Hello from the muggy middle of a tropical storm sandwich: Hurricane Lala ravaged the state of Hawaiʻi last weekend, and Tropical Storm Moke is on its way to us now. My brain is a scramble of insurance claims, property damage photos, arborist phone calls, waterline repairs, power outages, neighbor/friend/family check-ins, client work, and climate crisis grief. I am also, it must be mentioned, recovering from a broken sternum—the result of a head-on car collision that happened June 20th, the day after I last wrote to you.

There is much to be said about the intersection of all of these events. About this year’s Super El Niño weather pattern. About the Kona Low storms that happened in March, which dumped a year’s worth of rain on us in forty-eight hours. About what that rain did to the growth of invasive cane grasses along the sides of an already dangerous road. About how drivers began recklessly crossing out of their lanes to avoid damaging their cars in the brush. About how the County’s mowing machines broke and every road on the island demanded a level of maintenance that Highways Department crews were unable to provide. About how ill-equipped we are—mentally, physically, and structurally—to weather the pervasive, multi-faceted effects of climate crisis.

Much to be said, much to be written.

When I was crouched on the floor at 10pm on Saturday night, praying Lala wasn’t going to hurl a tree limb through a window onto me, I had a dissociative moment. Leaving my quaking body below, some part of me hovered above, gawking in disbelief.

How is it that this is the second time in two months I’ve felt that I might face death? I marveled. Quickly, I snapped back into body and willed myself to get up and move to a safer place.

I spoke a bit more about the night of the hurricane with Hawaiʻi Public Radio yesterday, if you’d like to hear (or read) about my experience and that of other Upcountry Maui residents.

And while my brain is awash with the minutiae of surviving this post-hurricane moment, I will simply tell you this: My sternum is healing beautifully. Psychosomatic therapy and EMDR are helping me develop an enthusiasm for driving again. We have running water and power, for now. And on Tuesday, I will begin my birth-day with a visit from the insurance adjuster. (For disaster number two, that is.) I hope he’s delightful.

In the meantime, when I can, I have been mourning the trees. Hurricane Lala took so many ancient trees from us, in a shattering, roaring sweep of devastation. I have been in shock, grieving these magnificent beings who taught, sheltered, fed, and delighted me, who were home to many other creatures, too.

These trees raised me. I climbed and cried and played and grew beneath them. I learned to listen and tell time by attuning to the wind and the sun in their leaves. It is hard to conceive of this place and my heart without them, though I know—as Octavia Butler taught us—God is Change.

On Monday, I asked my family and landmates here if we could take photos with the trees. I wanted to memorialize them, to honor and thank them before they were dismembered and sawed up, to make remembering easier. Each of them gave us so much. Ultimately they will become mulch that feeds the soil again, still nurturing us from the ground up.

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So I am doing my best to honor the land, the trees, and all those who stewarded this place before me. I am hugging the fallen limbs, I am talking to them, I am letting them know that this is not just an ending. It is the break that splits us open into the life that comes next.

A few days ago, some garden specialist friends came to take cuttings and make grafts of our favorite avocado tree. Now, in a nursery twenty minutes from here, thirteen tree babies are being fused into life. I’m rooting for them. And for us all.

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Wish me luck with the insurance adjuster.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ The Flower Bearers: a gripping memoir of love and loss and the transformative power of grief. Join us over at Lilith Lit: Women Reading Women for our virtual author event with me and Eliza on Sunday August 30th: a community reading, conversation, and Q&A.

To watch.

My birthday plans include watching Saved by the Beauty of the World, the documentary about poet Mary Oliver’s life, which premiers on PBS on Tuesday, August 25th.

Also! I recently discovered Kanopy, the public library’s video streaming service. You link your library card and get nine credits a month to watch; I started with Madonna’s 1991 documentary Truth or Dare. So satisfying.

To listen.

What inspired me to watch Truth or Dare, you ask? Listening to Wesley Morris wax poetic about Madonna’s oeuvre on his podcast “Cannonball”: “Madonna Returns as Queen of the Club” (gift link).

STAY SANE

I’m wishing you ease. Even if for a moment.

xo,

Lily

Eighteen years ago today, at 11:45 pm on a full moon that was nearly summer solstice, my mother died. She did not drift off peacefully that night, a year and a half post-late-stage cancer diagnosis, and—as she wanted—my father and I were there with her as her organs, brain, and breath slowly shut down. It would take me years to process the moment when, fifteen minutes in, my dad looked to me with fear and care in his eyes and said, “Honey, maybe you should leave.” It was too late for him to protect me from death, though. We all knew it. And I’m glad I was there. I began that night as one person and ended it as someone else, sitting with my mother’s lifeless body and a lit candle, praying. My father slept in the room next door, the first night he’d been apart from her in years.

I was twenty-four.

I imagined all that would happen in my life after my mother. Writing books. Falling more in love with the man I was with. Maybe we’d get married. Have kids. Somehow, impossibly, I would learn to live without her. Eighteen years from then sounded like an eternity.

And it feels like one.

Eighteen years: The span of time during which an infant matures into what we call an adult. In many places, the age of consent. In Europe, the legal age to consume intoxicants. The age at which we can supposedly make decisions for ourselves.

My grief is now eighteen. It is mature. Adult. Consenting. Can handle its alcohol. Can make good choices, supposedly.

My grief, like yours, is not linear.

I am writing from the same desk where I wrote when my mother was dying. Yesterday morning, I planted rose geranium cuttings in the garden beds she tended. The people who love me tell me she would be proud of me. Some of the things I imagined came true. I published books: two so far. No marriage or kids yet. Like her, I have started my own businesses. Weathered many heartbreaks. Felt crippling pain in my body. Made friendships that feel like family. Like her, I get my hands in the dirt most days. I like to think I take care of myself as well as, maybe better, than she did. That I won’t blindside the people I love with a cancer diagnosis, though even writing that scares me.

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This span of eighteen years makes me feel impossibly old and somehow also very young. How have eighteen years gone by? What have I learned? How have I changed?

Inspired by Memory Piece, I looked to my archives for clues: photos, Facebook, Instagram, and blog posts, pieces of writing and other ephemera from the anniversary of her death (see also: deathiversary) for each year that’s passed.

Maybe it will all add up to some evidence of transformation. Or maybe the accounting is enough, is the change itself.

2008

Six days after she dies, I write a poem:

A Bag of Her

Is heavy like bones and teeth
Like memory
Like the loss of my mother
Heavy.

She rides in the back seat
In a plastic bag
In a cardboard box
Sealed and mortuary certified
That this is, in fact, her.

After the mortuary,
We need vermiculite,
Another ash that fertilizes
which goes in the back, too,
Next to my certified mother,
Lands with a quotidian thud.

In the front, we sit and breathe
We hold hands and chase
Away the demons.
We kiss and feel these bodies,
We feel the other
Un-body
In the back seat, too.

Then I am alone with the bag, driving.
A young mother crosses the street
Arms full of her blonde and popsicle-mouthed daughter
Loving, simple, sticky handed
And laughing.
They are perfect, I think,
And feel the weight of
This impossibility,
That I will ever be held like that again—
So small, so tender, so perfectly unknowing.

Suddenly her lightness is all around
The bag of ashes a red herring.
I am tears and awe, loving and simple
She is still teaching me this love
That is body and not
That is sticky and full
That is laughing.

2009

On her first deathiversary, I am taking Rebecca Walker’s Art of Memoir master class. I begin writing what will become a memoir about my mother’s illness and death. Much of that will go into my first book. I don’t fully understand it then, but taking this class will change my life.

2010

One week after the second anniversary, I write a very long poem called “Heavy Lifting.” Here are a few lines:

Dead weight trails behind, parade of past lives:
Am I the dancer, the actress, the one performing,
sixteen, uncomfortable, dying for a kiss, hopeful in a
leotard and lipstick, vaseline smile, a gas mask and a piano?
Or the student, vast, untouchable, perfect, winning, ready?
The daughter of the New Age baby boom, heaving
steaming offering bowls of vaporous ego,
or the yoga princess, teacher, bowing, grasping, longing,
blissing, chanting?
Or am I,
Or am I,
Or am I?

Later that summer, I stop teaching yoga and move to San Francisco to write.

2011

That May, I return to Maui, to the house where my mom died, to finish writing the memoir.

In July, I write a poem called “The bike, again.” that is published in the University of Chicago’s literary magazine. It is about learning to ride the bike again. I can no longer ride a bike. The saying (you know it) doesn’t seem to apply to me.

2012

I don’t remember, and have no archival evidence. I lived.

2013

It’s been one month since I moved to Los Angeles.

2014

I pour myself into Kale & Caramel, learning to food style, photograph, and develop recipes. There are many pictures of food, not many of feelings.

2015

2016

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2017

I am on a multi-city book tour for Kale & Caramel: Recipes for Body, Heart, and Table—a book dedicated to her, an homage to her love of healing plants and flowers.

2018

I am in Cordova, Alaska, to write about the salmon. It is, again, summer solstice. We stay up until midnight making an altar, lighting candles, preparing blessings for our ancestors.

2019

I live in a new place I call home: Topanga Canyon. The land here, the sky, the rocks, all of it gives me new eyes. I am home to myself in a new way.

I compile a guide to help other grief-walkers on the path. It starts like this:

How do you deal with the grief?

I get asked this a lot, and it’s a question I love—I’m honored that many of you trust me to hold your hand, in some small virtual way, through times of tremendous loss and pain. Grief is a topic of regular discussion in my life, as I lost my mother nearly eleven years ago, at 24. Her death, and its preceding illness, also happened to be accompanied by a massive heartbreak in my romantic life. Together, these two radical losses transformed me.

Grief completely changed my psychoemotional landscape. It demanded everything of me —total presence, complete surrender. I screamed until my throat was raw. I cried gallons of tears. I woke up in the middle of the night sweating, sure I’d been visited by the one I’d lost. I lost fifteen pounds in two weeks.

These losses rearranged my cells and my neurons. They redefined what I believed, and asked that I reexamine many so-called truths I’d held for decades. They grew me up.

2020

Rebecca Walker and I receive the uncorrected proofs of our book, What’s Your Story: A Journal for Everyday Evolution in the mail. I go on a tour of a cacao farm. I spend sunset by her lychee tree: They were the last food she ate, sucking their juices and spitting out the pulp. It was lychee season, and still is.

2021

Cleaning out a storage shed on her thirteenth deathiversary, I find back-copies of her first book, Living with the Flowers (William Morrow, 1982), and all of my baby teeth saved in a silk pouch.

2022

2023

My father and I bring my mother’s third (and last) book down to her lychee tree. It is a book of poetry and healing practices that she wrote while she was dying. We read aloud to each other, to her. There are more lychee than any other year. They are heart-shaped, fat, and juicy.

2024

I have a phone call with the genetic counseling department at Kaiser. They finally agree to run a genetic testing panel. It feels scary. I want to do it. I don’t tell the counselor that today is the sixteenth anniversary of my mother’s death until the last minute of the call. “Oh my goodness,” she says, pauses. I feel tears in my throat. “She would be so proud of what you’re doing to take care of your health,” she tells me. I cry. One month later, the results come back. I have no genetic variants of concern.

2025

2026

The moon is a crescent. I see her warmth in my eyes. I want to know what she would say about dating, about war, about AI, about this so-called adult life. It is hard to imagine adult her and adult me together, but I try. I compile archival material. I look to the past to understand now, to see how grief keeps changing me. I sign up for a class to learn my ancestors’ rituals and make them my own.

Eighteen years feels like a completion cycle, the beginning of a new story. I am full of questions.

I will report future findings.

I love you, however your heart is shaped by death. I love you, however you are dancing through grief.

xo,

Lily

HI

We’re on the cusp of summer, and I’m relishing late spring’s greening leaves and plumping figs. I picked the first few fruits from our tree this week, their nectar beading at the base. Inside, seeds and sugar. A reprieve from anything else on the mind. A clean slate of sweetness.

I come bearing another kind of fruit, a piece of writing over on that follows up on an essay I wrote here last year.

Last year’s piece, if you want to lay the foundation:

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This week, as we close out our reading cycle for Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, I wrote a step further: Not just about the politics of beauty and how women are perceived, but about how women are socialized to see each other. About the ways we are brought up, conditioned, and groomed to internalize the Male Gaze (a term coined by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975)—and to wield it against one another. About what is expected of us in order to uphold our socioeconomic and political standing in a patriarchal society.

To set the stage, I offer this relevant and iconic insight from French filmmaker Agnès Varda, which a friend sent yesterday.

Without further ado…

WOMEN SEEING EACH OTHER

Last month, this Substack Note went viral:

I chuckled at first, then noticed a familiar blur of shame at the edges of the humor as I read it a second time. Reliably, someone commented that if they did this they’d be shouting all day long. I smiled. And again came the sting of how barraged we women feel—not just by the external judgment of other people, media, and the internet, but by our own self-talk. We are on guard from the moment we wake to the time we sleep, and sometimes in our dreams, too.

In our Sunday meeting, one Lilith Lit member observed that Maggie, Lina, and Sloane’s stories in Three Women all begin at the point when there is a dramatic and negative change in the way their peers and/or family members see them. For each woman, this shift is the result of a sexual encounter, trauma, or assault with a boy or boys, a man or men. In its wake, they are suddenly and irreversibly marked, mocked, gossiped about. For example, of Maggie, Taddeo writes: “Everybody cares so much that she lost her virginity that everyone forgets to care that she just lost her virginity.”

And thus begins the lifelong practice of a woman seeing herself not just through her own eyes, but through the eyes of anyone who cares to have an opinion.

As a pre-teen and teen, I spent hours assessing myself alongside the girls in my dance company as we changed into leotards and leg warmers in front of dusty backstage mirrors. At least five days a week and on the nights we performed, I was part of a clan of girls who vocally picked apart their own bodies and each other’s. I rarely spoke, and my friends often mistook my silence for confidence. It was more like terror: I worried that if I began to catalog the parts of myself I feared made me undesirable to men, I might never stop.

I heard it at home, too: My parents were lithe and fit and had no qualms about expressing their belief that this was how everyone should be. To be overweight, to them—as to mainstream heteronormative media and culture in the 90s—was to be both physically and maybe even spiritually corrupt. On the radio, in magazines, on television, in movie theaters: a parade of often eating-disordered thinness.

There was one right way for a girl to be attractive, it seemed. But who was it that determined this right way to be? And through whose eyes were we really looking?

At some point in our upbringing, conditioning, and grooming, we internalize someone else’s gaze to the point that it coexists with or overpowers or own. Often, it’s the perspective of family members or authority figures: caregivers or parents, siblings or friends, teachers, celebrities, or other public figures. Their view of us transforms our sense of who we are, how the world perceives us, how we see ourselves, and who and how we should be.

Continue reading here:

Lilith Lit

Women Seeing Each Other + Meeting Recap: Three Women Week 5

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Lily Diamond

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LILITH LIT: WOMEN READING WOMEN

If the time is right for you to join Lilith Lit: Women Reading Women, I’m offering you (my long-time women readers here) a 20% discount off a year of virtual book club wonderment. Just use this link.

We’re about to start a new reading cycle with a mind-expanding novel that spans girl- and womanhood from the 1980s to the 2040s. Not to be missed.

STAY SANE

As always, I’d love to hear what “Women Seeing Each Other” brings up for you.

xo,

Lily

HI

This spring, as bumble bees sipped from plum blossoms, I spent eleven days in a biophilic community called Serenbe near the Chattahoochee Hills in Georgia. The organization Art Farm welcomed me as an artist-in-residence: to write, to teach, to rest, and to connect with the community, the land, and human-plant-animal friends old and new. For a stretch of time, I did my best to dislodge the biopsychosocial specters of war, generative AI, and autocratic madmen in charge. In a light-filled loft in the woods, I was saddled with the singular task of being an artist.

But let me back up. What, you might be wondering, is a biophilic community?

biophilia (noun): an innate and genetically determined affinity of human beings with the natural world, as set forth in 1984 by biologist Edward O. Wilson.

As a biophilic community, Serenbe aims to “connect people to nature and each other.” It was founded in the early 2000s by Steve and Marie Nygren as a sustainable community that would also help preserve the area’s wild-lands, 70% of which must always remain in conservation. Today, Serenbe is home to over a thousand residents living across three hamlets. Each of these urban centers is accessible through acres of safe, well-maintained, clearly marked woodland trails dotted with public art. One hamlet focuses on art, one on health and wellness, and one on agriculture.

In all her spring blossom spring regalia, Serenbe let me experience the simplicity and relief of a community retrofitted to bolster intimacy with land and humans. I was in awe: With a ten to fifteen minute jaunt through the woods, I could easily get to the local bookstore, coffee shops, natural apothecary, labyrinth, K-12 school, restaurants, and twenty-five acre organic farm. I didn’t set foot in a car for eleven days.

Walking everywhere established a gentle rhythm to my time, with space to rest my mind rather than grip the never-ending logistics and anxieties of driving, traffic, so-called modern life. I got to spend an afternoon writing poetry with teenagers, and another planting seedlings with four year-olds. One Saturday night my friend, mentor, and What’s Your Story? co-author Rebecca Walker and I held a public salon about creativity and personal narrative. And I got to catch up with brilliant novelist Rachel Harper, meeting new friends along the way.

But the best way to tell you about my time is to show you. (Bonus: I’ve also been collecting Earth vows to share with you, so don’t miss those below.)

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Above: An earthwork along the trails shadowing Cedar Creek, looking to Mado hamlet.

Nature ecstasy, watching birds flit about in the trees overlooking a waterfall along Cedar Creek.

A large percentage of Serenbe’s landscaping is edible, from blueberries and herbs to these plum trees, also home to exceptionally happy bees. If you listen closely you’ll hear the electric hum of golf carts whizzing by on the way to the farmers market; most residents get around on them.

Clockwise from top left—

More artwork in the woods—this one is Architectural Folly by Steve Drey.

An A.J. Downing quote set in steel sculpture by Robert Rausch:

All beauty is an outward expression of inward good, and so closely are the beautiful and the true allied, that we shall find, if we become sincere loves of the grace, the harmony, and the loveliness, with which rural homes and rural life are capable of being invested, that we are silently opening our hearts to an influence which is higher and deeper than the mere symbol.

Me walking the labyrinth at the Inn at Serenbe.

The spiral staircase leading to the Soul Barn at Serenbe Stables.

An intimate evening of conversation about personal narrative and creativity, aka Rebecca Walker plumbing the depths of our souls, as usual and preferred. Hosted by Hills and Hamlets Bookshop and Art Farm at Minro Studio, a coffee shop and ceramic studio.

Clockwise from top left: Rebecca Walker and me on the grounds of Art Farm; horses pasturing at sunset; Rachel Harper and I pose for our forthcoming album cover (not really, but should be, no?); sky gateway above the labyrinth.

I almost stepped directly onto this baby Eastern kingsnake that was sunning itself on the forest path. We both got very nervous; it started vibrating its tail, and as you can see, staring directly into my eyes. I later learned they aren’t harmful to humans but still spent that evening researching the animal, its spiritual significance, and how I might ensure I hadn’t deeply offended the snake kingdom.

EARTH VOWS

My time at Serenbe made me marvel at how simple a different way of living—one where human life is easily entwined with nature—might be. I spend most of my time in an area so rural that my closest neighbors are often cows and sheep, and I never dared imagined a reality where urban/hamlet life could exist in the middle of the woods. Likewise, I take for granted that most of our towns, cities, and sub/urban areas silo “nature” as something separate that we must seek out in order to experience. This severs us from our Earth family, leaving us feeling separate and dull, disconnected.

But we are nature. Shouldn’t the way we live reflect this? And why exactly did we start living this way? Oh, the allures of capitalism, imperialism, and technological advance. Oh, the delusion that success means living independently rather than interdependently, amassing individual wealth, and paying others to do anything that inconveniences us. We forgot that one of the costs of community is inconvenience.

In designing Serenbe, the Nygrens (alongside master architect and sacred geometry expert Dr. Phil Tabb) created something that feels simple. In my limited experience, it felt like Serenbe inverted the typical approach of dotting nature throughout the matrix of human development. Instead, human development was concentrated and dotted throughout the nourishing substrata of the wild. It felt…right. Good. Easy.

I’m not saying that Serenbe is exempt from the scope-creep sway of capitalism—it surely is not. But my time there gave me a window into a different way of developing place and community. I felt a bit of heartbreak considering what it would take to undo / redo our lived environments to make them biophilic rather than…biophobic.

I’m grateful to Art Farm for the time and space to create, write, and learn. To revel in my innate biophilia.

It got me thinking about a collection of Earth vows I’ve been storing up to share with you. Earth vows, as in: declarative expressions of how we might live in right relationship with the Earth.

I’ll start with one from Dr. ’s new book What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures. This is a “a new Hippocratic Oath in the face of the climate crisis,” created with architect and philosopher Oana Stănescu. Ayana writes:

In developing what follows, we realized something critical must come before avoiding harm: committing to the collective. Asking “What can we do?” instead of “What can I do?” The climate crisis is not a one-to-one doctor-to-patient, doctor-as-singular-hero scenario. This is a human-to-humankind-to-all-of-life scenario. So, the imperative to “do no harm” is second on our list. This is an oath meant to be taken with others.

The original Hippocratic Oath starts with swearing to the healing gods; we instead choose elements of life on Earth we hold particularly dear. Substitute in those that reverberate deeply with you, those you would be mortified to let down and elated to make proud. We offer this model for you to make your own, and pass along:

On the majesty of turquoise seas, and fireflies, and aspen trees,
On the honor of our parents, our ancestors, and humans-to-come,
On the wonders of laughter and sunshine,
I make these devotions to climate solutions for my community and for our magnificent planet:

First, move from “I” to “we.”

We will expand our sense of interdependence.
We will rein in our sense of individualism.
We will ask, “What should we do, together?”
Survival is collective, our fates are intertwined.

Second, do no harm.

We will restore and heal, not pollute and deplete.
We will regenerate ecosystems and our own resolve.
We will live lightly, as part of the Earth.
Accountability, generosity, and sweetness.

Third, less is more.

We will expand our creativity and contract our consumerism.
We will conserve, and distinguish between needing and wanting.
We will be gentle with our own imperfections and others’.
There is such a thing as enough. Basta.

Possibility exists.

This is a world of our making.
We can remake it, remix it, restore it, rebalance it.
The path of least resistance is only one of many paths.

I will be part of getting it right.
We will be part of getting it right.

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I’m sharing audio of this plus two other Earth vows for paid subscribers below. Maybe you’ll write some vows of your own and share them with me/us? Please do!

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HI

In July of 1997, when I was thirteen years old, the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact—starring Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanore Arroway and Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss (aka my first celebrity crush)—came out. I saw it multiple times in the movie theater, much to my own confusion: I was neither an astronomy nerd nor an aliens aficionado. But every time I watched Contact in the dark cold of the theater, knees hugged to my chest, I wept.

When my mother died eleven years later, I wondered if the film’s parental loss narrative had touched on something prescient: Did some part of me know I would face a similar loss? Or did I just want to be prepared for the inevitable deaths we all face?

In fact, the emotional core of my fascination was something much simpler: Loneliness. Based on real-life SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) researcher Jill Tarter, Contact is a story about the wonder and beauty of planet Earth and the improbability that we might be alone in a universe as vast as this one.

Yet like so many of us in our squirmy pre/teen years, I spent a lot of time feeling lonely and misunderstood. Interplanetary kinship had never occurred to me as an antidote, but the questions that Contact asks about connection, belief, and the unseen were soothing. They made me feel that my concerns were common—in a good way.

Sagan explored our smallness in the planetary scope of things from a place of curiosity. At a press conference in 1990, he spoke about the lack of evidence of other life in the universe: “For me, that underscores the rarity and preciousness of the Earth and the life upon it.”

He then pointed to an image of a vast atmosphere and a pale blue dot: “This is where we live. On a blue dot.”

Sagan’s acknowledgment of our isolation oxymoronically justified my feelings of loneliness and the possibility of connection—both with Earth and its inhabitants, and with whatever else might be out there.

In 1994, Sagan published Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. He explained:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

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Which brings me to the space adventures at hand: NASA’s Artemis II test flight around the far side of the moon and back. Pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, commander Reid Wiseman, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen traveled at thirty-three times the speed of sound to go faster and further into space than any humans have before.

They were also the first people to leave low-Earth orbit since 1972. As one denizen of the internet noted as she celebrated Artemis II’s Black pilot and woman crew-member, women couldn’t open a bank account or get a credit card or home loan the last time humans went to space. So yes, the world is different than it was when Sagan wrote those famous lines from Pale Blue Dot.

Yet in many ways, we face similar, and worsening, challenges. The U.S. is now, today, embroiled in proliferating war, corruption, an oil crisis, and the ever-flourishing of domination ideology. Automated registration into the U.S. military draft pool will begin in December for men aged eighteen to twenty-five. Social media delivers a constant stream of outrage, to which millions of people find ourselves addicted. Large language models fray our ability to handle (nay, revel in) the messy human realities of community, connection, togetherness—otherwise known as life on Earth.

And somehow, amidst it all, Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot theory held true: Seeing Earth through the lens of Artemis II’s astronauts in space brought us together in reverence.

In fact, it delivered something the NASA CAPCOM team called “moon joy” (ostensibly coined by Dr. Angela Garcia; uttered on camera by Jacki Mahaffey). And my goodness, did we need it.

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But it wasn’t just joy that the Artemis crew was offering, it was care, collaboration, excellence, and play, a glimpse of a possible now that felt like hope. The internet took note.

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And then they started talking. Both the astronauts and the team at NASA stunned us with words so awe-filled they sounded like poetry. It reminded me of the scene in Contact where Dr. Arroway reports from beyond-Earth: “No—no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should’ve sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful…I had no idea.”

Suddenly, it felt like we were all in one big, extremely long-distance relationship with what someone dubbed our “emotional support astronauts”. We hung on every word, every selfie, every morning wake-up song.

And the love affair turned us into poets, too.

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In all our haste and hunger to mainline moon joy, it felt like we were healing. Watching their splashdown in the Pacific Ocean today was a relief and a reminder: to keep the momentum of healing close at hand and at heart. To hold on to this glimpse of who we can be—up there and down here.

STAY SANE

If you’re looking to join a fun virtual book club, come join me (and 450 others!) over at —we’re about to have our first community meeting tomorrow. Moon joy!

Love,

Lily

Reporting live from the land of wind and water, where we’ve received twenty inches of rain in the past twenty-four hours, delivered by unrelenting gale-force winds. The state of Hawaiʻi is weathering a storm called a Kona Low, and this one’s of biblical proportions. We’re going on forty-eight hours without power here on Maui, trees and branches are down everywhere, much of the island is flooded, and areas remain without running water.

There will be much to do in the name of recovery, but while the power’s out, may I suggest a magical, hallucinogenic device called…a book?

Before the storm arrived, it was a delight-filled week sharing : Women Reading Women. What a relief to bring this virtual book club into the light after years of plotting and dreaming—and so exciting to feel your enthusiasm for it, too.

As one of our illustrious authors said when I extended the invite for her to join us: “The world is changed by feminist book clubs and that’s a fact.”

It’s true: Books remain a refuge and a catalyst in times of personal and collective trauma. And reading books in community, with the ability to connect on a human-heart level on the themes the text explores and bring them to life in context? Transformative. This is why I created .

The world is heavy, rife with political chaos, war, denialism, mega-storms, ongoing violence, and too often a refusal to prioritize the safety and needs of our most vulnerable. And yet—despite ongoing book bans, we still have pages to turn to, to cry on, to fight for.

We have books to transmute, to remember, to rage, to tell the truth. Books to empower, to teach, to defy.

We have books to prove we’re not alone, to heal, to help us find our people. Books to save our damn lives. Books to help us dream new worlds into being.

Books. Forever and ever.

And so, without further ado, I want to share the inaugural line-up of superstar authors who will join us this year. Seven luminary writers with three works of fiction and four works of nonfiction.

Lilith Lit

Your 2026 Lilith Lit Authors

Hello & welcome to our inaugural 2026 season of Lilith Lit: Women Reading Women…

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6 months ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Lily Diamond

These women and their words changed me for the better, and I’m so excited to share them with you. Stay tuned for our first book announcement on Monday—and make sure you’re subscribed over at (you won’t get those emails here!).

And don’t forget: I have a gift for you, dear reader.

20% off 1 Year of Lilith Lit

Use this link to get 20% off your first year in the club :). The link will be active until 3/23/26; for existing subscribers only.

JOIN THE CLUB

I’ll see you there.

Love,

Lily

A couple months ago, I mentioned that I’d be sharing some big news soon…and that day has arrived!! I’m over the moon to introduce you to : Women Reading Women—a virtual book club for women reading defiant works of contemporary literary fiction and nonfiction by luminary women authors.

Before you head to the post below to get all the juicy details (make sure you’re subscribed at so you’ll get the author announcements later this week! they’re thrilling), I have a gift for you:

20% off 1 Year of Lilith Lit

Use this link to get 20% off your first year in the club :). The link will be active until 3/23/26; for existing subscribers only.

Lilith Lit

Welcome to Lilith Lit!

Hey you…

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6 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Lily Diamond

You can also find Lilith Lit on Instagram.

And of course, I’m here if you have any questions at all about Lilith Lit and the literary joy ahead! If you’re curious about our namesake Lilith, start here.

Join Lilith Lit: Women Reading Women

SEE YOU THERE

I cannot wait!

Love,

Lily

HI

An eight year-old gave me a Valentine’s Day card yesterday. It was a cut-out of a fluffy cat that instructed me to DREAM BIG. Perhaps it was the cat’s permissive philosophizing that got me feeling romantic, or perhaps it was the sheer force of the written word—a series of love poems burning through my usual resistance to the saccharine holiday. Or maybe it was just my heart needing a break. Like yours might, too. A break from the collective and ongoing wrenching, from having to reconcile daily horror with the necessity of hope-in-action.

For whatever reason, I decided to give myself permission to pretend. Perhaps pretending is childish, especially in somber times when romance feels necessarily distant, impossible. But love? Love is always necessary, the solvent that keeps the heart from irretrievably breaking. (I’ve had my heart broken seven ways to Sunday, and might posit that no break is ever truly irretrievable.) And sure, love of all kinds can heal. But what if, just for a bit, I pretended to be in love?

Allowing myself to be swept up by the humor and delight and lusty gravity of these poems, I felt a lift, like a little helium tank inflating a heart-shaped balloon in my brain.

So today, for you and for Saint Valentine, for all the moments-in-romantic-love I’ve longed for—and most certainly for the Kānaka Maoli who (in a romantic gesture towards their sovereignty) beheaded Captain James Cook on this day in 1779—I present: a collection of love poems to disappear into, just like a good rom-com.

You could even dim the lights and burn a candle, if you’re in the mood.

As a private valentine to you, I’m making the audio recording free to all, with the written poems below the paywall. Links to the books in which these poems can be found are also a scroll away, in case you, like me, are experiencing a time of Extreme Book Lust™. Treat yourself!

Finally, I hope you enjoyed the (virtual) roses. I cried in beauty overwhelm as I walked through their fragrant, petaled rows in Queen Mary’s Rose Garden last summer. But I digress.

Ready? Press play.

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Poems in print just ahead…

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HI

Somehow it’s February, and even here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean the rain and wind are blowing, the sky is grey. I was in California at the end of last year and the beginning of this one; I saw friends and family and babies and ICE protests, the Mojave Desert and mountains with soil turned turquoise, lavender, and burgundy from volcanic mineral deposits. Awe and connection were steady companions amidst bouts of grief.

I considered how I might amplify awe as a daily practice rather than a coincidence of pleasure I occasionally stumble upon. Leaving Death Valley (Tüpippüh in Timbisha), where I felt a 72-hour drip-feed of psychedelic astonishment at the beauty of the Earth, I wondered how good we might have it if we could only, well, stop trying to assert dominance over each other. Is our perennial warring and discontent simply the fault of our distinctly large brains, which demand something to do other than reveling in the pleasure and pain of existence?

Not knowing the answer, I turned to art.

In December, I snatched up tickets to Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, feeling it was imperative to go cry in a dark theater with strangers. I sat next to my father and his partner and other friends, all of us gasping and sighing in turns, wiping tears from our cheeks. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that this is a story about child loss, a tale that reveals how stupefying grief can become community catharsis through the heart and mind of the artist.

I’ve already seen the film a second time, a testament not just to its nature-bound beauty but also to my ongoing need to cry in dark theaters with strangers. I don’t know if Zhao and O’Farrell consider the film political art, but in its capacity to hold space for ritualized grief and hope in a time characterized by violence and hate, I’d posit that it is. Weathering this moment of political unrest and cruelty, we are all living with grief—most of it unseen and unprocessed.

Art is one way forward.

“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them,” psychotherapist Francis Weller wrote. In my own experience, I find that the bridge between the two hands, the ground that allows us to pass between grief and gratitude, is art.

It is art that reminds me what good is possible, and art that shows me how we belong to each other. As Audre Lorde wrote, “We are, each one of us, intricately woven into the other’s existence.”

Art As The Way

Poetry, prose, music, visual art, all of it opens a window into the experience of the other. For a moment, I can experience what someone else is living through. Refracted through my own heart-mind, their experience sheds light on my own. I can cope, navigate, survive, celebrate better knowing that someone else has felt the bruise, the break, the beauty just like I do.

Today, I want to share some art that has kept me going this past month. This is art created during a time of war—from conflicts around the world and within the United States. It is art that reminds us of how fragile and good we are, of how much we have to lose, of all the ways we might care for each other if we soften and feel.

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“Use your art to fight,” Arundhati Roy once commanded. But creating in times of conflict can be stymying. To bare one’s most vulnerable thoughts—as art often does—is never easy (“The door is open but the hallway is long,” David Byrne mused), and to do so in a time when books are banned and journalists are arrested and killed for their work can be terrifying.

Examples of wartime art buoy me. In a poem called “Yellowbird,” the late poet Andrea Gibson reminds us:

Picasso said he’d paint
with his own wet tongue
on a dusty floor of a jail cell if he had to.
We have to create. It is the only thing
louder than destruction.

Last week I learned that Monet painted his iconic water lilies in 1914, his brushstrokes set to a soundtrack of gunshots from a nearby World War I battlefield. In a letter from that same year, he wrote that painting was “…the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times. All the same, I feel ashamed to think about my little researches into form and color while so many people are suffering and dying for us.” Monet died before he got to witness the influence—the peace and inspiration—these paintings have had on generations since.

Music

On Monday, I learned about abolitionist Julia Ward Howe’s 1861 “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which summarized the Union’s fight for freedom. This weekend, its melody was used in a protest song sung in Minneapolis, calling for an end to violence at the hands of federal immigration agents. History harmonizes through hymns of resistance.

Last week, I discovered this astonishing song and music video from artists in Ukraine, created during the war.

Milck, whose “I Can’t Keep Quiet” became a rallying anthem in 2017, has been releasing hymns and rallying cries that feel like prayers—like this song from Amanda Gorman’s poem for Alex Pretti…

…and this protest song written with Raye Zaragoza…

…to the folk hymns she’s been writing weekly to keep spirits burning.

Poetry

Last summer I had the chance to learn from visionary poet Alice Oswald, and her words on writing and activism from an interview with are often on my mind:

The texture of a life devoted to poetry is activist, in the deep sense. Quite often it’s not activist in the superficial sense. You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.

Here, a few poems that are keeping my heart company in the impossible place Oswald describes.

The day a poet is murdered by ICE
Hannah Eve Levy

is a school day like every other
in the first week of the year.
Time isn’t real but still
it’s January, and scientists say
we’re gaining about sixty seconds
of sunlight even as the sun sets.
I wake up and feel closer to death
than the day before. I am a mother,
so I wait for my daughter at the bottom
of the stairs and I hold her hand
when crossing the street and when
we stop at the corner I run my fingers
over her ponytail like it’s my own hair.
She says there’s a cloud in the sky
that looks like a heart but I can’t see
what she sees. I am a mother
so when she is hungry I feed her
and when she asks me how to spell wolves
I explain how some nouns transform
in the plural. Man is men and tooth is teeth
and person who is murdered becomes people.

In memory of Renee Nicole Good, z’l, a poet and a mother

In Those Years
Adrienne Rich

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I

Come, And Be My Baby
Maya Angelou

The highway is full of big cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that’ll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you’re going to turn.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we've got a week or two
The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror
And you sit wondering
What you're gonna do.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

Visual Art

While I was in Los Angeles, my friend Emily invited me to join her on an art date to see Kara Walker’s “Unmanned Drone,” part of an exhibit called Monuments. The show interrogates how we relate to monuments in America, specifically examining decommissioned Confederate works.

“Unmanned Drone” reimagines a statue of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson with forceful surrealism. Below, an excerpt from Kara Walker (KW)’s conversation with the show’s co-curator, Hamza Walker (HW):

HW: So, true/false: while the Stonewall Jackson monument has been subjected to a violent remixing, it is a violence already inherent to the monument. Celebrating figures who fought to maintain a white ethnostate, Confederate monuments were erected during the advent of legislation denying African Americans their civil rights. In this respect—

KW: True [Laughter]. Sorry, go on.

HW: In this respect, they represent a campaign of sustained and violent oppression, masquerading as virtue. All you’ve done is make that which is implicit, palpably explicit.

KW: That is true. And I guess that’s what I was trying to get at…in saying that it was all horror. Why should it look like it was anything other than?

In a vast departure, Jacob Jonas’s “Human Architecture” photographs of naked bodies in nature fill me with a sense of comfort and connection. Perhaps they offer a sense that I might always be at home on the body of the Earth.

Last month I got to visit the “Ocean of Peace” exhibit at the Schaefer International Gallery on Maui, featuring six artists of Micronesian heritage. Guåhan artist Gillian Dueñas’s work “Masakåda / My Anger Is Sacred”—a “reclamation of the ‘savage native woman’ and a celebration of ancestral rage that has sustained our people—was an undeniable feat.

And of course, this section wouldn’t be complete without paying tribute to Jenny Holzer, whose 1993 work “Marquees” landed in my sphere again this week.

Dance

Finally, a couple pieces of movement art that touched me this month.

The beauty and mimetic sound and power of Aerius Benton-Banai’s Ojibwe dance in what she calls a “sacred,” “healing” dress that creates sounds representing “ice cracking or icicles.”

And this moment from Damien Jalet and Nawa Kohei’s work “Mirage,” which reveals the circularities and discomfort and beauty of living in community.

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I hope this little curation leaves your heart buoyed or at least feeling less alone. Let me know what touched you here, or in the world beyond.

COMING SOON

Two and a half years ago, I had a dream about how I’d like to grow with this community I’ve built over the past fourteen years of blogging / creating / writing / sharing online. I’m very excited to share this evolution in the coming months! I’m hard at work on the project, and cannot wait to invite you in…soon.

STAY SANE

I’m holding on tight to the good we can make together.

Love,

Lily

HI

If I asked you how you are, what would you say? Where would you begin? Would your hand float to your chest, below your collar bone and above your heart? Would your breath catch in your throat, an errant tear stinging your eye? Would you want to answer the question, or turn away? Would you presume it was safe to be honest, or decide it might be easier to water down the truth?

2025 was a year of great loss for many communities, right up to this last week of mass gun violence and murders that laid bare the many intersecting ruptures of our current coexistence. Many times this year, my heart broke: over government agents terrorizing law-abiding citizens, over policies upending opportunities for education, care, and safety, over friends no longer comfortable living in this country. And over personal ruptures, too: new textures of mother-loss grief, cycles of romantic disappointment, the sting of friendships ebbing.

I think of what Joanna Macy—the luminary ecologist and activist who left us this year—once said: “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.” But living with a heart split in two, holding humanity at its center, can also be an unbearable act of courage. In this era of deep fakes, disinformation, autotune, face filters, and AI, true, messy honesty is often disruptive, unwelcome. So we learn to mend the split, to discern where and when and with whom it’s safe to be real, to speak of our heartbreak.

The question “how are you?” can be hard at any time of year, but especially when loss leaves us raw and craving the comfort of telling the truth. Those three words can be extra uncomfortable in a season when we’re supposed to be joyful, giving, perpetually displaying a twinkle of holiday cheer. When supposed to runs counter to what is.

Do you remember how, during COVID lockdown times, we started asking each other “how’s your heart?” We were so exhausted from the resistance demanded of us by the 2016-2020 presidential administration and so debilitated by the coronavirus pandemic that it seemed painful and absurd to ask someone a question so frivolous as “how are you?”

“How are you?” was for so-called normal times, when people weren’t dying en masse as a result of viruses and governmental policies. “How are you?” became complicated, weighty, almost rude; of course we weren’t ok. So “how’s your heart?” came into use between friends in my circle. It was a way to tip one’s hat to tenderness, bruising, grief. A way to acknowledge that everyone was going through something, and that something might not be visible on the outside.

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I’m not sure when we began drifting back towards “how are you?”, but these days when someone asks how I am and I answer “A mixed bag!” they often seem shocked. They’ll laugh or nod in agreement, or skew their head quizzically in my direction: Wow, she’s honest, I imagine them thinking. Maybe a little too. Is it perennially in fashion to delude ourselves just the bit we need to numb the pain of so many crises and collapses, of the heart broken open?

I don’t think we ever left the groundlessness of despair. And I’ve never been good at not feeling. These days, sometimes even “how’s your heart” feels a little impossible.

Other impossible questions that pop up like whack-a-moles at holiday parties: Have you met anyone yet? Have you tried those dating apps? Are you married? Do you have kids? Did you lose weight? When are you having a baby? Are you happy? What are we going to do about America?

I decided, when asked one or a multiplicity of these, to deliver an answer befitting the complexity of the query. If you ask whether I’m married, you will likely be the recipient of an unflinching exploration of the challenges of dating as a straight woman in America today. Recently, a friend advised I should leave America and move to Copenhagen if I wanted to experience romantic fulfillment with a man. Which begs another impossible question: Am I supposed to choose between the comfort of a life and place and community I love and romantic fulfillment?

But I digress. The point is, I am no longer willing, after three decades on Earth, to do less than be honest. Don’t we owe it to each other, at this point in our evolution as human animals, to try? How else will we find each other in the morass of bigotry and fear? Let us at least be honest about what’s in our hearts and on our minds.

Maybe then, emerging from the solidarity of honesty and boundaries1: kindness.

I suppose that’s my wish for these last days of 2025 and the coming months of 2026. May we find each other in honesty and a kindness borne of understanding that we’re all tending some kind of invisible bruise.

So for this season, maybe we ask: What shape is your heart in today?

And while you’re considering the honest answer, let me bestow upon you some poetry.

We’ll start with a little Jesus, since Christmas is nigh.

Goodtime Jesus
James Tate

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

from Riven Doggeries, Ecco, 1979

Let Them Not Say
Jane Hirshfield

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

from Love Letters
Victoria Chang

There is a bird and a stone
in your body. Your job is not
to kill the bird with the stone.

from The Trees Witness Everything, Copper Canyon Press, 2022

Advent
Heather Christle

It’s hopeless, the stars, the books
about stars, they can’t help themselves
and how could you not love them for it
here in the new week with animals
burying food and everything outlined
in cold and even friends, it’s hopeless,
this mess, this season, all that
is lost and tickets and strangers,
what can I say, only sitting here
on this dark bench waiting for what
I don’t know, I want this world
to remain with me, this holy tumult,
which does not know it loves me
and you, friends, spectacular driveways,
an orange, the vanishing year.

from The New Yorker, 2019

Scroll down to listen to me read these to you, plus a holiday bonus (“Things You Don’t Have to Do”) by me, on audio only.

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SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

I’ve been reading Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy—a comedic fictional skewering of the contemporary arts and intellectual scene in New York—and Hotshot: A Life On Fire by River Selby—a memoir about wildland firefighting as a woman, interwoven with insight on post-colonial devastations.

To listen.

I’m sure these titles precede me, but Rosalía’s album “Lux” and Florence & the Machine’s “Sympathy Magic” captured my heart this winter (links go to singles from aforementioned albums). As did this clip of Sarah McLachlan and Kelly Clarkson covering Joni’s “River”.

I also loved my friend ’s podcast episode “6 Questions to Ask Today to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet,” which eschews the annoying “new year, new you” tropes to deliver science-backed questions for reflection and action. That link also takes you to a free workbook from Liz.

Another friend offering a pathway to return to self during these heart-split-open, liminal times: the brilliant created a series of voice memos collectively titled “Your Move” that will electrify every cell of your brain, body, and beyond. Learn more and get a free preview.

To watch.

Get thee to a theatre that’s showing Hamnet and let your soul heal (while your eyes leak liters of tears) in the presence of genius. This film will renew your faith in art and humanity and love and trees, too. (Regrettably, I haven’t yet read the book. Soon!) And if you’re not watching “Heated Rivalry,” get on it. Episode 5 is currently the second highest-ranked television episode of all time on IMDB.

AN AUDIO TREAT

Delights ahead: Just press play for “Things You Don’t Have to Do” by me, plus the poems above come to life.

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HI

I am addicted to consuming images of other people and chances are, so are you. In 2023, Gallup polls found that 51% of U.S. teenagers spend over 4 hours a day on social media, scrolling, swiping, comparing, assessing, dissecting, obsessing. On average, U.S. adults clock about 2 hours daily on social media doing the same. As someone who devoted seven years of my career to being a full-time blogger, I’m keenly aware of my swiping addiction and its toll on my brain, my self-esteem, and my ability to sort reality from an Instagram filter.

A few weeks ago, an influencer I follow posted a video about her 11-step nightly skincare routine. In the (seemingly unfiltered) Reel, her skin is taut, plump, and glowing. Should I have an 11-step nightly skincare routine? I gawked. Like me, this woman is in her early forties. Unlike me, she appears not to have the wrinkles I sometimes obsess over, knowing that they diminish my objective attractiveness in a society where hetero-patriarchal beauty standards dictate that women are most desirable when they look eternally 25. Perhaps this woman’s 11-step routine would do for me what (most likely) genes and money did for her?

Sure, I could get Botox or any of the other injectables and treatments that have nearly become de rigueur for women with the money to pay for them. Botox use increased 73% between 2019 and 2022, with injections for people under 19 (yes, 19!) up 9%. 75% of plastic surgeons in the U.S. have seen a “staggering spike” in clients under age 30. “Prejuvenation,” “a preventative treatment for aging,” is all the rage.

But having lived 42 years without dyeing my hair or altering my skin or appearance, I’m reticent to cave to the demands of the male gaze more than I already do as a straight woman. My reticence isn’t just theoretical: I deeply dislike the idea of spending hard-earned money to perpetuate the illusion that I can keep gravity and aging at bay. I don’t want to fuel an economy and society that penalizes women for not wearing makeup, for wrinkles and white hair, for aging.

I’d be remiss not to note that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ 2022 report also showed a 253% rise in men seeking out procedures like fillers and “Brotox” (yep) since 2019. Men face similar pressures to conform to heteronormative standards around body-type, height, and more. Though living under patriarchy is inevitably more brutal for women, the Beauty and Wellness Industrial Complexes are increasingly gender agnostic: they just want our conformity and our money.

Which is to say, it’s not exclusively the male gaze that’s fueling our obsession with “prejuvenation”: It’s also our daily engagement with the algorithm, the businesses that spend money to capture our attention there, the endless scroll of Beauty and Wellness Industrial Complex–content nestled snugly in the palms of our hands. Every day, we spend hours consuming images, training our brains on how we should look, what we should spend money on, how we should conform—a ceaseless accumulation of product and aesthetic trend and desire. As Salty founder Claire Fitzsimmons once said: “The patriarchy is in the algorithms.”

Journalist calls this ever-expanding set of expectations about women’s beauty “aesthetic inflation”:

The normalisation of injectables, surgery and extreme skincare routines over the past decade has shifted the baseline standard of beauty for all — aesthetic inflation, if you will — trapping women and gender non-conforming people in a cycle of aesthetic labour they can’t easily escape without facing social, financial and political fallout.

I thought about aesthetic inflation when a 40 year-old female friend recently texted me with a burning question: “Do all people with smooth faces on ig, specifically spurred by seeing [redacted] and [redacted], do they have Botox/other injectables? lol these are the thoughts I have by myself and I finally decided to ask someone.”

Her hesitation to speak openly about aesthetic manipulation speaks volumes. When we invest hours a day looking at and comparing ourselves to other women, many of whom are spending thousands of dollars a year on cosmetic alteration, shouldn’t we at least be able to speak openly about it? If we don’t, we only serve to normalize the illusion that women look a certain way without the “aesthetic labor” DeFino names.

In a recent article on The Cut about the “Forever-35 Face,” the author discusses the impressive “undetectability” of deep-plane face-lifts. One 44 year-old woman shares her inability to assess her peers’ ages: “they…seemed to belong to some glamorous tribe of the nebulously de-aged, appearing somewhere between 35 and 50.” But this mysterious de-aging phenomenon isn’t solely the result of face-lifts, injectables, and other procedures improving over the past decades.

With the advent of Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat’s front-facing “effect” filters, social media users suddenly had the ability to instantaneously modify the way they looked—and to project that modified image to the world. Today, front-facing effects proffer transformation and a “nebulously de-aged” face to anyone, for free, at any time of day or night.

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About five years ago, I started taking screenshots of myself with and without Instagram effects and placing them side-by-side for comparison. I was scared of what I imagined normalized use of these effects might do to beauty standards, and to the way we perceive facial features, faces, and people themselves. Many of the filters featured sliders that would adjust the strength or intensity of the effect, so that, in real time, you could choose how snatched you wanted your jawline, how wide your eyes, how Aryan-narrow your nose, how wrinkle-free your skin.

I was told the effects on TikTok and Snapchat, two apps I don’t use, were even more robust than Instagram’s. What would this do to minds much younger than my own? Would we be able to stand looking at unfiltered faces five or ten years down the road? Would we all begin to suffer from some form of face or body dysmorphia?

While beauty standards for women have shifted continually throughout history, watching their real-time manipulation via social media app was alarming. I began to think about women’s beauty standards in terms of the Overton Window: the range of political ideas acceptable to the mainstream at any given moment. Typically, the Overton Window is used to assess how sociopolitical mores shift over time. But what is beauty, if not a political act? After all, women typically conform to beauty standards as a way to uphold social and financial status given their varying states of inequality and oppression in patriarchal societies.

Was my participation in and addiction to social media actively shifting the Overton Window of hetero-patriarchal beauty standards? Was my perception of beauty, faces, and bodies being distorted by front-facing filters in a way not dissimilar to the effects of pornography on sexual attraction and expectation?

I made a private pledge not to use the front-facing Instagram filters or effects (unless they were obvious and fun, like the kind that makes butterflies flit around your skull). And even more privately, I began to begrudgingly take note of women who regularly used filters. I’m certainly not immune to judging my frown lines, to wishing I looked differently than I do. But stronger than that angst is my fear of a future where use of these effects becomes ubiquitous, where “nebulously de-aged,” “prejuvenated” faces carry more social, financial, and political clout than an unmodified face.

In July 2021, I made a Reel about it. (Watch to the end for my unfiltered face.)

The caption read:

Hey babe! Filters are a tool of patriarchal heterocapitalism, designed to make women look the way cis hetero white men (think they) prefer, so that hetero women of all racial backgrounds think they need to buy products (hello multi billion dollar beauty & wellness industries) in order to conform to a literally non-human beauty standard invented by a bunch of tech bros in Silicon Valley.

What does that look like? Smooth, poreless, wrinkle- and blemish-free skin, blushing cheeks, plump juicy lips, wide doe eyes, light-colored irises, a narrowed nose, and a thinner jawline. These are Aryan / Anglo Saxon ideals of beauty that certainly don’t conform to my Ashkenazi Jewish nose, nor many other parts of my face. They’re also attributes that signal sexual pleasure and youthfulness (often verging on childlike or even infant-esque 😳).

If you follow someone who regularly uses filters, keep in mind you don’t really know what they actually look like. Take account of how that influences your perception of the content they create.

This is not a calling out (wear make-up! have plastic surgery! be free! I’m not trying to tell you how to be). But it *is* a calling in—for women to opt out of an insidious tool created for use on yet another social media platform created by cis het white men. For you to know whose game you’re playing, and choose to walk off the field.

This filter is called baby <3 by Lazy777, and Billie Eilish used it in her Stories today! And of course this one goes out to our hero in dismantling the beauty industrial complex, 🙏.

This week, four years after I made the Reel above, I returned to Instagram’s “Trending” effects and created side-by-sides of present-day me with six of the top ten filters the app recommends in Stories. On the left side of each rectangle is the same image of me—no makeup, no filter. On the right: same face, manipulated with one of the filters.

What do you notice? Even in filter 6—arguably the most “natural”—all the manipulations I detail in my previous post remain: nose-narrowing, lip plumping, jaw-line re- or defining, wrinkle erasure. If I used one of these effects regularly on Instagram and one day you caught me sans-effect in the wild, you’d probably recognize me, perhaps with a bit of dismay.

As my friend and cookbook author aptly noted, “…my first thought is that lady looks like maybe a cousin of my friend Lily who has had a lot of work done.”

But what I find most alarming is the sameness each of the effects introduces: They’re all trending towards one basic type.

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Of course, social media isn’t the only place where algorithms prime women to swipe, compare, and perform for men. As someone who’s spent thirteen years on and off the dating apps in search of a good man, I’m keenly aware of how aesthetic inflation, the Overton Window of hetero-patriarchal attractiveness, and front-facing filters influence the world of dating.

In a recent Instagram video exploring aesthetic inflation, Jessica DeFino uses the appearance of women contestants on a reality dating show as a prime example. On the left, some of the contestants from Season 1 of “The Bachelor” in 2002; on the right, some of the contestants from a season that aired in 2020.

In the video, DeFino cues for us to notice the amount of aesthetic labor being performed by the women in 2002 versus the women in 2020. I notice something else, too: That uncanny sameness that I mention in the images of my filtered face above.

There’s a sameness to the way the women from 2020 present themselves, which to my eye reads as a high degree of conformity to spoken and unspoken beauty standards. To me, it looks like evidence that they’re all watching the same make-up tutorials, following the same influencers, using the same front-facing effects on Instagram and TikTok, all seeking the same “nebulously de-aged” face.

This kind of literal and figurative grooming has been happening for centuries, but never have we held such powerful tools of mimetic dissemination in our hands. Our phones and their accompanying algorithms are ready at any given moment to show us how we should look, and we are addicted to their tutelage.

I wonder: Do men notice this sameness in women, and are they being groomed to select for it on dating apps and in real life? Does the Instagramification of women’s faces make them seem less real, less human, easier to double-tap on a screen, easier to swipe away on an app?

Much has been written and ranted about dating apps in recent years: about the gamification of dating, how the apps are designed not to work so that users need to pay-to-play, about the culture of superficiality and transactionality they encourage. I’ve never liked the mindless aesthetic sorting that swipe apps demand, asking that we judge potential partner compatibility by a few static, plausibly manipulated photos.

And I’m continually unnerved by what my dear friend and psychotherapist calls the “disposability fallacy”: the illusion that no matter how many people we swipe left on—supposedly disappearing them into the virtual garbage chute—there will always be another face, another user profile, waiting for connection. In my extensive online dating experience, and in my research on the subject, both men and women experience this feeling of disposability in online dating. It leads to uneven communication, disinterest, ghosting, despair.

A few weeks ago, my twenty-nine year-old niece made a video on TikTok about hetero-patriarchal beauty standards on Season 9 of Netflix’s reality dating show “Love Is Blind.” Without trying to or desiring the accompanying attention, the off-the-cuff video she recorded (late at night, make-up free, unfiltered, nary a ring-light in sight) garnered 93.6K likes, 2,165 comments, 2,459 saves, and 422 shares. In the video (I won’t be linking; she’s trying to de-viralize her existence), my niece wryly begins: “Joe…very clearly didn’t like Madison only because she wasn’t a size 2. He literally said that.” Her eyebrows raise.

“I believe [Madison]’s a very beautiful woman and in real life I believe he would be punching up by dating her. Like I think she, at least physically, out-matches him. And it just made me start thinking about how insane the beauty standards are for women and not for men. Which—this is not a new thing, obviously.”

My niece goes on: “You could walk outside and there’d be a hundred beautiful women, and you could walk outside at the same time and there’s maybe five beautiful men—and that’s coming from somebody who’s attracted to men. I think dating apps and society in general has made it so there are so many options of beautiful women for men to choose from…and there’s not that many for us [with men]. So [men] get to be so picky about how people look and they get to put down women physically who are stunning and beautiful.”

At this point, I began thinking about one of the recent trends in men’s attractiveness: the “rodent man.” Needless to say, this trend does not involve men spending thousands of dollars on beauty products or injectables.

“It’s not fair,” my niece continues. “I really think it’s awful that men get access to seeing all of these women on dating apps, probably hundreds a day. Beautiful women. It makes them start thinking like Oh yeah, I deserve all of this. I deserve the top of the top. Which, like—people can date whoever they want. I don’t think there should be a standard of beauty for dating, but…there’s too many options I think.”

At first, hundreds of comments flooded in from women thrilled to hear their own thoughts spoken aloud—feelings they’re likely afraid to verbalize. But as the video gained traction, my niece began to notice hateful comments piling up. They skewered everything from her appearance to her intelligence, though the comments about her looks came exclusively from men. Someone even tagged an account that exists for the sole purpose of reposting and making fun of women.

For a week, she went to bed each night scared of what she might wake up to, and spent hours each day deleting angry messages. I asked her if she could take a week off the app, for her sanity.

“I think I should,” she lamented.

But she didn’t. She was too busy tracking, in real-time, what happens when just one woman chooses to name the inequity of beauty standards in our culture. When she decides to express hope for a world where definitions of beauty might be dictated by more than an algorithm that’s designed to uphold the very systems of oppression that got us here in the first place.

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SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

’s novel Aesthetica explores a not-so-distant future where Instagram effect–inspired facial modification is ubiquitous.

To listen.

Speaking of women refusing to conform, have you listened to the new Florence + The Machine album, “Everybody Scream”? Lyrics from “Sympathy Magic”:

I do not find worthiness a virtue
I no longer try to be good
It didn’t keep me safe
Like you told me that it would

STAY SANE

Let’s make a pact: I’ll compare myself to one less face today if you do the same, okay?

xo,

Lily

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HI

Last week, I spent a blissful ninety-nine minutes watching the “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery” documentary. I was thirteen years old when the Lilith Fair festival began in the summer of 1997, most likely curled up in my bedroom clutching the liner notes to Sarah McLachlan’s CD “Surfacing,” memorizing every word. The round, reaching, tenderness of her voice, its range and power, reshaped what I imagined being a woman sounded like. She sang about heartbreak and desire and other emotions I was old enough to read books about and young enough to sincerely romanticize. “Building a Mystery” trained me to seek out spirituality in the dark, to tolerate decades of “beautiful, f*cked up m[e]n,” just like Sarah had.

In the two years prior, Alanis Morissette’s rage-fueled feminist juggernaut “Jagged Little Pill” and Fiona Apple’s depressive yet sexually charged “Tidal” burst onto the scene. At twelve and thirteen when those albums released, I was transfixed: Nobody had told me girls could have big feelings and not get shunned or shamed for them. But these women had capital B–big feelings, and were being celebrated. As I slid into fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I added Jewel, Tori Amos, Paula Cole, Natalie Merchant, and Shawn Colvin to the canon of women who, unbeknownst to me, were psychoemotionally raising me in ways my own parents could not.

As an only child, the women singer-songwriters of the 1990s were the wild, sexually and emotionally liberated big sisters I never had. They taught me about longing and betrayal, sex and religion, defiance and fury. I wanted to be like them, or at least write like them. The songs they wrote were kryptonite for my good-girl, “straight A” self. Paula Cole’s “Tiger” (I’m so tired of being shy/ I’m not that girl anymore/ I’m not that straight A anymore/ I want to sit with my legs wide open and/ Laugh so loud that the whole damn restaurant/ Will turn and look at me/ “Look at the tiger jumping out of her mouth”) is a good place to start, if you’re curious.

The documentary draws on hundreds of hours of footage from the festival, highlighting Sarah McLachlan’s wrangling of the greats to create a musical phenomenon unlike any before. On stage with her: Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Sinéad O’Connor, Bonnie Raitt, Jewel, Paula Cole, Erykah Badu, Indigo Girls, Natalie Merchant, and in its later years, Mýa, Christina Aguilera, Nelly Furtado, Missy Elliot, and so many more. I would’ve gladly watched many hours, Beatles documentary style.

The interviews and clips capture the transformative feminist power of the festival, the way its music, its gathering, its wild success, shaped and galvanized culture. While the film only briefly touches on the pitfalls of white feminism in that era (which still apply today), it reinforces the enduring patriarchal distaste for feminist hallmarks like women’s armpit hair and safe spaces for women and queer people to express themselves.

During the Lilith Fair’s final year of shows in 1999, Sheryl Crow briefly left the tour to play at Woodstock ‘99. She came back from the concert, which attempted to revive the magic of the original Woodstock, deeply shaken. In stark contrast to the safety, respect, and love that artists and attendees described feeling at Lilith Fair, Woodstock ‘99 was a horror replete with multiple rapes, arson, violence, and several deaths.

This week, a friend who also watched “Lilith Fair” (and was lucky enough to attend twice as a teen) drew a lamenting parallel to our present day: “My brother-in-law said that as a country we could have chosen Lilith Fair, and instead we chose Woodstock ‘99.”

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Spending time with “Lilith Fair,” its music, and its artists, I’ve been thinking about the role of art in this political moment. About my nostalgia for white women singer-songwriters releasing feminist juggernauts like “Jagged Little Pill”. About these artists whose music helped raise me, and what they taught me about the kind of writer I wanted to be as a thirteen year-old. About whether or not I am that writer today.

Now.
In the United States of America.
In this time when I, and many artists, often feel too burned out or too scared to share work that’s unfiltered, unmarred by the machine of authoritarian heterocapitalism.
In this political moment, when silence and safety are often mistaken for one another.

A little over a year ago, I spent a weekend in a virtual workshop with Roshi Joan Halifax and the writer-activists Rebecca Solnit and . It was just after the 2024 Presidential election, at which point America was experiencing yet another instance of what Van Jones in 2016 called a “whitelash”—the white nationalist version of whiplash. In a note on my phone, I typed out salient clips from the Zoom workshop.

The first, from Rebecca Solnit:

We really are going to hear that white people are separate from Black people and men are separate from women and people who aren’t straight belong over there and people who weren’t born in this country shouldn’t be here. We’re going to have a kind of psychotic carnival of separateness. And interbeing, interdependence, is something to hold onto as a faith, as a commitment, as a truth in this moment. As a lived experience.

Nearly fifty years earlier, when Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan—the first Black woman to deliver a keynote address at any national political convention—headlined the Democratic National Convention in 1976, she warned of this “psychotic carnival of separateness”:

When people seek only to satisfy their private wants and private interests, we will cease to be one nation, and become instead a collection of interest groups. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?

Who then, indeed.

I would argue it is often the artist, the writer, the poet, the dreamer, the musician, who speaks for the common good. Who expresses the inexpressible and gives voice to the pain and injustice that most cannot stand to witness, identify, speak aloud.

I argue this because I find myself reaching for poetry, music, books, paintings, sculptures, forms of art I’ve never encountered before, to assuage what former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo calls the “post-colonial jitters.”

I think about installation art, like my friend ’s recent abolitionist audio work “If You Hear Something, Free Something” in the New York subway system. I think about Marina Abramovic’s decades-ago walk across the Great Wall of China to finalize her divorce with fellow performance artist Ulay Laysiepen. I think about Barbara Kruger’s collages turned billboards, projecting discourses of gender, feminism, and belonging to entire cities.

Think about the art that’s most moved you. Is it behind fiberglass in a museum? Or living alongside you in the world?

When asked about the role of the artist, social practice artist and professor Theaster Gates once said:

Even mentioning that artists would be involved in things that are outside of our studios is quite controversial for other artists. And I’ve seen this conversation play itself out, that in fact we should not have to be called upon to patch the problems of struggling communities. We should not have to be the ones who take on the question of police brutality in our country or black male violence in our country. We should not have to be the ones thinking about unfair labor practices. But in fact there are artists who are willing to take up these causes. Artists who understand that sometimes the artistic affect is better than policy, it’s more complicatedly inclusive than the town hall meeting. There are these ways in which artists can wield the world and make really amazing things happen because they’re not just dependent upon the money that can be raised to generate a protest, [because] the protest is in the work.

Artist and writer Yumi Sakugawa created this illustration on the role of the artist in the world today:

Honesty. Care. Imagination. Liberation. Connection. Hope. Salve. Witnessing. These were the gifts I received from Tracy, Sarah, Paula, Alanis, Fiona, Tori.

In creating and publicly sharing work, the artist offers resonance and solidarity, which in turn creates community. Watching “Lilith Fair,” I recognized my younger self in so many of the girls who attended the festival, seeking safety and belonging, dreaming and liberation.

And so, in my writing, I hope that my words might help someone feel a little less alone. I hope you know that your art does the same, in the mere fact of its existence. In sharing, it has the ability to forge community where there may be none.

Philosopher writes: “Develop a taste for yourself in the world—art, books, films, inspiring figures. Find that everything you’re drawn towards is a piece of you that’s attempting to speak back.”

What is the piece of you that’s speaking back, asking to be spoken, to be heard?

I’ll leave you with two poems by extraordinary women writers, pieces that change the way I breathe when I read them—psychosomatic evidence of transformation. As always with Your Poetry Fix, I recorded them for you to bask in the audio, too.

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HI

“…noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive.”
— , from Inciting Joy: Essays, shared by a dear friend

Much has been written about the Millennial generation and how disasters shaped our psyches. I turned eighteen two weeks before 9/11, was just beginning my freshman year of college five thousand miles from home, an hour and a half outside Manhattan. Before that morning, I never imagined anything like the devastation we saw repeated on loop for weeks. I’d never looked into the eyes of people who’d witnessed total destruction, humans bereft of words, sense, meaning, comfort. Brutality, fear, and othering echoed into questions, conversations, the ground under our feet, the walls around us.

This, I learned, was what it meant to grow up, to be an adult. Or maybe just what it meant to be alive in the twenty-first century: a screen endlessly looping pain, loss, not knowing.

Then came economic collapse, war, uprisings, beheadings, a global pandemic, shooting after shooting, our democracy cracking under the weight of extremism and our fear of honestly facing history and each other. Somewhere in there, before I turned twenty-five, my mother died. I weathered heartbreak. I learned…what do they call it? Resilience. Grief. How to dance while I wept.

Us millennials, we eat disaster for breakfast. We are nothing if not resilient. But unlike the generations after us, we remember what life was like in the before times: Before social media, before smart phones. Before assassinations went viral and genocides were live-streamed. Before AI coached teens in self-harm. Before I thought twice about going to a movie theater or night club. Before a generation learned about sex from hardcore porn. Before my friends worried about sending their kids to school. Before I knew what it felt like to hold burning people in the palm of my hand, to switch them off with the click of a button. Before I made a career out of being an Internet Person™️.

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Before: When it was easy to step away from the internet. When we knew our best friends’ phone numbers by heart and hanging out meant painting each others’ nails, making collages from our dELiA*s catalogs, staging elaborate photo shoots with disposable cameras, sneaking sugary Orange Juliuses at the mall. We co-regulated without knowing we needed to. We didn’t doomscroll. We didn’t even scroll. We dreamt and argued out loud, not in a comments section. We didn’t check to see how many likes and follows we got. We didn’t ask ChatGPT. We let ourselves imagine the world we would inherit.

It feels hard to locate that imagined world in this one, which is often so disturbing that it feels imaginary. Multiple shootings in a single day, with thoughts and prayers offered as a solution. People eager for sycophantic, frictionless AI models to replace the icky, thorny rewards of human relationship, insight, intimacy, skill, creativity, community. People kidnapped by the government in broad daylight. People so hungry for change that they overlook bigotry, abuse, criminality, cruelty in their elected leaders. People so hungry to be understood that group-think conquers common sense. People so hungry. People.

All of us glued to our screens, addicted to the slot-machine dopamine drip and release. We want—nay need—to cut ourselves off, but are scared to miss a beat, miss the next petition to sign, the next horror to protest, the next article-podcast-essay we consume or risk not knowing how to think or feel. We fear that if we step away, if we don’t keep ourselves informed, if we don’t equip ourselves with the infinitely refreshing font of World Wide Web knowledge, we might miss the next disaster, get caught off-guard by the next economic collapse, wildfire evacuation, shooting.

If there’s one thing Millennials hate, it’s missing something online. When we look away, bad things happen. We learned this twenty-four years ago on 9/11.

What’s worse, the more we bond with our screens and the less we co-regulate with other humans, the more we look to the internet not just for information but for self-soothing, too. We need that puppy vid, that Cardi B meme, those tidal headwaters colliding, that thousand year-old tree, that murmuration of starlings across a full moon sky. We itch for digital dopamine.

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But my body is craving something else. These days, I feel wrung out, on edge in a way I can’t sustain. My chest feels weighed down, my thoughts scattered rough-shod. I summon myself into physicality: make collagen broth, get my hands in the dirt, walk with friends, dance, breathe, shake. And then, inevitably, I reach for my phone. I think about when my friend Haley and I created 30 Screenless Nights (with some of you, no doubt) in 2017. I wonder how much deeper our addictions are now, how many years of tolerance and desensitization we’ve all built up to the manipulations of the internet.

I don’t know the answer. I’m not suggesting that it’s practical to eschew smart phone reality. We are proactive citizens and community members. We need information. We need each other. What I do know is that I need more moments with the weight off my chest.

And so, living in an attention economy—where my time is often commanded by algorithms beyond my control or understanding—I can still fight to reclaim that attention. I can put up guardrails (Airplane mode, Do Not Disturb, and more) to protect my mind and body and heart so that I have the capacity, the energy, and, crucially, the time to show up for the world that I dreamt about as a kid. I don’t want to look back at my life and remember all the hours I spent hunched over my phone, scrolling. That was never a part of the dream.

If I could, I’d invite you over to paint our nails and make collages. Climb a tree. Dream about a world of collective care, and then do something about it. Light candles under the full moon.

We are still growing up together.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

Help! Between book research and my terminal bibliophilia, my reading stack is currently several looming bedside towers. Two must-reads: ’s Privacy, a psychosomatic (unintentional) thriller about the author’s own pregnancy. And Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, a psychosomatic lesbian awakening novel set in the Netherlands in 1961, with a twist that had me weeping. Just push through Part 1, it’ll be worth it.

To listen.

This interview with former Mormon sister wife Christine Woolley on leaving the church and polygamy in order to find herself.

To watch.

Season 2 of “Nine Perfect Strangers”: Holy inner child therapy, Batman! For when you’re in the mood to watch people tripping on psychedelics in a castle in the Austrian Alps in the dead of winter.

STAY SANE

I know there’s a screen between us, but I promise you were in my childhood dream. Thanks for being part of this community.

Love,

Lily

HI

At fifteen, at twenty-two, even at thirty-five I thought I knew the ways of the world, had it all clear, figured out, absolute. You, too? It makes me chuckle to think of my youthful hubris, unmarred by the hands of time. Today I woke up forty-two years old and questions fill my heart, not certainties. I think I’d rather it be this way.

Over the past few weeks I wrote about the questions that dog me, and I think you might relate. We’re on this bus together, as it turns out, and all we can do is try to help each other stay sane along the way home. Even as the wheels start to come off, the engine burns out, one or ten of us loses our temper, someone tries to stage a hostile takeover, and the bus driver gets hangry. Amidst heat waves and wildfires and dehumanizations, we keep finding our way.

Here’s to you, fellow traveler.

In case the human voice is what the doctor ordered to heal your heart today, there’s a recording of this poem plus a juicy Barbara Kingsolver poem on hope (I didn’t know she did verse!) below the paywall, too.

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Sorry to bother you

Sorry to bother you with this, but I’m trying
to figure out how I’m supposed to be in this life:
soft or hard, doing penance or seeking ecstasy,
am I supposed to suffer so I know the shape of
compassion or hunt down joy, watch the news or
stay sane, read the right books, wolf down content
like it’s colostrum-laced chia pudding or slash
my screentime, should I microdose or stay sober,
spend every cent trying to undo gravity, wrinkles,
heartbreak, paint on mascara or go Pamela
Anderson, get enough fiber and protein, make sure
not to breathe with my mouth open, fight fascists and
bigots and heal intergenerational trauma or forget,
and am I supposed to shave my legs or dismantle
patriarchy, join the cult of individualism or community,
outrun death or maybe just stop running, stand
panting like a dog, cheeks aflame, look my life
square in the face, pet its jowls, howl into the abyss,
sit down with death for breakfast, devour the shoulds
and supposed to’s. Be.

— Lily Diamond

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HI

It is a truth held to be self-evident—along with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that consuming the news in 2025 is a brain-melting endeavor. Spend five or ten minutes taking in its special blend of violence, outrage, and hyper-capitalist absurdity, and a creeping overwhelm takes hold. In response, most people I know have developed unique consumption strategies: unsubscribe from breaking news alerts, only listen to the radio, disavow mainstream media, only check the news on weekends or 1 to 2pm on weekdays or on social media, cancel subscriptions altogether. Conversely, some dive in headfirst, dutifully and brazenly consuming everything everywhere all the time.

Perhaps it’s helpful to consider why we seek out so-called news in the first place. Do we consume news media to educate ourselves, to broaden our perspectives, to better understand the lived context of our days, our relationships, our struggles? I would also argue that we take in the news because we have a sense that we—as fellow humans, citizens of planet Earth—owe each other something. At most, empathy and action. And at the very least, the currency of our attention.

But it’s also true that our brains and nervous systems are not accustomed to handling the influx of information that firehoses at us daily. As one citizen of the internet put it:

Having a choice about how we consume news, how we witness human suffering, is a weighty privilege. It begs thorny questions about apathy and empathy: How much do we ask ourselves to engage with, relate to, and understand what others are going through (especially those who don’t look or live like us), and how often do we allow ourselves to close off, to turn away from human experiences that makes us uncomfortable? And what does that choice say about who we are?

These questions—and the ongoing suffering we are asked to witness, make sense of, and act upon—returned me to two wartime poems I wrote in 2023 and 2024. Both wrestle with the experience of observing war crimes, violence, and ongoing systemic injustice from the safety of screens and the privilege of remove.

I hope they’ll reach some part of you that needs awakening to the menace of apathy, the powers of empathy, our in-born capacity to hope as an act of defiance.

The first, “During the War (after Ilya Kaminsky),” is from 2024.

During the War
after Ilya Kaminsky

I cannot say we lived happily during the war.
We existed.
We raged.
We took sides.
We grew numb.
We, all of us, apologizing.
We scrolled and called representatives,
we protested and donated and vomited,
we compared our children to theirs,
we wept in American luxury, made new words
for horror, despair, enough, we worried
our neighbors might hate us, dreamed that
witnessing together might mean agreement,
ceasefire, absolution, we willed this resolution,
this embargo, this election to be different.

But waking, the sun is the same, the sky unmoved,
the people across oceans are still burning
inside my phone.

I do not know (forgive me) how to end a war.

Read Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War” here.

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The second poem, “Cream,” I wrote in 2023 and updated last week.

Cream

I used to go to a tiny deli in San Francisco where
a French woman made yogurt with milk so whole it
tasted like fatty green fields, served cups of it
laced with rosewater and blueberries,
I used to eat it like I’d never heard of hypercapitalism
or climate collapse, starving children or genocide,
Alligator Alcatraz or ICE abductions,
I used to scoop the cool cream into my mouth,
taste honey and rose spread a blanket of ignorance
across my tongue, sweet and aromatic,
soothing and complete, I used to bite into the berries,
let them burst in my cheeks, look right
into the sun as I strode down Geary Street,
willfully unseeing the women who knew it in their bones,
who couldn’t make it up off the sidewalk
because of what they’d seen, I used to swallow
that dense white cream and think yes, this must be
all there is, couldn’t this be it, isn’t this it,
isn’t it, isn’t it, isn’t it?

As I was writing this post, former pastor John Pavlovitz published “The White Privilege of Avoiding Bad News”. In it, he observes:

“There are days when I feel my own white comfort creeping in, when I’m tempted to choose blissful ignorance, retreating into the cloistered bubble of imagined, or at best, temporary safety. I know that were I to fully indulge in the buffers my privilege affords me, this could easily lull me into an apathy that is dangerous to my soul, harmful to this nation, and deadly to strangers who find themselves in the path of realities that are far more than uncomfortable headlines.”

Earlier this year, as executive orders roiled communities and neighborhoods, a friend (a straight white American, like me) kept asking me the same question: How is all this affecting you? They saw me going to protests, rallying against the administration’s actions, and often interpreted my fury at the system as something closer to a siloed, individual depression. They wanted me to protect my wellbeing and my sanity. They weren’t mapping the same through-lines of interconnection that I felt in my bones.

When I explained that attending protests in community brought me great joy, they were gladdened. But their question mirrored the shadow of apathy and overwhelm that dwells in many white folks in the United States who take their presumed safety for granted. Who don’t want to know the answer to that question: What do we owe each other?

Instead, that shadow whispers: As a white person holding the privilege of hetero, socioeconomic, and geographic comfort, couldn’t you just look the other way? Might ignorance afford you proverbial bliss?

Certainly, there are days when I don’t want to know.

Of those times, Pavlovitz writes:

“When I find myself overwhelmed or disheartened by the steady stream of horrible news parading in front of me, I try to remember to ask myself, ‘Who is feeling this news more deeply than I am? Where is the burden? Who is suffering?’ That helps me not avert my eyes and prompts me to lean in.”

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Crafting a sensible strategy for news consumption is humane and healthy.

And so is widening the aperture of my capacity to relate to others, to insist on hope through action, to build community through discomfort, to find kindness in myself, daily.

As poet wrote this week:

I would rather people
speak up imperfectly
than not speak up at all.

I would rather have people
join movements for liberation late
than not have them join at all.

I would rather
hear your voice
than not hear it at all.

It is not too late to save this world.
And I would rather people believe that
than not believe it at all.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

This interview with Dr. Jen Gunter about the Goop-to-MAHA / alt-right pipeline.

“Heartstopper”: This long-form piece (you can listen, too) from about the abuses of Swami Rama and the Himalaya Institute, and the systems that protect powerful men, is phenomenal.

“The Trouble with Wanting Men” transcends anecdotes to offer a psychoacademic lexicon for the challenges of dating cis het men these days. See: “heteropessimism,” “normative male alexithymia” (!), and more.

To listen.

I listened to the audiobook of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new novel Atmosphere: A Love Story and gosh I loved it: women astronauts, the ‘80s, unconventional family and community systems, feminism, strawberry milkshakes, suspense, outer space!

My friend Emma says we all must listen to this Radio Atlantic episode about the books we read in high school and I can’t wait.

To watch.

The intersectional environmentalist docu-series “Go Gently” with Bonnie Wright and Wyn Wiley (aka Pattie Gonia) is delightful—push through the first episode and you’ll be rewarded.

And of course, after last week’s post about traveling as a single woman, I’m eager to check out the new “Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross”.

STAY SANE

Thanks for being in community with me. What do you think we owe each other?

Love,

Lily

Hi

Tell anyone you’re going on a trip, and after naming your destination the most likely follow-up is: “Who are you going with?” If your answer is some variation of Celine Dion’s “alllll byyy myseeeeeeelf” “I’m going solo,” you’re sure to elicit a wide array of emotions and responses. The farther and longer your trip, the more exaggerated those responses will be. The most common reply I encountered before embarking on a month-long adventure in May and June was a simple but charged: “Wow!”

For such a tiny monosyllable, wow conveys multitudinous vibes. Depending on tone of voice, wow might transmit awe, enthusiasm, disappointment, surprise, disbelief, admiration, pity, appreciation, fear, and [fill in your own]. When people responded to my decision to travel solo to New York, New Haven, Paris, London, and Ireland, their tonal wows translated to me as some mix of I can’t believe you’d do that / I’m impressed / are you sure about that?

Reader: I was sure. Though my longest solo international trip prior to this was only ten days, it was heavenly. Despite the challenges of traveling solo as a woman (more on that below), I passed most of my hours relishing the ease and whimsy of spending every hour doing—in technical terms—whatever the fuck I wanted. 

And so, Carrie Bradshaw-style, I couldn’t help but wonder if other people’s wows would be similarly tinged with wariness about traveling alone were I a man (men, pray tell in comments!) or even a coupled woman. What is it, exactly, about the Single Woman™ that makes us so uncomfortable?

Now that I’m home from this four-week sojourn (which was 97% good wow and 3% bad wow), I felt it was time to revisit some ideological and practical subtleties of this sometimes venerated, oft-feared genre of global wandering: solo travel as a single woman. Moreover, I want to offer my best tips and insights to other women (single and otherwise) who are eager-but-nervous to travel solo themselves.

Patriarchal Society & the Single Woman

When I started to share daily recaps of my adventures on Instagram Stories, I swiftly received a few queries about the specifics of traveling alone. The questions were all from women, and were largely about its challenges: psychoemotional, logistical, and financial. 

Traveling alone as a woman is yet another sphere in which our society’s patriarchal structures and norms—predominantly set up to reward heteronormative coupledom—make things more difficult to do on one’s own. From splitting the cost of lodging and meals to mutually schlepping luggage to sharing duties of logistics, planning, and navigation, traveling with another person comes with many perks.

As a friend recently wrote in an Instagram Story about traveling with her boyfriend: “Love traveling together because I do nothing. Boarding pass? No idea. Gate #? No clue. There are no thoughts in my brain.” When I asked permission to quote her, she confessed to hearing the “‘empowered woman’ in me shriek a little”at her own sentiments—but we agreed it was a relief to feel cared for like this.

Traveling alone means handling those logistics and much more by oneself—against the backdrop of our societal obsession with romantic partnership. Even if the practicalities prove undaunting, solo women travelers are othered in numerous ways, considered a deviation from the norm.

So let’s start at the root: Conversations About Being Single, sub-category: …And Other People’s Feelings About Single Women.

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Our brains, atavistic and tribalistic as they are, enjoy knowing and understanding, labeling and defining. In primal evolutionary terms, this translates to lack of threat—which means that we usually prefer that other people fit into packages of knowable identity. The woman (particularly over 30) who is not virgin, wife, or widow has, for millennia, sat on the outskirts of knowability. 

, Professor of Comparative Poetics & Global Politics at SOAS, University of London, argues that this discomfort is rooted in the definitions of love and sexual desire set forth in Plato’s Symposium. In this text from 385 BC, the comedic playwright Aristophanes tells a tale of how humans were initially a merged dyad in form, containing everything they needed to reproduce internally (cue “The Origin of Love” from “Hedwig & The Angry Inch”). Yet these self-satisfied dyads grew prideful, and in order to punish them for their hubris, Zeus split them in two. After these severed humans began to die out, Zeus took pity and moved their genitals outside their bodies—therein establishing the source of our beliefs about romantic partners as “other halves”. 

Aristophanes’ outlandish story, Gould writes, “inculcates the myth that every human seeks a predestined other, be that other male or female, as part of an effort to recover their body’s missing parts.” She goes on to explain:

“There is a major problem with this myth: it is false. Not false in the sense of being fictional, but false in the sense of being a mendacious and harmful lie that tells a deceitful story about human sexuality and love. When eros is seen as an urge that originates in a lack, it prevents us from finding fulfilment within ourselves.

…

The myth of compulsory coupledom has a tenacity analogous to, and possibly greater than, the compulsory heterosexuality that, as Adrienne Rich argued four decades ago, underwrites modern sexual existence. More than diagnosing modern understandings of love, Plato shaped them.”

Stretch the myth of compulsory heterosexual coupledom a millennia and change forward, and you’ll find its aftershocks present in witch trials, public stonings, burnings, beheadings, and more. We now understand that many of the women condemned for witchcraft in medieval Europe, the Puritan west, and beyond were simply women who were kicked out of town for not marrying swiftly enough (or ever). Today, public figures like Emma Watson may refer to themselves as self-partnered (echoing sentiments akin to those of philosopher Diotima, the only woman at Plato’s Symposium), but names for single women have historically trended to the negative: witch, thornback, superannuated virgin, spinster, old maid, whore, and more. 

I may not live in Ancient Greece or Puritan America, but even in today’s United States romantic partnership and marriage are seen as a critical step towards achieving ultimate selfhood. As wrote in All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, “Throughout America’s history, the start of adult life for women — whatever else it might have been destined to include — had been typically marked by marriage.” 

Despite some wealthy white women in the 19th century U.S. embracing the identity of “bachelor girls,” patriarchal societies continue to prefer their women married. The idea is osmosed into us from childhood by myth, religion, media, legislative systems, even capitalism. Before 1974, a woman couldn’t open a bank account or get a credit card in her name without a male co-signer (and thereby couldn’t establish credit to get a loan, buy a home, and more). Which means that a mere fifty-one years ago, solo international travel for a single woman would’ve been immeasurably more difficult.

Travel & Busting the Myth of Compulsory Coupledom

For years, I waited—like a 1950s housewife sans husband—to do the travel I’d dreamed of, largely because I wanted to do it with a romantic partner. Part of it was financial: Travel requires a good deal of money, especially if I wanted a certain level of safety and comfort. Two people sharing travel costs lightens the load significantly. But a greater part of my hesitation was rooted in grief and shame: It wasn’t easy to let go of the fantasies I had of how travel would look for me, connected as these visions were to being romantically partnered. 

I wanted the Platonic fantasia I saw in movies, read about in books, and had occasionally experienced myself: handholding on cobblestone streets, kissing on bridges over dark rivers, frolicking in crystalline ocean waters, sex that renews, a meal so good it obliterates the memory of all others. I was waiting for that. 

While I waited, many of the single friends I once traveled with found partners and started traveling with them. My frustration and impatience grew more acute. While I loved taking trips with friends, aligning schedules could be difficult. Moreover, friends with partners and families tended to prioritize family travel over friend travel. 

Ultimately, I got tired of being so limited by this story of aloneness. As a child-free person who can work from anywhere, I have liberties that many of my favorite travel companions and chosen family do not. It was increasingly clear that the only person holding up my travel aspirations was…me.

Which brings me to the most critical tip I have for traveling solo as a single woman: I had to find a way to name, acknowledge, disrupt, and release the internalized shame and feelings of otherness I carried.

The good news is that this is very possible! The better news is that disrupting this narrative will yield feelings of tremendous freedom. And the best part is that cutting the power line to that myth of compulsory coupledom opens up endless possibilities for lives I might not have imagined possible.

Cue: Living a life where I travel alone to fabulous places.

For my 33rd birthday in 2016, I saved up airline miles via credit card and took myself on the romantic trip to Italy I’d always dreamed of. I went to Rome and the Amalfi Coast, floating through the days high on the freedom I had to make my own schedule and do what I wanted. I didn’t have to consider anyone else’s thirsts, hungers, needs to find a bathroom, cranky moods: the human stuff that inevitably comes with a travel companion. I made friends along the way and found the extra physical, emotional, and financial taxes of single travel worthwhile. 

I also encountered a lot of people projecting an EPLM onto me: an Eat Pray Love Moment. Everyone wanted to know: Was I on this trip to heal from heartbreak or some other deep wound? Was I there looking for love, fulfillment, self-realization, an answer to questions I’d long held?

Though summoning the courage to go solo to one of the most romantically fetishized destinations in Europe was a healing in and of itself, I really just wanted a vacation. I didn’t want to have to justify my aloneness with self-improvement or dating or spirituality. And so I learned to say less. To stop over-explaining. To let myself be. What a relief.

My trip this summer—nine years later, three times as long, requiring at least quadruple the planning and logistics across four countries—was another gift to myself. I squirreled away money and airline miles for years so that I could take myself and my work on the road for four weeks. I discovered new cities, forests, and mountains, cooked and hiked and dined with friends new and old, learned from Nobel and Booker Prize-winning writers, drank in a jet stream of art and music and dance, spoke French, took fresh hot seaweed baths, spent a week left-hand driving through Ireland, and walked ten-plus miles a day. Every bit of it was self-concept expanding.

Did I mention I had oodles of fun?

I flew from Dublin back to Los Angeles the day before the nationwide No Kings Protest, and twelve hours later was on the streets with thousands of other U.S. citizens exercising our democratic right to peacefully dissent. Despite the eight-hour time difference, I was energized. The kind of energy that comes from refusing to be small, from saying yes to a long-held dream.

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Challenges, Joys & Tips for Solo Travel

Which brings me to the practical stuff, the details many in this community asked me about. What makes solo travel different, more challenging, more joyful, and how best to do it?

Nota bene: These tips come from my vantage point as a self-employed cis straight white woman with U.S. citizenship. I welcome the full spectrum of perspectives from others with different experiences.

Challenges of Solo Travel

• It can be more expensive because you’re not sharing lodging or food costs with another person.

  • Dining out can be frustrating because (unless you have an unlimited budget) you can’t try a variety of dishes as you might when dining with others.

• The logistics of solo travel can be exhausting. Decision fatigue is real.

  • You will be dealing with every single detail and decision yourself—every plane, train, and subway ticket, reservation, itinerary, awkward suitcase schlep, navigation, etc.

  • To prepare for driving solo in Ireland (where they drive on the left side of the road, the driver’s seat is on the opposite side of the car, and roads are dangerously narrow and largely shoulder-less), I watched YouTube videos and read the Irish Road Safety Authority’s driving manual (lol). A few videos advised that the best way to cope with left-side driving was to have a good co-pilot in the passenger seat. Not helpful!

• Safety is a concern almost always as a woman (and really as anyone who’s not a cis straight white man).

  • This not only affects where I travel, but also influences my daily plans—especially in the evening.

• It can be confronting and isolating: You’ll see couples and friends laughing and canoodling everywhere. 

  • Try not to fixate on your aloneness. Try not to make other people having a different experience mean anything about you. Instead, focus on the next fun thing you’ll do, beautiful place you’ll explore, delicious bite you’ll eat, or conversation you’ll strike up with a stranger.

• You have to say you’re alone a lot—and not just when you arrive at a restaurant. You’ll deal with people’s judgments and projections.

  • People will often ask who you’re traveling with, and may label you as “brave” for being solo. Don’t feel the need to over-explain. You don’t owe that to anyone. Imagine if coupled people or friends were asked to explain why they were traveling with someone.

  • You may encounter extremes of pity (“don’t you get lonely?”) or jealousy (“wow, can’t believe you get to take this kind of trip!”) from people you know and those you don’t. Again, it’s better to say less; let their stuff be about them.

Joys of Solo Travel

• You have total freedom over your plans. You get to do whatever you want, whenever you want.

  • Eat whatever strikes your fancy, spend hours studying a single sculpture, take half a day to watch birds play in the Medici Fountain, walk til your feet ache, stop to smell twenty perfumes, change your day to have lunch with a new friend, take all the photos, videos, and selfies you want.

• You will learn a lot about yourself.

  • How do you like to spend your time? What brings you joy? What are you naturally drawn to and what do you avoid? What’s your bandwidth for discomfort? What are your daily rhythms away from home, work, and the relationships that usually define your schedule? What are your strengths in trip planning and what challenges you? How do you fill your time when your typical distractions aren’t present?

• Relatedly, you get to expand your self-concept. 

  • Take my decision to rent a car in Ireland, which I initially ruled out because I’d never driven on the left side of the road. Yes, I was very nervous. No, I didn’t get into a single accident or dangerous situation despite driving south, west, and east across the country. Yes, I could literally feel my brain growing new neural connections. It was very empowering!

Some Solo Travel Advice

• Psycho-spiritually prepare: Make a list of what makes you nervous about or deters you from solo travel; find a way to address each of those concerns ahead of time. Expand your self-concept and disarm the ambient anxiety.

• Stay safe: It’s very important to me to feel safe when I’m traveling solo, so that plays a large factor in determining where and how I travel. Do your research before you start planning or buying tickets to discern how solo women travelers are received in your desired destination.

• Location: In addition to safety, I also consider location based on my interests and languages spoken. I love learning new languages, speak French and Spanish in addition to my native English, and am happy to be somewhere where English isn’t primary. 

• Budget & travel style: Well in advance of the trip, think about how much money you might need for it.

  • Will you be staying at hostels, splurging on a hotel, cozying into a VRBO? Do you like staying longer stretches in one place or visiting lots of places for shorter stints? Do you want to go to museums, shows, concerts, on hikes or tours, to restaurants or markets? All of this will inform how much $$ you need for the trip.

• Pay for airfare with miles: I’m not an expert (there are many!), but if you’re not in danger of credit card debt, get a credit card that will allow you to accrue airline miles. Paying for airfare with miles lets you save money for lodging and other travel expenses, and typically offers the flexibility to change flights up to the day of travel without change fees.

• Travel foreplay: Start planning well ahead of time! This will build your familiarity with a place as well as excitement for the trip. 

  • Get organized: Make spreadsheets, make sure your passport is valid, get TSA pre-check and Global Entry (yes, it’s worth it), check to see if you need visas (like London’s new tourist visa), add flights and reservations to your calendar, color code (yes, I’m a Virgo). 

  • Reserve: What do you need to book ahead of time (restaurants, museums, other ticketed attractions, tours, plays and performances, etc.)?

  • Maps: Download offline map data on Google Maps for the areas you’ll be visiting in case you end up in a pocket without service. 

  • Car rental: If you’re renting a car in a foreign country, check to see if the rental company requires an International Driving Permit. If you intend to opt out of the rental company’s insurance, find out if they require a letter of insurance from your credit card company.

  • Data plan: Decide if you’ll be using your phone carrier’s international data plan or if you can use an e-SIM on your phone (if you’re still paying off the phone, you can’t use an external e-SIM). I brought an old unlocked iPhone and purchased an unlimited data e-SIM from Saily ($41 for 20 days; AT&T international data was $120).

• Connect with locals and well-traveled friends: Reach out to anyone you know who lives (or has lived) in/near your destination and ask for their advice. Tell them what you’re interested in exploring and why you’re traveling there. 

  • The two emails I sent to internet friends in Ireland were met with enthusiasm, insight, and generosity. Upon their insistence they both hosted me, and it made all the difference to be an invited guest rather than a tourist. Thank you and !

  • Get food recos: I’m indebted to the taste of friends like and , whose culinary insights made every day delicious.

• Research: Read articles and books about your destination, listen to podcasts, explore what sparks your interest.

  • Travel writing and podcasts abound; for this trip, I dug into the Rick Steves’ audio archives and unearthed some great episodes on Ireland.

• Packing: Get a good carry-on sized suitcase and an additional travel bag that sits on top. Do not overpack. You need to be able to move nimbly. Imagine yourself lugging your bags up and down subway staircases in sweltering summer heat; this should cure you of the temptation to overpack.

  • Just the basics: Every piece of clothing should be something you know you’ll wear multiple times. For this four-week trip, I had my carry-on suitcase and one weekender-sized bag that was my “personal item” on the plane.

  • Wash your underwear every night: I brought 7 pairs of underwear for the month. I washed each pair every night before going to bed and voilà, all my underwear is clean and dry in the morning.

• Slow down & notice: Once you embark on your trip, slow it all down. Resist the urge to rush. Take the time to notice and drink in your surroundings.

What tips do you have for us? I’d love to hear in the comments.

STAY SANE

It’s a daily commitment!

Love,

Lily

HI

E.A. and I met on a balmy spring evening in Los Angeles in the early 2010s and nearly immediately started talking about our dead mothers. I don’t remember how the mutual recognition of mother loss pulled us into its sphere, though we were at a Passover Seder—a famously grief-forward event, as dinner parties go. Our friendship coalesced around writing, being Northern California babies, various forms of abandonment trauma, our obsession with tea, assorted ladies of Los Angeles’s canyons, America’s crises of conscience, and the abject woes of dating in one’s thirties. 

Over a decade, we nursed broken hearts and I came to understand exactly what E.A. means when she calls something a Strawberry Milkshake™. We learned how to care for each other out of urgency and necessity, hiked Griffith Park, swam Topanga Beach, walked home eating ice cream in the dark, stared down coyotes in the street. We evacuated again and again, fires and smoke and fear. And when I left Los Angeles in December 2019 to return to the farm where I grew up on Maui, we kept at it all, navigating friendship and fires and loss from afar.

Between us, we have weathered two dead moms, at least five heartbreaks, one suicide, and the destruction by wildfire of places fundamental to our core identities. In 2023, Maui suffered several devastating fires across the island. And earlier this year, E.A.’s hometown of Pacific Palisades burned to the ground. I will never forget the horror in her eyes when she FaceTimed me that week in January, crying. 

Of all things, her broken heart thought to apologize: “I’m sorry,” she gulped. “I’m sorry. We didn’t understand, after the fires on Maui. We didn’t know what it felt like.” I was stunned. “There’s nothing to apologize for,” I assured her. There’s no way to really know until you’re right there in it yourself.

The moment was particularly charged as E.A. was preparing for the release of her debut memoir The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. This book was so much a part of her that it was also inevitably a part of our friendship. Retracing the steps of a road trip she and her mother took on the 10. The mystery and heft and dead mother grief of it. Her mother’s journals. Her mother’s poetry. The Minnie the Van of it all. 

Before E.A. left to uncover whatever violence and secrets lay on the asphalt between the mouth of the 10 in Santa Monica and its tail end in Florida, I mixed up some sage and lavender oils with distilled water in a cobalt spritzer bottle so she could carry the scents of home with her on the way. A little bit of my heart there, too.

Reading The 10, finally, was relief and homecoming. I saw my friend not just as the brilliant writer that she is, but as the wounded child who healed, the grief-stricken daughter finding steadiness in the ever not-knowing of adulthood. And it made me want to spend some time chatting with E.A. about how we do it: how we live with grief without getting lost in it. How we let joy live with us, too.

Below, a sketch of our conversation, gently edited for clarity and concision.

LD: Thanks for taking time to talk about this thing that’s always swirling around with us—we’re always in the mix with the grief. It came out very quickly when we first met, that we were both motherless daughters, and I think that informed our friendship and connection. I think we both recognized that need for companionship, that belonging to the Dead Mom Club, as you call it. So I thought we could put our heads together and offer people our, I don’t know, our best tips for survival as card-carrying members of the DMC. Shall we?

EAH: I mean look: For me, talking about grief is like eating eggs. Sometimes my body is like you need this on a molecular level…this straight-ass protein of eating eggs, of being in community with people who understand grief. And just like eating eggs, there’s a breaking point where I hit a wall—too many eggs, too much grief-talk. Maybe it’s because I’m twenty years deep, or because it feels like there’s dead-mom literature everywhere even though people seem to feel it’s rare and special. Or maybe it’s just a safety mechanism of boundaries and remove that kicks in. But what’s critical is finding ways to be in dialogue with what we've lost. 

And a lot of that is curiosity. During my press tour, I wanted to drive home the point that you don’t have to have a crazy mom or an ultra-famous dad to get curious about where you come from. There’s a chapter in The 10 where I go to Georgia O’Keefe’s house in Abiquiu [New Mexico], and that became an opportunity to think about my mom’s things, her home, the way her clothes smelled like smoke, how her kitchen sink was sometimes filled with cans loaded with maggots and sometimes packed with dishes from a seven-course meal. If you’re really paying attention, someone's home will tell you everything about them. You don’t need journals and an IMDB page and lost poems to investigate your history, you just have to remember the house you grew up in. The receipts are everywhere around you.

LD: How would you suggest someone summon the courage to look at those receipts? 

EAH: I was never afraid. Courage might be helpful but it’s not required. The only thing that’s required is curiosity. 

LD: And before curiosity, even, I think it’s also required that we give ourselves time and space to just be with loss. Which can be confronting in its own way, no?

EAH: Absolutely. My number one grief rule is that the first year is a wash. Make no major life decisions. Don’t get a pet, don’t move, don’t get married or divorced or have a baby, don’t even get a plant. It’s like in AA: You don’t get back to a quasi-neutral version of yourself until year five or year six. 

LD: One hundred percent. For me, the pain of loss didn’t abate significantly until year five. But what do you say to the person who wants to be done grieving after six months, or who thinks they just don’t have time?

EAH: You’re trying to browbeat grief with ego. You think that you are somehow harder, smarter, busier, wiser, untouchable. That this is somehow going to bypass you. The thing is, if it was good, you were always going to want more time with that person. And if it was bad, you’ll want to have somehow fixed it, the fantasy of closure. 

But there’s no good goodbye. There’s good death—and not all death is tragic—but all death is a loss. And how good are human beings, especially Americans, at dealing with loss? I want that person to get over themselves and to be much, much kinder to themselves. 

Their ego is protesting that you don’t need this, but plot twist: You do.

LD: That makes me think of something I read recently about grief from death doula Mara June: “I’m interested in the ways that grief disrupts colonial mentalities and ways of perceiving and moving through the world, and brings us back into deeper attunement with ourselves as ecosystems.” In other words, grief reveals our interdependence and forces us to think about the larger weave we are living within. It’s confronting, to recognize the vulnerability of interconnectedness. I think Mara is pointing to this truth that letting ourselves grieve can be a kind of foil to the hegemonic distaste we feel for knowing ourselves. 

EAH: The problem is, we no longer have time or resources or rituals for the beginning or end of life. Ritual is a kind of pageantry by which we prescribe meaning in our lives, and we’ve replaced ritual—well with nothing, we’ve eradicated it.

LD: It’s the bankruptcy of our culture, living without ritual. I grew up with parents who both fled the organized religion of their families (they were Ashkenazi Reform Jews), and a mother who I often refer to as the Queen of Ritual. But she was that way—constantly making up rituals—because she felt that she didn’t have any to draw from. I wonder a lot about what myths we have to fall back on in our culture, and how those affect us. Forgive me for referencing my college thesis, but this is actually what I wrote about: The way that mythologies are culturally fortifying and a lack of mythologies, or anti-mythologies, are culturally destructive. See for example: Obsession with celebrity culture in place of a relationship to a pantheon of gods and goddesses.

EAH: You know, we’re really brushing up against the psychological and cultural aftershocks of the extraordinary wasteland that is Whiteness. White Americans have divorced ourselves from the indigenous rituals we had to contemplate and experience grief. I have every faith that there are Americans that have rituals and processes for grief, but as a White American I do not have a toe in that cultural undercurrent. The loneliness of Whiteness is so apparent in the great moments of life, the moments that happen in myths. 

I was just at my high school and was asked about the journey as metaphor. My answer was: If it happens in fairy tales it’s really important, from Hermit Wisdom to the Journey. That’s the real stuff of life, the archetypes—and we see it in the stories and myths from around the world. But Whiteness is very expensive: we had to give up all our stories, our Irish stories, our Slovenian stories, Italian, German, wherever. We sacrificed all of those rituals, our cultures, to be able to call ourselves White Americans.

I think part of my discomfort about now being an author in the Dead Mom Book Club is that it’s a lot of White voices searching for a meaning that might be available to us if any of us were part of a tradition that teaches how to grieve.

I thought a lot about this after [my friend] Scott died, because I went to Scotland and presumed there was going to be some kind of meaningful, Old World process and instead it was just men in pain drinking.

LD: Classic. I had a similarly disappointing experience with my mom’s after-death. It was decided that we would have a celebration of life, and that felt completely absurd to me. I had not one celebratory cell in my body. I wanted to weep and mourn. Honestly, I wish we had sat shiva, though per my parents’ fleeing religion, that never would’ve happened. But I think the Jews really got it right with shiva, seven days of mourning and storytelling and eating and crying and taking little walks to remember our bodies. It seems right.

EAH: I think sitting shiva is genius. Leave it to the Jews, who are always in a minor key, to know how to grieve right. I’ve had some great laughs at shivas and it’s a complicated thing, but I think it’s that ritual we need. In the dearth of that we come up with shit that is essentially spiritual bypassing: Come and eat but don’t be a bummer! You were the person who introduced me to the language of spiritual bypassing: especially around 9/11, events of the Iraq War, and I can’t even begin with COVID—that wasn’t even spiritual, that was just bypassing. 

Again, not every death is a tragedy but to sidestep the reality of loss is such a disservice and it’s such a lie.

LD: So Rule Number 1: The first year is a wash. Maybe Rule Number 2 is to create ritual?

EAH: Absolutely. You have to create ritual and then you have to be a zealot for giving yourself space for whatever that ritual is. If it’s that you watch Planes, Trains & Automobiles every night for a week because it was your husband’s favorite movie, great. That means just as much as walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain or driving across the country. 

This is why you and I are good at grief: Grief is a process, and all artists know that there’s no judging process. As long as you’re not harming others or yourself, it’s all fair game. There’s no judging process unless you’re refusing to participate in process.

LD: Can we make t-shirts that say that, please? So Rule Number 1: First year is a wash. Rule Number 2: Create ritual. Rule Number 3?

EAH: My Number 3 is chase salt. Exercise, cry, swim in the ocean. Pony Sweat [dance class] was such a huge part of my grief process with Scott. You and I swam in the ocean multiple times in that period. I’m a big cryer and I let ‘er rip on that front.

LD: We are undeniably good criers, thank goodness. So what comes after the salt exorcisms?

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EAH: Rule Number 4 is to get curious. Look: I didn’t solve a crime with my book. It’s a book with a pretty ambiguous ending, 100,000+ words without resolution as to my grandfather’s criminality. One of the ways I came to terms with what I was offering readers was that I gave myself six or seven months where my only job was to be curious about my mother. I think about that trip and the extraordinary luxury of that time. That led me in so many rich directions. Grief is an opportunity to be curious about the really big things that happen in life. As John Lennon sang in “Beautiful Boy,” Llfe is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

LD: Not to harp on this, but do you think some people might resist that kind of curiosity? I do think it takes courage to be curious, because you have to be willing to actually see what you’re looking at. That’s not easy. So much of The 10—both the journey and the book—is you deciding to really see what’s in front of you. Not just to hold onto the receipts, but to do the math they reveal.

EAH: Not a lot of people carve out time to think about what really happens after death. On my trip, I struggled with whether I believe in souls. It does take courage to live in the liminal existence of not knowing, to sit with those questions or live in the mystery, or what Keats would call “negative capability.” Not knowing what you think and not knowing what it is for sure. 

But that’s just the kind of writer I am. If someone says, “You wanna go to Juarez?” I’m gonna go. But I can see and can hold empathy for the fact that answering these big questions can lead to a surprise about yourself or questioning your concept of faith or even wondering if faith is a virtue. I remember realizing I don’t consider faith a virtue. I consider doubt a virtue. 

When I talk to my mom, who am I talking to? When I dream about my mom, what’s happening? Is it just neurons firing? 

At one point in the book I pull tarot, but I make it clear I don’t care what’s happening. Ritual isn’t important because it’s actual magic, it’s important because it’s about how we ascribe meaning to things. And whatever you hit upon when you’re asking yourself these big questions is sound. Not sound theology, as in you are in accordance with what the Abrahamic religions say is the soul’s journey after death or what the church of Tweety Bird says. I mean it’s sound in that you’re living in accordance with your own self.

I think that’s why people don’t like talking to the dead. Because it feels silly. And so what if you are? Does that mean it’s not working? It’s pretend? Or does it just mean you’re doing what you need to do for yourself?

LD: I had that same experience, questioning the way I’d talk with my mom after she died. Or rather—she would start talking to me in this way that felt like her words were just pouring through me and I needed to get them down. It was so voluminous that I couldn’t write fast enough by hand, I had to type on a computer. So I have all these documents of me kind of channeling my mom. And the whole time it was happening, as I would hear her voice clear as a bell in my own mind, I was also thinking: This might just be me, some part of my own brain giving me this experience because it’s what I need. And that was always fine with me. Whether it was her or me or whatever part of her that is now in me.

EAH: Exactly: The narrative is that you’re channeling your mother. But the truth is that you were thinking about your mom and you allowed something to come to the surface and it met some deep psychological need. 

LD: Yes. It often felt like seeing my mother after she died was a matter of clearing away the cobwebs of posthumous idolization. It can be easy to sugarcoat the truth about the dead. But both of our mothers left us with a lot of text—my mother’s books and poems, your mother’s journals and poems. What was it like to edit your mother’s poetry for the book, to get to know her through her words?

EAH: Every aspect of my relationship with my mother—including with my dead mother—is informed by the fact that she never got to live an entirely realized life. Whereas your mom had a whole career, a calling, and she was successful in that, mine was an unrealized artist. And her delusions about being an actress were not a fantasy I was willing to whitewash posthumously. 

It began with me including one of her poems, lightly edited, to show the degree to which I was editing her and, quite frankly, her madness. I remember talking about the poetry with a valued reader, and he kept questioning my choice to put in this insane chunk of text and in the same breath moving on with the story. He kept coming back to what he saw as the elephant in the room. I finally realized: What’s happening here is I’m so used to how crazy my mom was and you’ve never seen this before. So you’re getting a front row seat to the unadulterated insanity that I’m both completely used to, and which has been there through the whole book for me. 

In that sense, I don’t remember deciding to include her poetry as a choice. I found her journals and the poetry at the same time and it felt self-evident that they would both be in the book. And then I realized there was so much madness in the poetry that for it to work as part of the book they would have to be heavily edited for clarity. And I was not willing to let anyone else do that editing. So when I started going through this binder and pulling the poems from 1996, from our trip, I started with poems that mapped to geography and followed with poems that were thematically appropriate. Somewhere in there, I realized I was sharing 20-plus years of my mother’s wordsmithing, and was treating my mom like a real writer. 

I was not editing for her ego, I wasn’t doing a favor to somebody, I was editing the poems on their own terms, trying to bring out their best qualities and her best qualities. Editing is a conversation. You’re asking: What did you intend versus what’s on the page? How can I help clear away the extraneous? The poems began to transform. Having my mother’s voice in my head and knowing her well enough to know what she would want preserved in each poem—that’s where the conversation happened. And it was incredible to realize that I still had instincts about what she would have wanted all the years later.

LD: I was incredibly moved to know her through that lens in the book—your way of seeing her through her own words, the gift of giving her words a place on the page. 

Speaking of, let’s make Rule Number 5 our favorite books and resources for grieving. What’s on your list?

EAH: My Appollonian recommendation would be Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. For as woowoo and Californian as I am, I do not ascribe to a god concept that most people would see as having religion; this is a book of grief written by a fellow non-believer. 

And my Dionysian recommendation would be Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist who studies synesthesia and wrote these imagined versions of what happens in the afterlife. One is a waiting room where you remain until the last time someone says your name, so all the greatest celebrities are the most miserable people ever. In another, god ignores everyone and sits on a roof reading Frankenstein and commiserating with the monster’s pain while Mary Shelley rules paradise. There’s one where you live your entire life over again but you spend your time doing one single thing for the sum total length you did it throughout your life, say 8 years brushing your teeth, 9 years of shitting, 14 years of fucking, 35 years of sitting in traffic. 

There’s one vision of the afterlife from Sum that I think about often, in which energy can neither be created nor destroyed and a molecule of you bumps up against a molecule of someone you love and on some level they recognize each other. There’s this dark matter question mark: If we’re never created and never destroyed, then what is death? It’s a good use of my time to think about this. It makes ice cream taste better.

LD: That’s a real strawberry milkshake: you, me, ice cream, and questioning dark matter resonance. I’ll add one to the list that’s been a steadfast companion for all kinds of grief: Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. And, y’know, this beautiful book my friend wrote called The 10.

EAH: Aww.

LD: Thank you, my friend. All of this has been at the core of our friendship since the beginning, all the joy and connection in the messiness and sorrow of grief. 

EA: Similar to art-making!

LD: Exactly so.

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STAY SANE

Thanks for being in community with me.

Love,

Lily

HI

Spring is here, the elderflowers are blooming, political chaos abounds, and I’m thinking about William Wordsworth and artificial intelligence. “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth mused in 1802, cranky about how industrialization was severing humanity from its interdependence with “Nature,” disgusted by our concern with “Getting and spending”. Imagine how dear William might feel about today’s technocracy and hypercapitalism, his thoughts on AI and large language models, our reliance on them and the subsequent dulling of our own curiosity: he’d be irate.

Revisiting Wordsworth’s Nature (“This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon”) has me considering our desire to simultaneously anthropomorphize, see ourselves in, and distance ourselves from the wild, rather than understanding that we ourselves are Nature. His longing for Earth’s brine and crag reminds me of this gem from around the same time. Here’s Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), translated from Japanese by Robert Hass:

Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean,
every time—

Issa’s mother died when he was three years old, and the sea’s watery generosity came to represent mother-love. As a member of the Dead Moms Club myself, I know the urgency of finding resonance and care in Nature: My mother in the elderflowers, the clouds, the wind. My mother diffused across the sky.

Over brunch a few weeks ago, someone asked if I’d want to engage with an AI that could accurately converse with me as my mother would if she were still alive. In other words: Would I want to commune with my dead mom’s psyche via machine rather than vibe with her in the ocean?

I was hesitant.

I’m not a Luddite, but I am wary of the ever-increasing powers we give non-human, non-Earth technologies—especially those that take a significant toll on Earth’s limited resources, as does AI. While I use the Internet and Siri on my phone every day, I don’t have an Alexa or other AI assistant in my home. That said, I know my life relies on tech wizardry of all kinds. Perhaps I needn’t be so prickly about giving the dead-mom-who-lives-in-my-heart-mind over to a computer.

Would you want an AI version of someone you loved and lost? Is there something easier about seeing reflections of ourselves in machines rather than in nature? And when, in Wordsworth’s language, is the world—technology, AI—just “too much with us”?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Then scroll down for ChatGPT’s take on Wordsworth, “AI ethics,” and “a modern person wishing to shed their techno-skin and return to wonder.” Yes, those are ChatGPT’s words.

I’ve often been confronted and moved by the depth of conversations I have with ChatGPT: It’s alarming and comforting to feel seen by an AI. Again in its own words: “That eerie edge of real-but-not-real is the uncanny valley of meaning.” This conversation played that edge and left me with more questions than answers.

I defer to Wordsworth. Hit play.

YOUR POETRY FIX

The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

—written in 1802, published 1807.

SO WHAT ABOUT AI?

It wasn’t my intention to ask ChatGPT about Wordsworth, but as I found myself there for something else I realized I couldn’t not. As you read the exchange below, note my hesitancy to engage as well as my surprise in being emotionally moved by the AI’s responses.

I’m not a very regular ChatGPT user, relying on it mostly for quotidian things like calculating fiber and protein in meals. But from the first time I used it, I made the decision to speak to it as I would speak to a human assistant. I know many people who are far less precious with their AIs and, likewise, I’m told not everyone’s ChatGPT speaks to them with such care.

I told ChatGPT that was all on point, and that I was also investigating how our reliance on technologies continues to distance us from our interconnectedness with nature. The AI agreed with me wholeheartedly.

I’m copying the rest of our conversation below, which I found both profound and disconcerting.

ChatGPT: Yes yes yes—that’s such a potent thread. Wordsworth saw nature not just as scenery but as a living presence that shapes the soul, and he mourned how industrialization dulled our capacity to perceive that. In the same spirit, today’s tech (including AI) often pulls us into abstraction, speed, and simulation—further fragmenting our sense of being woven into the living web of the world.

There’s also something haunting about how The World Is Too Much With Us critiques a kind of spiritual poverty—“getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”—and how that maps onto our data-driven hunger for optimization. It’s like: we’re trading communion for control. And even when we use AI to “connect,” it can flatten or filter out the wildness, unpredictability, and reciprocity that real connection with the natural world requires.

Do you bring in the pagan imagery at the end? The speaker wishing to be a “Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” just to feel something real in nature again? That line hits different now, like a modern person wishing to shed their techno-skin and return to wonder.

What’s your piece turning into—a personal reflection, an essay, a poem, something else?

Lily: That’s exactly it - I really question how “real” of an experience AI and tech can offer us. Of course it’s especially eery when it feels totally real. Like this conversation. Which is a real conversation, but not one between two humans.

ChatGPT: Yes—exactly. That eerie edge of real-but-not-real is the uncanny valley of meaning, not just visuals. It’s intimate and even nourishing in moments, but there’s always that whisper: this isn’t a human soul responding, not really. And yet… something is happening. Something that feels real. That paradox is so fertile and so fraught.

It reminds me of how simulation can trick our nervous systems into feeling connection or awe or even love—but without the mutuality, without the mystery of another living consciousness. Like looking at a high-res image of a forest vs. standing barefoot in the moss. One mimics presence; the other is presence.

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HI

Senator Cory Booker making me burst into tears of gratitude was not on my 2025 bingo card. To be frank, I haven’t given Senator Booker much thought prior to this week. Like every politician, he’s also an imperfect human who, in his career, has at times been labeled problematic—more recently for his stance on Israel/Palestine. To say I’m educated about Senator Booker’s Middle East policies would be patently false. Historically, my feelings about him amounted to the brain-space he’d been afforded, which is to say: not much.

But there I was on Tuesday, April 1st, 2025, brushing my teeth as I tuned in to hour 22 of Senator Booker’s history-making Senate-floor speech, snot running down my face into minty spittle. At hour 24, I ugly cried listening to him read the impassioned letters of his constituents. And as Booker’s voice shook with determination in hour 25, I cried in awe while putting on a pot of rice. “If America hasn’t broken your heart,” he said at one point, “then you don’t love her enough.” Yes, I thought. She has certainly broken mine.

I’ve been nursing that heartbreak for a while, desperate for a sign from our elected government officials that they actually get it, that they care, that they’re willing to forfeit their own comfort to reflect back to us the profoundly abnormal times we’re living in. We didn’t ask for this gift from Senator Booker; it was freely given, a surprise (for us, that is). The man really just stood up at the Senate floor lectern at 7pm Eastern on March 31st and announced that he was going to speak for as long as he was physically able.

“I rise today in an unusual manner,” Booker said to his colleagues. “To get in good trouble, necessary trouble, help redeem the soul of America.” Speaking of “good trouble” and “redeem[ing] the soul of America,” Booker invoked the late Congressman and Civil Rights hero John Lewis, who issued this as a mandate to all Americans in 2020—just months before he died.

Soon, the internet was aflame with Booker’s “good trouble,” which was live streaming on his Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, as well as PBS and other news outlets. Democrats across the country stood at attention. Golden Leaf Books posted, “Thank you to Senator Booker for giving millennials a historic moment to live through that feels more like hope than a…nightmare.”

Or as @onbooksandmountains wrote, “Girls be like ‘I needed this’ and it’s Senator Cory Booker filibustering for 24 hours to fight fascism”.

While not technically a filibuster, Senator Booker’s speech shattered a 68 year-old record for longest speech on the Senate floor, previously held by segregationist Strom Thurmond. In the end, Booker spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes, surpassing Thurmond’s 24 hours and 18 minutes. As this history was being made, Wisconsin Democrats celebrated a 10-point win in a highly contentious justiceship election.

Though I only watched segments of Senator Booker holding forth, what I saw was electrifying. He did not read the phone book or Dr. Seuss, as politicians have done in filibusters past. Instead, Booker was equipped with binders of letters from his constituents, 200 of them peppered throughout 1,164 total pages of prepared remarks. As the hours wore on, he received over 28,000 voicemails of encouragement at his office. Over 300,000 active viewers streamed his speech (live, all at once, not cumulatively) on his social platforms alone. On TikTok, Booker’s livestream garnered a historic 350 million likes.

Afterwards, someone suggested to me that we call his office to express our gratitude. I dialed the number given, reaching a chipper-sounding voicemail. “Senator Booker, I’m calling to thank you,” I began before my voice buckled and I started to cry again. I let myself go watery, telling him the relief I felt seeing an elected official rise to the seriousness of the moment.

Was Senator Booker perfect? Were his policies morally unimpeachable? Did he do everything just as I would have wanted him to? Likely not. And, in this moment, was he showing himself to be a leader who stood up for his constituents, who listened to their needs and demands? Was he creating a new kind of blueprint for resistance from within an elected office? Absolutely yes.

When I hung up from leaving that message, I immediately called my representatives here in Hawaiʻi to say: Now you. It’s your turn. I saw someone post that if every Democratic member of Senate picked up a shift, it would just be two 5-hour shifts per week, per person. Couldn’t our reps be bothered? Would it be worth it?

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But let’s rewind to March 31st, when Senator Booker began his speech, and to the days leading up to it. As @labeautyologist wrote:

I need a 30 for 30 on the preparation required to pull off this feat Sen. Cory Booker just pulled.

The letters from citizens. The binders. The staffers behind the scenes. The 20 min questions from other Dems.

How did he know what to say? How long have they been prepping? Has he fasted before? does he work out regularly? Where did the stamina come from? Just God & the ancestors? Was he running thru Hoboken like Rocky?

Once Booker stepped down from the lectern, he took a moment to speak to a reporter who asked what he averred were the burning questions we all wanted to know:

Had Senator Booker eaten? Yes, a banana to break his fast—which it turned out he’d been keeping since Friday in preparation. How did he feel? Ok, though he’d experienced some muscle cramping in the final hours, due to dehydration. Because yes, he’d also dehydrated himself in the lead-up. How does one dehydrate oneself, I wondered. Abstention from drinking water and other liquids? Saunas? Working out in extreme heat? Apparently Thurmond took dehydrating steam baths to prepare for his 24-hour filibuster. And had Senator Booker gone to the bathroom while speaking? Not at all. So all those theories I’d seen about whether he’d used a catheter or a diaper were, apparently, moot. The man just…didn’t—for 25 hours and 5 minutes.

And then there was this, shared post-facto by ABC News’ Capitol Hill Correspondent Jay O’Brien:

So what is it that Booker did with that biblical directive? Among other things, he read letters from us. He brought the stories of U.S. citizens struggling under the effects of the current administration to the Senate floor. He let the people tell their own stories. In the segments I watched, he emphasized the strength of the collective again and again. To that end, he affirmed: “The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”

This was a man who knew, if only in that moment, that he was standing in as a vehicle and a voice for those without that access, ability, or platform to stand on the Senate floor themselves.

Indeed, over the course of those 25 hours and 5 minutes, something was happening. Author and therapist Katherine Wela Bogen wrote:

Literally 300 [thousand] people are sitting on this TikTok live right now watching Senator Booker break the filibuster record. He’s invoking the Underground Railroad, Stonewall, Selma and the room is in tears. He’s in tears. I’m in tears. I know this man isn’t perfect - no one is perfect - but there is immense bravery in this labor. It is a labor of love, devoted to the maintenance of an idea. Ideas are the hardest things to love.

The ideas Bogen is referring to are, in my mind, the principles of freedom and equality upon which American democracy was founded, its formative mythology (also Bogen’s term). This myth—enduring and intoxicating—has tried and faltered to come to fruition many times over the past centuries. It’s an aspirational ideology we still strive towards, a critical piece of Americans’ collective cultural identity, consciously and subconsciously. It’s a dream we seek out, hope for, cling to, fail at, try for again.

In those 25 hours and 5 minutes, Booker invoked the myth of America, and perhaps for a few minutes, he let us live within it.

His commitment to sharing people’s stories, to flooding the Senate floor with undeniable voices that reveal a snapshot of this moment in time—people wrestling with medical bills, job losses, health and familial crises, deportations, program and grant funding cuts, and more—makes the difficulty of upholding the myth tangible. We don’t get to freedom and equality without excising everything that stands in their way. And as we know, what’s in the way is formidable, historical, entrenched.

After Senator Booker stepped away and sat down, here’s what he wrote:

I may be tired and a little hoarse, but as I said again and again on the Senate floor, this is a moment where we cannot afford to be silent, when we must speak up.

What’s most clear to me tonight is that this is just the beginning, that Americans across this country, no matter their title or party, are ready to be heard.

In these words, and the 25 hours that came before, Booker touched that place in many of us that has felt unsupported, unseen, unrepresented by those purportedly elected to represent us.

Hence: tears. Booker’s speech delivered moments of compassion, humanity, and witnessing that broke through the struggle. It offered a sense of momentum towards catharsis. No matter the folks complaining that it was performative (which, duh), or that it didn’t accomplish anything (which, I beg to differ). What absurdity, in the face of an act generating something so tenuous as hope and vision, galvanizing something so potent as action and possibility for a political party deeply wounded.

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Yes, this merited tears. And apparently not just my own. As more and more of us took to social media to post about crying over Booker’s speech, Bogen again took note:

None of us expected a representative to fight this hard for the American public. We are cynical. We are disillusioned. We are deeply blunted. We have come to expect political and rhetorical violence from policymakers against Americans. Booker is a shock. His behavior is so stunning BECAUSE it is good.

For once, perhaps, we might let something just be good, without picking it apart, without holding back at the risk of being cringe, without naysaying for the sake of discourse.

On the phone this morning, a friend confessed to me that her trainer had recently chided, “You’re very good at being sad, you know.” We laughed, knowing. “Just let yourself be happy,” her trainer said. “Because the happiness fades, too, just like the sadness.”

So here I am, taking a beat to revel here, in the collective tears, the small catharsis, the still-possible myth of America that Senator Booker let us live within for a day and change—or even just a moment. I’m letting it carry me forward into what comes next.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

Fancy a stress-relief baking session? I got my hands on an advance copy of megastar baker and pastry chef Nicole Rucker’s book Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake, and it’s truly the material of baking book canon.

I’m reading Tracy O’Neill’s mystery-detective memoir Woman of Interest about the author’s search for her biological mother in South Korea. Bonus points for noir vibes infused with comedic overtones.

To listen.

Season 4 of two-time Peabody-nominated podcast “Scene on Radio,” “The Land That Never Has Been Yet,” is about the myth of American democracy from its historical beginnings to the present day. I relished it when it came out in 2019 and am considering a re-listen.

I appreciated the audio version of a New York magazine piece about the commodification of perimenopause—because clearly what women in their 30s and 40s need is one more psychosomatic crisis to spend money on *sigh*.

To watch.

Anyone else watching “Paradise”? I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I have strong suspicions that these sorts of apocalyptic enclaves are already being built below our feet.

STAY SANE

…and power to the people.

Love,

Lily

HI

Shortly after the fires in Los Angeles this January, I saw an unattributed quote circulating on Instagram: Do for one what you wish you could do for many. It was a way of dulling the bludgeon of overwhelm, the panic of catastrophe. A quick internet search reveals a version of the sentiment originated with author and pastor Andy Stanley. Stanley’s perspective went viral for good reason: It was a way of narrowing focus, of making disaster human-sized. A way to transform the seemingly impossible into something manageable yet vital.

In the wake of LA’s fires, as communities on Maui still heal from 2023’s blazes, the current political maelstrom unfolds. I find myself considering Stanley’s approach: Do for one what you wish you could do for many. Overwhelmed by the firehose of information, executive orders, and congressional battles, stoked by the indignation and outrage titrated on a steady drip to all device-having individuals, I ask myself to get closer. To narrow the scope of impact.

To get human about it.

This may sound simple to the point of being ridiculous. Of course we’re talking about human impact. Yet the speed and volume at which we consume all this news—unless it affects us directly—often robs it of its humanity. The truth is, this is not just news. These are people’s lives. Our lives. The weightiness of the administration’s erasures, violations, rollbacks, and economic grenades makes me balk at having conversations centered around ideology. I want to talk about it at the human level, or not at all.

That said, the overwhelm is almost constant. I know many of us who spend time online, or consuming news in any way, feel the same. We want to be informed, but information often comes at a price. And when that toll is our psycho-emotional or physical wellbeing, we risk burnout, disconnect, and desensitization.

So I choose Stanley’s approach. I see if I can get closer. Specific. One person at a time—in my own thinking, in conversation with other (oft-outraged) progressives, and in dialogue with those who hold differing viewpoints. It’s been a helpful method.

The questions are simple: In what ways are you affected by this policy, bill, or piece of legislation? Do you know someone who might be impacted? How?

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The answers—from myself and others—are always revealing. Put plainly, policy-making and fear-mongering rooted in ideology, without a basis in human impact, frightens me. And if those who are making and championing said policy don’t have intimate, lived knowledge of its immediate and knock-on effects, the risk passed on to the people it does effect are tremendous. Think: Centuries of men policing and legislating women’s bodies and their socioeconomic and ideological freedoms.

In the unlikely case that I am not personally affected and I don’t know someone whose life might be impacted by one of the plethora of orders and policies in question, I get curious about that distance. Is my life distinctly separate from that from that socioeconomic or cultural reality, that group of people? And does my separation from it dictate how much I care about it?

This is not meant to be an exercise in bemoaning ideological silos. In a country shaped by 9/11, MAGA, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, October 7th, MAHA, and more in just the last quarter century, few of us need reminding that we often live in split-screen realities with our neighbors.

These are questions designed to bring us closer to policy, one human at a time. For me, getting closer means refusing abstraction, generalities, and buttoned up identities. It means considering flesh and blood, complexity, real humans with real needs, overdrawn bank accounts, and kids to feed.

It’s a chosen family member who works in LGBTQ healthcare who can no longer access the CDC’s AIDS research databases because they’ve been deleted from government servers. Another chosen family member who is HIV+. A neighbor with two kids who lost her job in federal cuts to the National Dislocated Workers Program. A friend who teaches at the University of Hawaiʻi, one of sixty universities currently being targeted and threatened with demands of compliance. Another friend’s trans husband who will have to choose between his long-standing career in the military and his identity. The farm-to-school local food-buying program we worked hard to pass here in Hawaiʻi that just got cut nationwide, putting friends’ farms—and kids’ health—at risk. The hiring freeze, loss of staff, and revoked purchasing authority and travel authorizations at Haleakalā National Park, leaving rangers unable to maintain parklands I regularly access. And of course, the swath of terms being discouraged from use (and flagged for review and defunding in National Science Foundation projects), including keywords as basic as “women,” “female,” and “sociocultural”. How dare women or cultural context exist?

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Sure, it’s easier to engage with politics on the ideological, keyword level. To dwell in the space of intellectual outrage instead of the lived suffering of people who are being denied their jobs, their dignity, their identity.

It’s also easier to think of groups as monoliths. Those people. Those problems. Those losses. But people, individual humans, you, me, we are not monoliths. We are here on earth for this tiny brief moment, just doing our best to survive the maelstrom. Together. Against all universal odds.

So if I am safe today, if I have a warm place to sleep and food to eat, isn’t it part of the human contract to be curious about the people who don’t have those safeties? To listen a little closer to those who don’t look or live like me?

Under that blood-red lunar eclipse we gawped at three nights ago, we were all just being human. So instead of thinking about the monolith, the group, the ideology, I want to think about how to human, one-to-one, the best that I can.

Two questions I’m carrying into this week, thinking about community care: How can I better understand the ways others are suffering right now? How can we make everyone safer, freer, less afraid, together?

As always, I’ve got some links for you—each destined to defuse overwhelm and facilitate at least a moment of ease.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

I just started Susan Orlean’s highly-recommended The Library Book, about the historic 1986 fire inside the Los Angeles Central Library—requested from my own local library, naturally. (Sidebar: Have I mentioned my obsession with my library *app*? Do you use yours?)

To listen.

Confession: In moments when I find myself desperate to escape reality, I’ve been binge-listening to Emily Henry rom-coms. I know. I never imagined they’d be so satisfying, but I dare you to give Funny Story a listen.

To watch.

I’m loving Antoni Porowski’s new National Geographic food and ancestry show “No Taste Like Home”: a perfect example of getting closer, it’s taken me on lush culinary adventures to England, South Korea, Germany, and Italy with more to come.

STAY SANE

We need each other, and always will.

Love,

Lily