what is possible. This where I want to live, in the rich unknown.

More Mind Expansion

Polyamory and Anti-Capitalism

“Pursuit of the nuclear family is framed not as a choice but as a moral imperative, a safety net and the end goal. And when alternatives to the monogamous heterosexual married-house-kids prescription are presented, the existing structure aims to drag them under its umbrella. … [Legalized marriage was] a victory for LGBTQ+ rights, no question, but a victory within the channels of a system that does not embrace newcomers so much as assimilate them.”

Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency

This show is currently up in LA, featuring the work of Milford Graves (1941-2021) polymath musician, visual artist, botanist (!), and martial artist. His drumming plays throughout the exhibit, and there is a loop of the sound created by exhibit visitors that was created by an audio artist. Weekly events feature different drummers playing on his hand-painted kit, while video of Graves executing the martial arts form he created play in the background.

I went down a rabbit hole the other night. The best kind of rabbit hole. One far away from Minnesota and the brutal sanding away of our rights. Away from the conversations about my mom’s morphine dosage, which quickly morphed all too into conversations about estates and donations.

I’m not even sure how I ended up there, Alice-like on a Tuesday night. I went looking for art — to try to jumpstart my heart. Douse it in the open veined visions of imaginations birthed from experiences far afield from my own. Less chronological. More mythological. Fewer rocks. More waves. Only by jumbling our sense of reality can we grow our heart to contain other experiences.

I landed in southern India. An art biennial in Kerala. I know the word K-E-R-A-A-L-A. But I couldn’t place it on map. Didn’t know of its left wing politics and watery canals. I found there a weaving school. A master of shadows and light. A painter of dreamlike landscape.

It led me to a map and an imagined trek along the Arabian Sea - bucket list material. It brought me to perch on the line between liquid and solid.

This is where my mom was in those final days: right at the shoreline, sometimes under the water, moving into a space beyond what we can know with our shrinky-dink imaginations and linear patterns; sometimes right at the water surface, taking it in so that it bubbled through her lungs and garbled her speech and netted thoughts that were half of one place and half of another. In moments that were as normal as they were surprising, she she paddled to the surface, even crawled to shore to meet me in conversation.

I couldn’t name this undulation between lucidity and ambiguity. I couldn’t name it because, really, is this place lucid and another less so? What is lucid about our world? We are in a dream that headlines selfishness and power gone awry.

Since going down the rabbit hole to Kerala, I’ve been awed that it is there and Minneapolis is here. For even a fleeting moment, I think: “Yes this (reading headlines, paying bills) AND Kerala …” Today, it will be 90 degrees in Kerala, while it’s snowing in Minneapolis and feels like 11. I’m sure there are children hungry in both places. Artists poking holes in reality in both places. Mothers exhausted. Bureaucrats pushing papers. Cats roaming. Cars on their last gasp. Hikers pushing uphill. In both places.

Here is part of my cognitive dissonance. This summer, I was collecting unemployment. Eating beans - so many beans. Not attending an event that was incredibly important to me because I couldn’t afford the trip. Now: I could buy a ticket and be in Kerala by week’s end. I could move to Mexico. Or open a hole in the top of my house and build a small luminous dome. This doesn’t compute. But the wanting is the same.

And what I want cannot be bought. I want: love. To have someone look at me with a peaceful, abiding love. A love that exhales. A love that does not possess but defends. A love that knows when to pause or take a step back and when to move forward. I want a love that says, Kerala - shall we? And as easily says, let’s just stay in. A love that makes room but shows up.

Somewhere in Kerala — perhaps they’ve been captured on a drone or CCTV — a person is sitting by the ocean, in a park, outside a home — feeling exactly the same thing. Thinking to themselves under the 90-degree sun, the humidity rolling off the Arabian Sea — “Here’s what I want: love.”

I saw The Chronology of Water the other night. It is about our watery memories. The experience of a lifelong swimmer who is more at home in pools and lakes and oceans than in her own body. The fluids that run through us as blood and tears and ejaculate and spit. The horror and beauty that threads through families. The water that is death and birth. The way we remake ourselves out of the deepest caverns of pain into something strong and immensely beautiful.

Its makers — director Kirsten Stewart and memoirist Lydia Yuknavitch — deeply understand the contradictions in which we all are submerged, whether we admit to it or not. The author of the beautiful poem below echoes my experience: “…each time I have crawled the dark of my own belly to not see, the shape of the great light coming.” There’s a tomblike quality to the current moment — the weeks after my mother’s death, the deepest and coldest days of winter, the numbing bitterness of Minneapolis’ battle. And the light is not only coming but already here, even if it’s on the other side of the world beating down on the Malabar Coast.

The Cailleach to the Widow by Leanne O’Sullivan

The Universe said to me,

Old woman I have learned

a few good things,

that when one part dies

in me another comes

tearing through the darkness

like a star, sudden

and tender and painful

as hell. Each time

I have sat at the centre

of the world to see it,

each time I have crawled

the dark of my own belly

to not see, the shape

of the great light coming

and the dying one,

washed in such kindness

rising steadily towards it.

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” - Joan Didion

“If you remember your lineage, you will never feel lonely.” - Philip Glass

“To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.” - Chinese proverb

My mom’s attorney came to her room in the care facility the week before she passed to have her sign a document that named me as her lineage. He described it as the dot on an i — not entirely necessary but signing it would make her feel better. Much of my mom’s concerns in the last month have been practical — telling me passwords and the whereabouts of papers, cancelling dental appointments and reviewing artwork.

The lawyer — a really nice guy who is mainly retired except for a few of his longest running clients — was apologetic about this relatively unnecessary document. He said he tries to avoid the word “lineage” and just inserts the person’s name instead. But I rather like it. We are, after all, connected by lines thick and thin, invisible or on full view.

As part of preparation for taking jukai, the ceremony signifying commitment to living by the Buddhist precepts, I made three lineage charts. Two were on enormous sheets of mulberry paper, written in a combination of black for the names and red for the blood line. The first was the traditional chart that shows the unbroken lineage from the historic Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, to one’s own teacher, with a space at the very bottom for one’s own name. Although it appears to be a line, if you look closely you see that it’s actually a closed loop without ending or beginning.

There are only two females named on my chart — Roshi Joan Halifax, who ordained me, and me. The second chart was created in recent decades to rectify this omission of the many women and two-spirit people who contributed to the dharma, dating back to the Buddha’s mother. Whereas the other is ladder like, this chart is circular.

The final lineage represents our teachers and the format was of our choosing. I made mine on paper from the previous year’s calendar. I wanted to reuse the paper and to have time folded into the chart, which is broken into four sections — earth, air, fire, and water. I included people, places, creatures, and elemental forces that have been teachers. The ebb and flow learned from waves. The rootedness of trees. There are human teachers in it — some who taught me discipline and passion, others who modeled calm and acceptance.

My parents are both on the chart, as is my paternal grandmother. I can tell you concretely some of the things grandma Phyllis taught me — how to identify the birds that lived in her woods (something I’m trying to relearn); how to differentiate between an oak, a maple, and a hickory tree; the basics of batik; how to age with curiosity and grace. My father taught me how to drive (stick shift on gravel roads, no less) and how to balance a checkbook. He reminded me to be aware of oil changes and insurance premiums. He taught me to iron shirts and prune shrubs. After he died, a friend wrote to tell me that he always recalled what my dad had taught him: put the ice into the glass before you pour in the soda.

There are things I remember my mom not teaching me — like when she handed me a box of tampons, opened the bathroom door, and then left to go make dinner. So much of what she tried to teach me, I resisted learning — or practicing — either because I didn’t agree with the lesson, or couldn’t afford it. She taught me, for instance, to invest in well-made clothing that would last for years and not go out of style. To always have a black dress for a funeral. She tried to instill the importance of not leaving the house unless your hair was brushed, there was a dab of blush on the cheeks and color on the lips, and you were wearing matching, unwrinkled clothes. And to never ever travel without cash.

None of these do I practice.

Here are things I did learn from my mom: I put my napkin on my lap at the outset of a meal — as do my kids, who knew that not to do so could lead to a short reprimand. I write thank you notes and sympathy cards because of her — she insisted on the former as soon as I could write, and I learned the latter through her example. I shop locally. I try to leave tips for hotel maids, though sometimes I have no cash because of the above.

When I worked at the university, I met many people who remembered my dad fondly. They were usually in prestigious positions higher up the food chain. They recalled his kindness and humor, as well as his style. (I spent a solid chunk of my childhood in men’s clothing stores.)

The people on campus who remembered my mom were more often in service positions — groundskeepers, catering, facility workers, and office admins. Every one of them smiled at her name. Many had funny stories to share, memories of sharing a smoke. They recalled her hallmark laugh — a loud chuckle you could hear at a party before she came into view. Many told me of how they’d received letters from her — cards of thanks for a job well done, a note when a spouse had died, congratulations on getting citizenship, a gift card at the holidays.

In the past five weeks of my mom’s transition from healthy to exhausted, from weighted under news of cancer but without clear prognosis, and, finally, to the clarity that this would be fast, I’ve felt the lines between us. The strings, supple and strong, that connect us. There is our mutual love of restaurants — hers born from her dad’s restaurant in Chicago, mine from going to fancy places with my parents on special trips into that city. Or our shared allegiance to spelling and grammar, to bookstores and libraries.

These lines go back to sturdy German women in Wisconsin drinking beer and playing cards. They are even now moving forward to whomever is living in Bella and Tobey, awaiting that umbilical connectivity.

We all come from somewhere. But we don’t do a very good job of remembering this, honoring it. We can’t wait to leave home. Light off for new territories instead of learning the calls of local birds, the texture of the tree bark in our own region.

I’m attracted to models that push back on this amnesia. In Buddhism, when someone gives a talk, they nearly always begin with thanks for their teachers, especially their “root teacher,” the one who has introduced them to that particular lineage. Or the lines that hold restaurants together — both the day-to-day roles that keep a kitchen going and the family-style learning that extends from one chef to another.

In the late 1800s, Escoffier created the brigade system, a military-like hierarchy that provides order out of chaos and, yes, sometimes too much “me over you” mentality. More endearingly, there is the generous acknowledgement by a chef of those under whose guidance she came up the line (literally). Often, the obituary of a chef will mention their best known students. And those with long lives, like Alice Waters, have so many progeny that there are maps of every restaurant in the Bay Area run by a Chez Panisse alum. The point is that chefs know from which they came — both their hands-on training and the cookbooks that inspired them. They can draw a line from their earliest days of truly curious eating and making, to their current cooking.

I began writing this piece a week ago today, sitting next to my mom on January 17, listening to her gurgling breath, not knowing where she or this would lead. But needing, as I always have, to write in order to find the lines of heart and mind. The next weeks and months will be filled with untangling the everyday bits of her life — bank accounts and bills. But for years, I’ll be trying to find and follow the lines she threw me — rules, norms, and examples by which to live.

When my daughter was leaving for college, I began to panic: Had I taught her enough? Had I taught her anything? I started writing little lessons, things I wanted to be sure she knew. The first was about how to boil an egg. I kid you not. I told her what I was doing and she gently laughed; “Mom, I know how to boil an egg.” I put the idea aside. I’d been casting lines for years. She’d watched. Like me with my mom, she could now choose which ones to follow. Some might appeal to her now, others later. But they were there. Ages of lines.

Small nibbles of reading for sanity

We Are the Sycamore Gap Tree - An essay about how the cutting down of an epic tree mirrors our Greenland-obsessed so-called president.

What Is Ours - An account of an octopus mother who stayed on her nest for years — not the usual months — and the author’s questioning about what we can tend.

A conversation with Terry Tempest Williams and Susan Murphy - “The truth of the lake’s absence can bring us into relationship with its presence.” Terry speaks of the relationship between her mother, lineage, and the Great Salt Lake.

Who writes the words in the CAT scan interpretation? In the biopsy? Poets and tricksters. There is the lovely pleural effusion, but there is also, nestled within a list of “immunopathology performed,” Pan-Keratin (IHC) +Sausage -A1; SOX10 (IHC) +Melan-A -A1; SMSA (IHC) +Sausage -A1; DESMIN (IHC) +Sausage -A1; TRPS1 (IHC) +GCDFP -A1; GATA-3. Sausage? Some research scientist’s idea of humor.

The words that are being used to describe the cancer have been scooped from the sea. From minerals buried deep in the earth’s belly. Words like encrusted, which brings to mind a band of amethyst, spreading for miles, wrapping around the roots of the oldest trees. and covering the underground layers of boulders. It sparkles, though only if someone opens the giant door above, peels back the earth’s crust, exposes the inner workings to spy inside.

There is also colonized, which is what the cancer has done to her adrenal glands. There are Martians in this analogy. And pompous white Europeans schlepping with them all that we shall regret — smallpox and guns and smugness.

But the image I have is of the diminutive mushrooms that pop up in and around the magnolia tree in my backyard when it’s wet in the summer, Fairy Ink Caps. They’re so tiny, so prodigious — fragile and young, tenacious and strong in their numbers. It takes just a few days for them to lose their baby softness, to brown and wrinkle. And then as unexpectedly as they appeared, they are sucked back into the Earth. I never totally foresee either their coming or their going — forget to anticipate them — and when I try to be patient and observant it’s too late.

During their brief stay, they colonize the space in the big hollow of the magnolia. The tree is so improbable at this point, the physics makes no sense. Under the heavier, older side of the tree, the base is rotted out, and there is a a place where a small dog or cat could curl up. A toad lived there for a few days two summers ago. About 7 feet above in the same limb, there’s another hollow area where a squirrel I named Sophie stayed for a month or two, despite the dogs. And underneath it all, a mycelial network.

At the heart of the matter is the mass in the chest. One doctor said it is wrapped around the aorta, another said it was on one of the lungs. They can’t decide. The word that describes its location is mediasteinum — the chest’s central compartment, the space containing the heart, major vessels, trachea, and esophagus.

I like that this word is dedicated to negative space; it’s not about the organs but the starry night of this black compartment. Like a glove box in which rests a single leather calf, skin glove. Or the deep blue velvet lining of a violin case in which the hairs from a white horse’s tail are pulled taut in a bow.

And what it would be like to float in that open space? The cyst, there, floating, spreading. The size, someone finally said, of a softball. It was days into the ordeal before someone finally used this concrete visual, and I realized too late that I was meant to gasp when the first doctor told told me the size in centimeters. He may have thought I was callous. Or stoic. Or another American who doesn’t understand metrics. Because he, and most, of the doctors we’ve seen were not born here. Bear strong accents and mannerisms of healthcare systems infused with other ingredients. And I wonder - what happens to us when we send them all away in order to be “great”?

No one was direct with me for days — not softball-sized direct. Meanwhile, the cyst floated in the amethyst encrusted compartment, like a young octopus growing steadily, wrapping and writhing and squeezing against voice boxes, the esophagus, the heart. Taking up more space, insisting on its right to be there and, in doing so weakening, other parts of the body’s abilities to breathe, to pump, to speak, to swallow. Like a baby pushing against the bladder, stretching upward into the diaphragm, declaring it space, its mighty intention to thrive.

At the very top of the body, the MRI shows a lesion on one side of the brain. One doctor said the right side, another said the left — but the matter is inconsequential as this is but a dot among orbs. This shred of a diamond, the eye of a lighthouse, the view through a pinhole camera throbs with the brain’s pulsations. In its tininess, I am more apt to forgive it than the others. It does not shroud, or flood, or enrobe. Peering down into the larger infinite coal black compartment, it waits.

Below the mediasteinum there are nodes in the lining of the belly. Bean-shaped and soft, they are floaters, embryos in amniotic fluid. They neighbor the compartment in which I grew - the womb. That first home was filled with confusion and fear, first love and cigarette smoke, probably shame and anxiety, and all of the idiocy of every 19-year-old ever. That echo chamber. The place where I learned my love of water, of floating. Where stillness and quiet were a balm.

Nearby, too, are the folds of the bowels, where there are more findings, more shapes, more bumps, more things growing. And no one has more than mentioned them in passing — the way you might forget the most trivial moment of a day, a week, a life. Oh, that — that, that small hive of cells in a fold of the bowel, sorry - nearly forgot about that - the least of your worries.

And so we come to another word. Palliative. “From the Latin pallium, meaning ‘a cloak,’ … to describe something that covers, conceals, or mitigates symptoms rather than curing the underlying cause, much like a cloak covers the body.” (Etymology Dictionary) Covering up with the softest blanket, spun from silk. Soothing in its coolness, reassuring in its warmth. Holding pain. Loosening obligation. Reminder of the many ages of a body, from girlhood swimming in Wisconsin lakes, to lying out on a Florida beach. Float, float, rest your head back, look up at the stars, feel the tadpools dart at your back. Let go into the immensity of it all.

.

limen - Latin for a threshold

karkinos — Greek for crab

Words connect, reach, and move sideways, dragging themselves through the sand into new mouths, unfathomed situations. Limen spawns sublime — reaching a high threshold; and eliminate — to remove a threshold; and liminal teetering on a threshold between two states.

Other words evoke and mimic, they’re more visual than poetic. Karkinos means crab and was used by Hippocrates (460–370 BC) to describe the external tumors he thought looked like crustaceans— circular with pincers. Perhaps he also associated the tenacity of crabs to grip and not let go with obstinate, painful tumors. In the 1st century, De Medicina — a massive encyclopedia project based on Ancient Greek works — translated the word to cancer.

The first written description of a now dreaded medical disease came from the Ancient Egyptians about 3000 BCE. There is evidence of cancer in dinosaurs (70-80 million years ago) and ancient hominids (1.7 million years ago). It’s always been here. With us. In us.

Most mammals get cancer - though not the bowhead whale, which can live to be 200 years old. There are transmittable forms of cancer, including one that effects stray dogs all over the world and is believed to have arisen from one dog 11,000 years ago that is called “the founder dog.”

But where it did this cursed crab come from? It wasn’t until the late 1700s when a bewigged British surgeon, Percivall Pot (I kid you not), made a connection between an environmental factor and a specific kind of cancer, noting that a high number of London chimney sweeps contracted cancer of the scrotum. We had to wait more than a century and vast improvements to microscopes for a German zoologist to correctly conjecture that mutated chromosomes cause of cancer.

Cut it out. Pack it with herbs. Change the diet. Cauterize it. Nothing stopped this crab run amok.

In 1867, Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born in Warsaw. She moved to Paris in 1891 to study physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Poor and alone, she spent most of her time studying. In the cold and damp winters, she wore every piece of clothing she owned to stay warm. Her doctoral research was on uranium, and she made major discoveries into the nature of atoms. Between 1898 and 1902, she published a total of 32 scientific papers—some with her husband, a fellow scientist she met at school. But many were her own, and she took pains to prove and make entirely clear that the work was hers — people didn’t believe a woman capable.

The writing was largely focused on two elements they’d discovered: polonium and radium. One paper shared that tumor-forming cells could be destroyed by exposure to radium. It was a major discovery, but Marie Curie, as she was now known, wasn’t allowed to speak publicly at the University of Paris about her findings. Again, she was a she and that was a problem. When the Nobel committee awarded their prize in physics for the work on radium, it was originally going to go to Pierre alone. Someone convinced them otherwise, and Marie Curie became the first woman awarded a Nobel Prize in any subject. She won a second Nobel in chemistry and remains the only person to do so. She was a humanitarian who developed a mobile X-ray unit that she drove during WWI. She melted down her gold awards to give to the war cause. Through it all, the French government treated her more than shabbily. Today, Curie’s papers are stored in led-lined boxes because they’re highly radioactive. Even her personal cookbooks are unsafe to handle. But radiation has saved countless lives.

By 1970, cancer was the second leading cause of death in the U.S. — the numbers were up partially because diagnosis was improving. But there was also growing understanding of the connection between cancer and chemicals. Rachel Carson drew attention to the massive expansion of synthetic chemicals into daily life since World War II. Her book Silent Spring, published in 1964, was fiercely opposed by chemical companies, but it led to reversals in national pesticide policy, including a ban on DDT and other pesticides. President Nixon set up the National Cancer Institute in 1971, declaring a “War on Cancer” — because the U.S. seems to need violent metaphors to get behind something.

According to KFF, a nonprofit health news source, nearly 2 million Americans are diagnosed with malignancies every year, and cancer kills about 613,000 people, just behind heart disease, which is the leading killer. But amazing things have happened. The cancer mortality rate in the U.S. has decreased by 34% since 1991. There are some really hard to fathom treatments available now, including the immunotherapy my friend Sarah had in which her T-cells were removed, sent to a lab in California where each one was modified to turn off the cancer gene, and then reinfused into her body. Every month brings more firsts in cancer treatment.

So what has our wise leader done? He’s cut cancer research. Along with so many other things the current administration has deemed expendable — like international aid that included cancer care for children, local food programs that provided nutritious produce to schools (as opposed to chemical laden processed food that is linked to cancer) — the National Cancer Institute lost more than $300 million and hundreds of staff members. Research projects that have been going for years — upended. Incoming brilliant research students choosing to study elsewhere because the money is gone. By end of 2026, it’s expected that the NCI will be 38 percent smaller than when Trump took office.

Here’s a fact: Although advanced cancer may cause pain, it is often not the first symptom.

These cuts are removing findings that many people don’t even know is possible. The effects won’t be fully felt for a while. Researchers and doctors are leaving the U.S. Cancer isn’t going anywhere, but those with the money and passion to solve its riddles are.

Let’s return to that first word: limen - Latin for a threshold. Have you ever been really sick and felt that the world stopped? Or you’ve cared for a loved one as they’ve entered the deep time land of illness, perhaps an illness that seemed incurable, that scared the shit out of you, that was a riddle within a riddle. And you stood at a threshold of before diagnosis and after. You stand nearly still as the world moves around you — the stock market ticking, the glaciers melting, your grocery list sitting stagnant on the counter.

I’ve been on that threshold the past two weeks, walking alongside a loved one. It’s the third time in my life I’ve been submerged in the language of cancer — metastasis, lesion, biopsy, staging. And other things that oddly come alongside it — hospital menus featuring liquid diets and no-sodium peanut butter, Jello and mashed potatoes. Clunky bedside tables. Beeping that won’t stop no matter how many times you push the button. A roommate who swears in the middle of the night. Someone down the hall who screams. Blood draws again and again until it is somewhere between absurd and impossible.

It’s liminal here as we wait for a biospy. Wait for a prognosis. Wait to see where the next step is beyond the threshold. Either way, there’s cancer. It’s been here since the dinosaurs — life turning on to a high volume, clicking “repeat” over and over, unable to stop. Life making more and more. The candy scene from I Love Lucy — what to do with it all, all those cells, rapidly growing, each one coming down the conveyor belt with nothing to stop them.

Last night on the phone, pacing in a hospital corridor, my friend said, “It’s Late Stage Capitalism.” My foggy brain needed her to spell out the similarities between the disease and the non-stop growth demanded by capitalism, a growth that is reaching a tipping point as natural resources disappear or become so mutated they cause harm. This is hardly a new metaphor, but one that hits closer to home when you’re standing in a hospital getting one test after another that suggests cancer has run amok in a body you love.

And you remember - love, too, can run amok.

Thank you for sharing my work and liking it. This is all the payment I ask. It buoys me and helps me to (re)believe that writing matters. - JN

The first week of each month is grief week. I lead two groups that meet monthly and, for better or worse, they both occur the same week. One is a support group for people under 50 who are experiencing a direct loss; the other is called Writing Grief and is a broader exploration of grief, including losses of place, ideals, and personal identities.

I’ll admit that while I don’t exactly dread these groups, I’m not overcome with anticipation. Though I should be. Because each month, I leave feeling utterly nourished and grounded. I don’t say this lightly — the conversations that occur in these spaces renew my faith in people and the power of connections. They also remind me of the radical importance of showing up for the hard stuff.

Gifts?

At Tuesday’s Under 50 group, I started us off with a quote from Katherine May’s book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times: ““Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.”

I shared that I believe grief comes with gifts. To their credit, no one in the group threw rotten fruit at me (though none was available), and one person ventured — “like, you mean, good things?”

A day later, I was on a Zoom call with a man who had found me vis my work bio where I note that I am involved in ecological chaplaincy. He works in farming circles and is also involved with Christian communities but has been frustrated by the lack of interest in / attention to the destruction of “creation” by his faith companions. He asked me a lot of questions about ecological chaplaincy — I surprised myself a bit by realizing just how much I have to say on this topic! — before pausing and asking, “Is there anything good about grief?”

Boom! I was right back to Tuesday evening’s group.

I Am of a Nature to Grow Old

Yes. Yes, there are many gifts to grief. Is it awful in so many ways? Does cancer — probably the most common culprit that has brought people to either of these groups — absolutely suck? It more than sucks. AND we are more compassionate, patient, generous humans as a result.

On Tuesday, a few things that came up in response to my opening salvo —

• I wish I hadn’t had to go through this, but I like the person I am now better than who I was.

• I no longer give a crap about what people think.

• So many things just don’t matter; they’re not worthy of my time or energy, and I can let them go now.

• Now I know what to say and do when someone else has a loss; before, I had no clue.

During Saturday’s Writing Grief session, we, too, ended up in similar territory around the gifts of grief. We got there by way of The Five Remembrances, a Buddhist teaching that begins with the ever-peppy: “I am of a nature to grow old. I cannot escape growing old.” and gets all the more serious as the list goes on. It ends pointedly with: “My actions are the ground on which I stand.” Meaning — change in the form of aging, illness, and death are inevitable; what we make of our lives, however, is our choice.

Sitting on the sofa after work last night and watching TV while eating chocolate pudding was a choice. Getting up early to shovel as I recalled neighbors who walk their dogs was also a choice. My recent lack of exercise is a choice — even as I argue with myself that I have no time — as is my commitment to show up to Monday evening’s meditation group, even when my back hurts and I’ve been at a computer all day. Each of these choices has a domino effect, sometimes subtle. A few extra pounds might dog me later in various ways. A neighbor might have a moment of gratitude this morning.

Something I read recently that I cannot stop thinking about or sharing is a Substack post by Courtney Martin, who is one of my favorite short-form, online writers. In “Death and Taxes” she writes about how our society is separated by those who know death intimately and those for whom it is an arm’s length, largely intellectual concept. Part of her thinking in this essay echoes very much what my grief group people share — when we are with someone who is dying or in the aftermath, we are in a different kind of time, one that moves more slowly, one that is less concerned with the machinations and noise of the world.

The Gulf of Grief

This isn’t new — many brilliant writers, like Francis Weller, Frank Ostaseski, and John O’Dononhue, have traversed this areas. But what Martin did that keeps me coming back to the essay is connect this experience to our current political situation. What does it mean, she wonders for large swaths of the population to have intimate and often extensive familiarity with death and others to have a much more glancing relationship to it.

“Other Americans, know death like a familiar song—the words and rhythm of which they can’t forget if they try. These Americans live in neighborhoods that are filled with people they love and also, sometimes, deadly violence. These Americans sometimes have death in their epigenetic, too—grandsons and granddaughters of enslaved and displaced people, migrants who have known war and genocide in other places and brought that knowing here. These Americans assemble artifacts on their grandparents’ ofrendas as little kids, make RIP shirts as teenagers for other teenagers, lose too many of their favorite aunties in their 30s and 40s because of heart disease, racism, heart disease, racism…”

If you, like me, became momentarily fascinated by this summer’s Ezra Klein meltdown in which he kept inserting his foot further and further down his own throat on the issues of Gaza and reproductive rights, you’ll especially appreciate how Martin brings her insight on death and politics to the conversation between Klein and Ta-nehisi Coates. Klein keeps coming back to surface-level, wonky, statistical arguments for Democrats and the left to give up on various policies in order to gain more votes. Coates, relies not on statistics, but on firsthand experience as the descendent of enslaved people to say, no way, not giving any of that up.

And there’s a line, Martin argues, between the two men’s approaches and their relationships to death. One is simplistic and seems to come from a lineage of theoretical books and complex spreadsheets. The other feels rooted in poetry, soil, and ancestry. One believes we can think our way out of this mess. The other knows we must sink into the body, be with loss intimately, and listen to elders.

“liberated at the site of loss”

It reminded me of a podcast conversation between Prentis Hemphill and Malkia Devich Cyril from last year that I shared with friends in the death and dying space. Cyril is a poet and media activist who grew up in the Black Panther Party in Brooklyn. Prentis asks the more senior Malkia about their definition of grief, and the response blew me away. They began by say, “Grief is often or you could say traditionally been defined as the anguish, sorrow, the distress that an individual experiences in the direct aftermath of significant loss.” They explore how this is not the case, that grief actually occurs over time, generations, and is woven into life cycles.

Acknowledging grief is the first piece of a relationship to death than can alter us on not just a personal level but a collective one. This is followed by embodying it — allowing the very physical sensations of grief to occur and not banish them. Then actively embracing the choices available to us, even in these most difficult moments to invite others into the process.

“… this is the path of transformative grief. This is the path of being liberated at the site of loss. Loss is not only a burden, there is also, because there’s agency in every moment, because we have choices in every moment, whether you’re in a prison cell or somebody dropping bombs on you.”

Malkia shares that we could incorporate grief and loss into our systems—legal, educational, economic—and in doing so, things would change. We would take more responsibility. We should show up as full-hearted embodied humans who are invested in the kinds of actions that will transform the conditions that produce the loss in the first place. By making sure all people have access to healthy food and not protecting corporations that are bent on producing nutritionally-devoid products and stuffing them on the shelves of Dollar General Stores. By cleaning our water so that we’re not drinking nitrates.

It’s good, friends. So good. Do give it a listen.

Since I began writing this over the weekend, I’ve been plunged into a situation that is all about life/death, grief/gratitude. It will be unfolding, evolving, starting and stopping. Already it’s been maddening, boring, exhausting and also held moments of beautiful human contact between family, friends, and medical staff. I anticipate great learning on the horizon. As well as great sorrow. And both are invited in, just like Rumi’s “Guest House.” I’ll leave with this ever-elucidating poem.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

REPRIEVE

Nnena Kalu, non-verbal autistic artist wins UK’s biggest art prize — her work is mesmerizing and hopeful and bright and repurposes “garbage” into beauty.

One of the reasons it has stayed with me is its undertow of similarities to the current ICE raids. The violent images of masked military figures with ridiculously large weapons and bullet proof vests yanking people off the streets is a blatant effort to rid our cities and country of diversity. While the government propaganda machine spews images and talk of “rapists and murderers and the worst of the worst” in some of its social media, it also posting old paintings — think Norman Rockwell — that depict a very white, very idealized version of “America.” Among recent Department of Homeland Security posts was a painting many of us saw in our history textbooks of America as a giant, luminescent angelic woman leading settlers west toward their manifest destiny.

This sameness, this violence, this idealization of doing “what’s right” is what I see when I drive through fields of corn and soybeans here in Iowa. It’s what I see when I look at a logo that I used to love — the DeKalb flying corncob. This icon is shorthand for farming, a wink-wink-nod-nod to anyone who has been overlooked for living in flyover country. I nearly got it tattooed on my shoulder as a sign of Iowa pride.

DeKalb is no longer a company. It’s still a product, yes, but it’s part of the large portfolio of products owned by Bayer. And Bayer bought it from Monsanto. That folksy logo would like you to think it’s still based in Illinois and still run by the farmer-inventors who developed its eponymous hybrid seed in the early 1900s.

DeKalb had a pretty expected business mission — producing ever more resilient and productive corn and soybeans —until 1982, when it entered the world of biotech via a partnership with Pfizer. Pharmaceuticals and corn? Things were getting fuzzy.

Fuzzier still, DeKalb was bought by the chemical company Monsanto in 1996. The St. Louis-based company also got its start in the early 1900s. Its first commercially successful product was saccharin, followed by refined caffeine, vanilla extract, and aspirin.

Within decades, Monsanto was far far away from vanilla and fake sugar. During the Vietnam War, it produced Agent Orange for the U.S. military. According to the United Nations, the chemical caused an “ecocide” as 7,700,000 acres of land lost substantial tree canopy, seeds were destroyed, species declined, and exposed humans experienced increased cancer rates and birth defects.

In 1974, Monsanto patented a new product that used a chemical called glyphosate to kill weeds. A Swiss chemist had synthesized glyphosate in the 1950s for medical purposes, but it didn’t do what it was supposed to do — the backstory of so many inventions that ended up doing great harm or good. A Monsanto scientist rediscovered it, realized its potential as an herbicide, and the company patented it as Roundup.

At this very moment, millions of bottles of RoundUp are sitting on shelves at your nearest Lowe’s, HomeDepot, or Ace Hardware. A bottle might even be in your garage right now collecting spiderwebs. Many of us have had an ethical dilemma as we held a bottle of Roundup in one hand while thinking of some patch of poison ivy or invasive species that was driving us nuts. Was it worth it?

Weeds and bugs are farmers’ nemeses. I was just at an organic farming conference where one man said, “I’d rather deal with weeds than worms,” and many heads nodded in agreement. Listen to AM radio during an Iowa basketball game and you’ll hear plenty of ads that make worms and stubborn weeds sound like Marvel movie villains. Just apply glyphosate, however, and those worms will go back where they came from! Problem solved.

In 1996, Monsanto introduced glyphosate-resistant soybean seeds, followed by resistant corn seeds two years later, aka Genetically Modified Organisms. When farmers bought these genetically engineered seeds, they were buying the right to the technology behind them. That right extended to the point when the plant was harvested — no further. Monsanto told farmers they couldn’t save any seeds — an age-old agricultural practice — because doing so was tantamount to stealing the technology. About the same time the Supreme Court was granting personhood to corporations, it sided with Monsanto.

In a loop recognizable to any addict, farmers who had become dependent on glyphosate were now hooked on the resistant seeds. In a stellar and beautiful essay about corn, Robyn Wall Kimmerer ponders the ugly knotted nature of the relationship:

This is a technology that uproots the original agreement between maize and people and makes corn subservient to the needs of agribusiness. The genetic integrity of The Wife of the Sun [corn] has been compromised. There’s a word for forcible injection of unwanted genes.

Let’s turn our attention to another company whose name you’ll recognize: Bayer. The German company began as a dye manufacturer, but its first recognizable product was aspirin, a modification of a folk remedy found in the bark of the willow plant. In the early 1900s, Bayer also trademarked and sold heroin, marketing it as a treatment for pneumonia and tuberculosis. This turned out to be a bad idea.

By the 1930s, Bayer was part of a six-company partnership under the name I.G. Farben. To access cheap labor, Farben built factories inside of concentration camps, including Auschwitz — not wholly dissimilar from today’s use of incarcerated labor to produce goods for private companies. Though Bayer now has a page of atonement on its website for this period, it undeniably benefited from its association with the Nazis and hardly turned a corner after the war.

Rather than making life-affirming products, they rolled out neonicotinoids, the insecticides that have been linked to the worldwide collapse of honeybee colonies. Bayer also went on an expansionist tear, buying up other companies and their star products, including Aleve, Alka-Seltzer, Claritin, Miralax, Flintstones vitamins, and Cutter insect repellant. In 2018, it purchased Monsanto, including DeKalb.

Drive past tall, late summer cornfields in Iowa and other Midwestern states and it’s still easy to see Dekalb signs. Bayer has wisely held onto the flying cob logo, which has a folksy vibe with undertones of red barns, overalls, and homemade noonday meals eaten on a front porch.

What we can’t see are the chemicals — those on the fields, those in our bodies. And we don’t see the veins and arteries that run from the fields to the bank accounts of mega corporations like Bayer. It often takes years for a cancer to surface — metaphorically and literally — but in the last decades, people have connected the dots between human health issues and the massive use of glyphosate. Some has woken up sooner than others; around 2015, countries in the European Union began to stop purchasing organic products from U.S. farmers because the amount of glyphosate allowed by the USDA was 150 times that allowed on EE crops. And this was for organic! [Source: Talk at the Iowa Organic Farming Conference by keynote Bob Quinn, University of Iowa, Nov. 17, 2015.]

According to the Lawsuit Information Center, there are currently 61,000 Roundup lawsuits against Bayer, many brought by plaintiffs claiming that exposure to glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin lymphoma. “As of May 2025, [Bayer] Monsanto has reached settlement agreements in nearly 100,000 Roundup lawsuits, paying approximately $11 billion. Bayer achieved this through large-scale block settlements with law firms handling high volumes of claims, along with pre-trial resolutions in individual cases.”

We also don’t see how diversity has been quashed in favor of productivity — birds and insects wildly declining in numbers. The green, upright fields of summer look “normal”; most of us don’t even know how utterly NOT normal they are, having replaced the prairie, an ecosystem as diverse as the rainforest.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to liken what is happening in our agricultural and food systems to what is occurring right now in our cities. ICE deportations are a very thinly veiled attempt to “eradicate” (a favorite word of Roundup ads) anyone who doesn’t fit the dominant profile of white and Christian. Long straight rows of corn aren’t so different from the lines of ripped, groomed, white soldiers Hegseth and Trump envision. The way the government talks about immigrants is not so different than the way Bayer/Monsanto talk about weeds and worms.

If your eyes are accustomed to large scale corporate farms, an organic farm can take a minute to get used to. It’s not tidy. Bare soil is a no-no, so there are covers crops like clover that look unkempt. Two different crops are often grown together, a practice that helps reduce weeds. And the crops themselves can include plants we’re no longer used to seeing.

There are also more birds. More bees and others pollinators. Food is being grown that directly feeds humans, unlike the majority of large-scale corn and soybean farms that are producing corn to feed livestock or create ethanol.

I would much rather live next to an organic farm, just like I’d much rather live in a community that is diverse — weedy, even. I’ll take a bug-spattered windshield over a clean one any day. I’m happy when I hear many languages being spoken. When my neighbors don’t look and sound just like me.

I am so relieved my younger self thought better of that flying corncob tattoo. It’s now a sign to me of monoculture, corporate greed, and the messed up and tangled roots that comprise our current food system. There are days (today was one of them) when a visit to the local grocery store makes me sad because I can see all of these threads of chemicals and money and non-human scale decisions behind each box and bottle.

In that same essay, Kimmerer wrote: “The tools we choose to adopt influence how culture develops and also reflect a culture’s values.” Our government’s current tools are all geared toward destruction, limiting, pruning, and removal. But we need tools of creation, curiosity, and connectivity. The arts. Public education. Unapologetically drying our underwear in the breeze on a sunny day. Having a messy yard filled with dandelions.

A few weeks ago, I walked down an alley in my neighborhood and a dog started barking at me. Through the fence, I could see an older pitbull who looked less than threatening. Her person was out in the yard and rather than yell, “Quiet!” or worse, he kindly reminded her, “Sheila, you’re cooler than that.” I found this funny, charming, and a reminder of the inner-voice I wish we could all locate right now. Instead of chastising, let’s try this kind reminder that we — each of us — is better than this.

And yes, we. All of us. Not just some of us. Not just them. But we. This moment calls for we-dom. For each of us to note ways in which we could be “cooler.” Sure, some of us are taking our bad actions to great lengths, like a real estate agent who bit a kid at a concert to get a t-shirt, but we’re all doing something. I, for instance, keep meaning to get off of Spotify but somehow haven’t managed yet. What’s your one or two or three areas where you could make a different decision, one that would benefit the we, not just make life easier for you?

We all need to show up for this to get better. So long as we continue to allow and even aggrandize poor behavior — behavior that is all about the individual’s comfort or wants —then the collective is in jeopardy. And yet, the collective is the way out to so many of our aches and pains: Joining clubs to be less alone, getting into an inflatable costume to join the resistance, inviting neighbors for dinner.

The next Buddha will be the sangha — words from Thich Nhat Hahn — gesture toward the great potential of we. Sangha, in Buddhism, is a community of fellow practitioners. People with whom you learn and provide service. People who hold you accountable and care for you tender parts. The sangha is full of people with different skills, perspectives, and lived experiences. Only through this diversity can we find the solutions we need to go forward.

I had a wonderful email exchange this week with a man who is growing chickens in a regenerative manner using agroforestry. I’ll be interviewing him for an article related to my new job with Marbleseed about a talk he’ll be giving at our conference in February. He was clear that he didn’t want the article to be about him. He rejected the title “keynote speaker” — too hierarchical, to “sage on the stage.” He proposed “meditation” or “creative inspiration.” He wanted other voices included. This is the role of good leadership, by the way — amplifying other voices, stepping back and letting others shine as a way to demonstrate “we”ness."

Getting out of our own way — a phrase that is so overused as to not mean much — suggests that we can hold ourselves up with self-doubt and second-guessing. I have another way of thinking about this: get out of the way of thinking about ourselves first and foremost. Begin with WE, not I. Try this equation on: “If I purchase this / go on this trip / pay for this service to this company / etc. what does it mean for WE?” And we is not just here and now but extends into the future.

At a workshop I led recently about eco-grief, the final exercise was to name something you wanted to do, inspired by the activities and conversations we’d just had. People’s answers ranged from the practical — planting trees, limiting food waste — to the creative — completing a piece of art. The group was invited to offer a doubting voice to each share. These were intended to remind us that we all have these voices that try to get us off track and keep us small, to keep us from doing the things that we feel called to do. Many of the doubting voices were outlandish and funny, pointing toward how truly ridiculous our inner doubter really is. Then, one person from the group spoke: As your great great great grandchild, I thank you for doing [whatever they just said they intended to do] because …

I was worried this activity would feel silly, but it was anything but. Very quickly, we all realized what sobering and beautiful messages we were receiving from our future ancestors. What we do here and now matters beyond the time and space we’ll ever witness.

Nearly every religion and spiritual practice in the world shares this thinking. I imagine that the “Do unto others” in Christianity includes the others of the future. And Judaism offers the beautiful concept of tikkun olam - ”repairing the world.” We know. All of us know these things are true. We, like Sheila, know not to bark as passersby, not to pee in the house, not to nip at strangers … and yet we’ve been entirely derailed by greed, hatred, and delusion. (aka the three poisons that are at the root of suffering, according to Buddhism). And we are so much cooler!

Guerrilla Art at The Met - Seven Generations Thinking in JOYful Action

On Indigenous People’s Day earlier this month, 17 indigenous artists unveiled an unauthorized exhibit at one of the most powerful and white museums in the world—The Met. In an ingenious use of QR codes, Encoded overlays new art on top of old, questioning the stories and assumptions of the latter and reminding viewers of the contemporary vitality of the former. Often the two interact, so that Washington Crossing the Delaware becomes a meditation on environmentalism and the mythologizing landscapes of Thomas Cole serve as a backdrop to one of Cannupa Hanska Lugar’s dancers.

You don’t have to go to The Met to see their work; thier website provides the QR code and the images. There’s also a wonderful video set in The Met that provides context.

The project was produced by Amplifier, an arts activism group that has downloadable posters on its website and resources for educators.