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I’m sure you have questions. Like, for example, how is this possible?

Well, it’s really quite simple: They bring those states to you. Like literally right to you. And, if you breathe (and, you know, most of us do), they actually bring those states INTO you. Like you actually get to breathe them in. It’s astonishing. You go to one state and, then, just like that, tick, tick, tick, you get to actually check three states off your “I’ve visited” list. Modern efficiency at it’s finest.

So, what’s the catch?

Well, I wouldn’t actually call it a catch, but there are a couple of minor inconveniences like the acrid smell of the air and the fact that you can’t really see the mountains you came to see. Oh, and you should probably wear a high-quality and somewhat uncomfortable N-95 mask, especially if you have any pre-existing conditions (and really, don’t we all have at least a few of those?). Please note, however, when you’re collecting those adorable in-lung souvenirs of Washington and Oregon you will, of course, want to take the mask off. But really, that’s pretty much it and, to my mind, the brilliant pink sunsets, while a bit garish, will make up for those minor, as I said, inconveniences.

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So, anyway, pack your bags. This deal won’t last long. Well, I mean it probably won’t last more than another month or two this year. Of course, there’s next year, and I hear from federal authorities that the general plan is to keep this deal alive for all the foreseeable summers to come. Happy travelling, all!

(Next week, check back for my update on visiting some newly cleaned coral reefs. And I mean sparklingly cleaned. I can’t wait to show you pictures of that beautiful extra-white coral.

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Coming up to the 250th anniversary of this country’s Declaration of Independence, I was thinking a lot about what it means to live in a country founded on ideals of collective liberation from an oppressive force but also a country where masked police are sweeping people off the streets, constitutional rights to citizenship and voting are under assault, and people’s access to everything from public records to medical care are being limited. The first question that came to mind was this:

Who gets to be free?

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This thing we call freedom has always been unequally distributed. Sometimes, the boundary between freedom and lack of freedom is an actual wall, a thing so obvious you can see it and touch it. Other times, the line is more subtle, a thing you might not recognize if you passed someone on the street or a differentiation in freedom based on who you are. Some facts:

• In the US, nearly 2 million people are currently incarcerated. We have both the highest number of incarcerated people in the world and one of the highest rates of incarceration. As a country, we make up 5% of the global population but 20% of the incarcerated population.1

• As many as 50 million people across the world live in modern slavery.2 This number includes over a million people in the United States.3

• In the US, women’s pay continues to lag behind that of men. As an example, full-time female managers are paid, on average 76 cents for each dollar earned by their male counterparts. This disparity varies based on race4 and limits a whole host of freedoms for those impacted.

• “One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to be sentenced to prison, compared 1 out of 6 Latino boys; one out of 17 white boys.”5

• In Kansas, transgender people cannot have driver’s licenses that match their identity, a fact that has recently caused a woman to face charges (with potential jail time) for carrying a fake license specifically because it listed her sex as it was identified at birth.6

• More than three quarters of people aged 40-65 in the US have either seen or personally experienced workplace age discrimination.7 As with women’s pay disparity, this discrimination limits economic movement and choice.

• “Black and white Americans use illicit drugs at roughly similar rates, but about [25% of] people arrested for drug law violations are Black, although Black people make up 14% of the U.S. population.” 8

• Many US states have enacted laws barring transgender people from using bathrooms matching with their gender. Data shows that, while these laws have no positive safety impact for anyone, they do increase risk of harassment and violence against transgender people.9

Good ol’ American individualism wants us to believe these differential levels of freedom are mostly due to individual choice and personal responsibility, wants to give me kudos for the extraordinary level of freedom I experience on a given day while holding someone else accountable for their lack of it. This assumption, however, is often misplaced; Much of what determines the level of personal freedom we each experience are accidents of birth like country of origin, race, gender, class, parents. There’s also the current sense that freedom is a thing you have to compete for where, somehow, my voting rights are in conflict with yours. It’s as if the whole idea of freedom is a zero sum game where we’re destined to fight for the limited commodities of physical, economic, political, and social liberation.

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But what if it’s not that way at all? What if, instead of asking the individualistic question of who gets to be free, we step back and ask it this way:

Who’s deciding who gets to be free?

While, at the individual level, most differentials in personal freedom are tied to luck, at the collective level, it turns out that we control that luck. In other words, the answer to this question is, We do. We can’t control the circumstances of anyone’s birth (even our own) but, communally, we can do a LOT to control overall, collective access to freedom. Actually, we already do that (though clearly not as well as we need to).

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Here’s where that magic happens: Every day, we make choices that impact the collective freedom of those around us and around the world. We make these choices when we vote, when we buy clothing, when we hire and fire, when we choose to call our representatives to express an opinion. We make these choices in how we show up for our neighbors when they are being hauled off by that masked police force (thank you, Minnesota) and in how we respond to the discomfort of sharing public spaces like bathrooms, busses, and public parks with people who aren’t like us. We make these choices when we talk to our friends and family and neighbors about who should have access to food or medical care, who should get to marry whom, who should have legal status in our country. To be clear, my one individual choice (or yours or your sisters’ or whoever’s) doesn’t make some huge difference, but it does move the collective needle. And, of course, sitting out those choices also has an impact.

Today, with the dust settled on the 250th anniversary of the document that formed this country, I’m going to suggest that, as we go back to the business of making all our small day-to-day choices, we remember that the founding document of this country was a collective Declaration of Independence, and it’s most foundational statement is that all “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That document, for all the prejudices and limitations of its authors and of the society from which it was born, was a clear statement that liberty is not a zero-sum game. As we work our way through this unnaturally hot summer and the seasons beyond it, I believe that we’ll live and die by how well we lift each other up, not by how well we scrabble for whatever scraps the billionaires want to throw at us. To quote Robin Wall Kimmerer, “all flourishing is mutual.”

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1

The storm started while I was out on a walk with friends. On the way out, a stiff wind was at our backs, but nothing out of the ordinary for a front range city in Colorado. Even when we turned around, it still seemed like one more blustery day at the tail end of a record warm and very windy winter.

The whole way back, though, it built. First, it was just wind, then it was wind plus fine dust whipped up off the parched horse pastures across the canal, and then it was the wind and the dust and also the sand being blasted off the gravel path under our feet. Finally back at our cars, our eyes were gritty and every bit of exposed skin was covered in a thin layer of dirt. The weather had predicted wind gusts in the forties. Perhaps this would be the worst of it, I thought.

2

My husband and I separated in November. While the separation is amicable, there are days when the the heartbreak is a stone of grief tied directly into the sinews that hold my heart in my chest, a stone so heavy it threatens to pull my heart straight out through the soles of my feet.

3

A half hour after the windy walk with my friends, I stood in the kitchen talking to my child. The wind wrenched at the creaking roof and walls. I was thinking of the Marshall Fire, the most destructive in Colorado history, which swept through suburban neighborhoods in similar weather in 2021. “In drought and wind like this,” I said, “if you get the hint of a fire—smoke, for example—you just get out. Don’t question it. Just leave.”

No joke: Five minutes later, smoke poured into our neighborhood.

We fled.

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4

I grew up steeped in the feminism of the 80s, and 90s. Doors had been opened for us, we were told, and now it was time to walk through. Career success? We could definitely have that. Children along with that success? Absolutely. A true partnership of equals with a man? Well, naturally, because how else would we balance all those other things?

Of course, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and we knew there would be resistance. To prove worthy of those open doors, we’d always have to work a little harder and be a little better than just equal. Still, with grit and determination, all the things women in generations before us had dreamt of and fought for were finally possible.

Despite all that, I had my doubts about marriage and kids which, even in my progressive family and despite my father’s definitively feminist views and politics, looked like a pretty tough road for women. The truth is, I can’t remember Mom ever sitting down and doing something entirely for herself—and I mean literally ever. Perhaps this story illustrates: One Christmas season, in the midst of finishing her classes (like my father, she was a university professor), and preparing for the holidays, my mother was up very late by herself wrapping presents and writing out a few cards to my brother and me. On Christmas morning, when I opened one of those cards, her handwriting started out fine, went unreadable, then dribbled off the edge of the paper like spilled milk off the edge of a table. Apparently, somewhere in that long night of work and deep in the fog of exhaustion, she’d fallen asleep in the middle of writing that card.

We all laughed about this, because, well, that was Mom. But the truth behind this story really wasn’t funny—and it stuck with me. As a young woman, I promised myself that, if I ever got married and had kids, it wasn’t going to be like that.

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5

Driving out of our smoke-filled neighborhood, the air was dust and sand and sticks and tumbleweeds. On one street, the wind overturned trash cans and dragged them down the street like legless blue cows. We passed a construction site where men raced through a torrent of dust to retrieve tarps that had taken flight. On another road a semi had blown over and the driver was crawling out through the space where the windshield should have been.

I had no idea where to go. I dodged the trash cans and tarps and tumbleweeds. At red lights I tried not to stop under large trees. Heading down a road at twenty miles an hour, a small bird was blown so hard into the windshield the glass bent beneath the impact.

6

Almost thirty years ago, when I first moved in with the man I would marry, he was the first one to bring up the question of how we could divvy up chores equally. It was a good sign.

When we got married, he did laundry. I took care of bills. We both walked the dog. We talked about having kids. Neither of us wanted to stop working. Also, given that I’d never felt any huge attraction to babies and little kids, I was somewhat terrified of parenting. He, on the other hand, was a high school teacher who had worked at a camp for emotionally disturbed kids and at a daycare. If ever there was going to be someone who could make up for my potential ineptitude as a parent, this was the guy.

We talked about how we would make it work, about how we could build an equitable partnership. I was sure it would work, so sure, that, at some point, I confidently told my mom I would never agree to the kind of exhaustion she’d dealt with. She’s been dead now for twenty years, but I often wish I could ask her if, in that moment, she believed me.

7

Amidst the wind, eighty responders attacked the small fire that flooded our neighborhood with smoke, managing to quickly quell the flames. We went home, put away the few things we’d taken with us, and tried to reassemble our minds. The wind, however, continued to wreak havoc for hours. The Interstate into Wyoming closed. The local university shut down the campus due to tree damage. In Nebraska, the same wind fueled fires that would end up burning over 800,000 acres. Later, we learned that the winds in town had been well over ninety miles an hour, exceeding the mark for a category 2 hurricane. (One thing is for sure: This did not make me want to try to ride out a real hurricane.)

8

I’ll cut to the chase: The equal partnership I staked my hopes on didn’t happen.

There was no sudden shift, no clear rift between intent and action. To be clear, my husband wasn’t and still isn’t lazy—and it’s not that he wasn’t doing anything at all. We were both busy with challenging full-time careers and with our kids. Still, there was this slow drift whereby mutual responsibilities somehow became mine. Vacation planning? That was me. Tax preparation? That too. Owner of family calendar and all things that went onto it and also reminders about those things? Also me. Primary parent for three teenagers? Yep, that too.

It wasn’t like I was blind about what was happening. I saw it, resisted it, tried to renegotiate. And yet, with an almost shocking level of inevitability, the drift continued.

For years, this situation flummoxed me. After all, my husband is a nice guy who cares deeply about equality and equity. Given that I’d been trained by society that equality had become an individual challenge, a thing that, as a woman, I could work for and achieve, I had to assume the issue was on my side. I just must not have yet found the right way to show how unequal things had become, to negotiate a more fair arrangement, to explain the damage this inequality was doing to me, the impacts to our children, and so on.

And, of course, in the midst of all that discussion, the work did not abate. There were finances to be managed, doctors appointments to be made, family events and vacations to be planned, and on and on and on. There was also a global pandemic and there were some teenage crises. There was even a Christmas season where, one night after a marathon session of vacation prep and gift wrapping, I hauled myself up off the floor at three AM and both remembered my mother’s handwriting dribbling off that card and me telling her that I would never, ever end up in that situation

9

Late on the day of those crazy winds, I went to see a physical therapist for the first time to deal with chronic, intermittent hip pain, which turned out to be caused by my pelvis being out of place. Lying on my back, the therapist pressed against the edge of my right iliac crest, which was as tender as a fresh bruise. In the midst of an exercise a few minutes later, something very deep in my pelvis released, and I gasped, my eyes instantly filled with tears.

The therapist asked if I was okay. I said yes. Physically this was true. I was less sure about the rest of me, because it felt like I had let go of something that, until that moment, I had been holding as tightly as a thing can be held. Having let go, I had no idea what would happen next.

10

On one of my early ski days this year, I was having trouble really edging into and carving turns. After a few runs, I realized the difficulty was a kind of wariness, a fear that started as tension in my shoulders and ran all the way down to where my feet were clenched in my ski boots. If I wanted to ski fast and do it well, I had to let go. Instead of that tight, wary holding back, I needed to stand on relaxed feet and sink forward into the turns, to lean into both the speed and the risk.

11

There was a day when I realized that I hadn’t just lost the battle in my struggle to achieve a partnership of equals. I’d lost the whole goddamn war. There was no explanation I could concoct, no request

I could make, no action I could take that would result in a situation where my most intimate partnership was not also exploiting my time and labor. This wasn’t a failure of explanation or negotiation on my side. By the same token, it wasn’t a failure of love or care on my husband’s side. Rather, it was a failure of training. As a woman in a patriarchal culture, I was trained from day one to see and assume responsibility for all the work related to my family and home. That same culture trained my husband, to NOT see that same work and, where it must be seen, to diminish both its value and the effort it might require. In short, the whole time I thought I’d been negotiating with my husband, I’d really been battling an entire system of patriarchy that allows women to expect equality, while also still training men to believe that seeing—much less owning—the emotional and domestic labor of family means relinquishing their entire identify as men.

And so, yeah, I guess it’s not surprising that I lost.

For better or worse, this knowledge only changed part of my personal equation. I’m still not willing to live in a relationship that exploits my time and labor, but I also understand much more about the struggle men face in seeing or even stepping outside of these patterns.

12

Two or three physical therapy appointments in, I began to see the connections. The pain in my hip and pelvis was one output of walking around clenched into a knot of tension that runs the entire length of my body. So are those tense feet and shoulders when I’m skiing. So, too, was the absolute conviction that, by god, I alone could successfully negotiate an equitable relationship.

I took that thought out with me on another ski day. That day the white and gray clouds streaked across the blue sky. Across the mountain valley, the peaks were tinged with gold in the morning light. I let go of the tension between my shoulder blades. In my ski boots, I unclenched my feet. And then I flew down the mountain. I rode the lift back up, flew back down. Each ride up was all my own. Every run down was also my own. The light on the mountains shifted. Over and over again I had to remind myself to unclench, to let go, to sink forward into the speed, into the fear I might hit an icy patch or catch an edge.

Unclench. Let go. Fly.

The sky paled to afternoon blue. My feet relaxed. My shoulder blades released. I was alone and free and flying fast. At the bottom of the slope, thighs burning, breathing hard, I stopped and waited for no one but myself.

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13

Of course, that one day of skiing isn’t the end of the story.

The following day when I did my physical therapy—and, yeah, I was probably pushing things too hard on a day I should have been resting—something twinged. The next day when I got out of bed, my entire lower back was tender and wobbly. In trying to let go of my pain, my entire body had become unstable and fragile.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that my body is struggling to find a new way to hold itself or that my heartbreak is not healed by one good day of skiing. I’ve spent decades walking around with whatever it is—fear, anxiety, patriarchy itself—gripped so tight it has contorted my body into pain and my heart into breaking. Liberation, it seems, whether from pain or inequality or really anything, isn’t a windstorm that comes in and blasts away all the bad things. These moments—the wind, the release in my hip, flying down the mountain—are just beginnings, moments that expose the things I’ve been hiding from myself. Liberation is more a process of retraining, of reshaping my mind, body, and heart as I learn to walk this new path. Sometimes its steep and rocky. Other times it is wild flight down mountains.

“It’s a great teaching point to really shine a light on how women should be championed for their amazing feats. And [instead] now I have to sit … in front of you and explain someone else’s behavior. It’s not my responsibility.”
—Hilary Knight, captain of 2026 US Women’s hockey team

Probably you’ve already watched the videos. If not, you might want to take a little detour down to the first footnote for the links1. Either way, here is a summary of some of the things that happened in the locker room last Sunday after the US men’s Olympic hockey team squeaked out a win against Canada.

1. The Director of the United States FBI guzzled beer and whopped it up with the US men’s Olympic hockey team in the locker room following that team’s gold-medal win.

2. The President of the United States used his congratulatory call to the team to mock the US women’s hockey team—who had also recently won the gold medal against Canada.

3. The US men’s hockey team raucously laughed along with the joke.

Enter the apologists…

• Sports is about unity. Why can’t you just celebrate their win?

• Why does the left always have to make everything political?

• And, of course, my perennial favorite: It’s just a joke. Why can’t you take a joke?

Sigh.

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But, okay, I’ll take the bait…

Let’s start by dispensing with the obvious stuff:

• If you make, laugh at, and later defend a divisive and obviously political locker room joke then you are making sports not about unity. If you want sports to be about unity, stop doing that.

• As for people like me making it political, see the previous bullet. The joke was political. Laughing at it was political. My response to the political nature of the political joke and the political response is not “making it political” because it already was.

• The item about this being “just a joke,” is going to take more than a bullet point…

A million years ago, when I was in my late twenties and a newly minted manager at a tech company, I was sitting in my cubicle chatting with my boss. A friend of his happened to walk past, and he stopped to chat as well. A couple of minutes into that conversation, the friend made a coded joke about my menstrual hygiene (there were some reddish drips next to the mug on my desk where some berry tea had dripped earlier that day). My boss laughed along.

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Like Trump’s locker room humor, this was definitely a joke. But (also like Trump’s statement) it wasn’t just a joke. By forcibly inserting the functions of my female sexual organs into the conversation, that guy made the moment about his (and my boss’s) maleness and, therefore, also about their comparatively greater social power. While (this time, at least) the President of the United States managed to avoid referring to anyone’s genitalia, his joke also called out the maleness of everyone in that room and their comparatively greater social power—since, after all, they had garnered the President’s enthusiastic invitation rather than the “avoiding impeachment” invitation offered to the women.

First of all: Yuck.

But, second, let’s ask the more important question: Why? I mean, yeah, the gross guy in my cubicle was some mid-level manager in a tech firm, so maybe you can see why he needed a little stroke to his, ummm, ego. But the President of the United States? Seriously?

Also, the women’s hockey team is popular—as is girls’ and women’s hockey generally. The women’s gold-medal game against Canada was the most-watched women’s hockey game ever, and USA Hockey is reporting a surge in player participation for girls and women2. With the sport and, specifically, the women in that team in a moment of ascendency, why would Trump take the risk of lobbing a metaphorical pile of shit at them?

The short answer to this question is because it works. Like it works really, really well.

It turns out that one of the most powerful tools in the belts of contemporary authoritarian leaders across the globe is a highly gendered political stance that insists on rigid norms for gender, sex, and sexuality3. This is, of course, a gender ideology. And it’s a gender ideology that shows up all over the place. A few examples:

• Blatant misogyny like Trump’s joke or him trying to shut a reporter up by saying, “Quiet, piggy” or like Mexico’s president being groped in public4 or like… oh, there are just so many things.

• The resurgence of “traditional” masculinity in everything from business5 to marriage to, apparently, the combination of working out and whole milk6.

• Most stunningly, there is the outright assault on transgender folks by limiting access to everything from healthcare to basic civil infrastructure to critical citizenship documents to sports7. This, despite the fact that the differential actual threat posed by trans people in any of these areas is nonexistent8.

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In case all of that isn’t fun enough, this entire movements gets packaged as “protecting women9” and protecting the “dignity” of women’s sports10 against the “gender ideology” of the left11. (Side note: Given the locker-room fiasco, can we finally, please, please, please set aside the idea that any of this is about preserving the dignity of women’s sports?12)

Let’s jump back a half step: This is all happening because it works. These tactics are working to gain and hold power for right-wing authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning politicians the world over.

Ironically, this brings me to the good news. Seriously. This is actually where I am going to magically pull some good news out the very ugly hat I just spent the last nine hundred or so words knitting together. Even better, I’m going to pull that good news out of the worst part of that whole locker room debacle: The laughter.

Remember that? There was the beer guzzling, then the nasty joke, then the guys laughing.

Here’s the magic: The power of that moment is not actually embedded in Trump’s joke. It’s in the laughter that followed and that’s because, in the split second that followed Trump’s joke, he was not the most powerful person in the room. In that moment, right before all those guys laughed, they held all the power. They could, of course, do what they did, which was to choose the easy path, fall in line, skewer their female counterparts, and then sweep up the rewards for their good behavior (free airplane rides! White House trip! Public adulation!)

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Or they could have not done that.

To be clear, I fully recognize the challenges of that particular moment—at least for any of the guys in the room who would actually have cared to speak up. Those guys were rightfully riding high on their victory. The President of the United States was on the phone. Also, we’re all human. We all get sucked up into things and go along when we shouldn’t. Which, of course, is why a couple of those guys have come back and said things that sort of skittered toward an actual apology.13 (I’ll give a shout out here to Charlie McAvoy for what is, so far, the best-in-class statement.)

I think that, right now, it’s worth quoting Hilary Knight, the captain of the gold-medal-winning women’s hockey team. When asked about Trump’s joke, she said, “It’s a great teaching point to really shine a light on how women should be championed for their amazing feats. And [instead] now I have to sit … in front of you and explain someone else’s behavior. It’s not my responsibility.”

Oh, she is so right. It isn’t her responsibility. And yet, despite that, she did the work that should have been done by literally any of the men in that room but wasn’t. Why? Because she’s a leader and a team player and assertive enough to say an unpopular thing out loud.

She’s also right about something else: This is a “teaching moment.” I can’t speak to exactly what Knight meant by statement, but I can tell you that when I say it, I’m looking at the regular, ordinary guys out there. Because here’s the thing: You are always in the room when jokes like that get lobbed and y’all are the ones who then have a choice.

Choice 1: You can laugh along (even reluctantly while sipping your beer). You can maybe just nod a little bit (even if it makes you feel gross). You can look around, feel relieved there are no women there, and then just stay silent. You can do any of those things, but know that, every single time you do, you give power to the gender ideology that both does real damage to people you claim to love and that, as a bonus, feeds the creeping authoritarianism of our age.

Choice 2: You can speak up. The next time you’re in a room and someone makes a gendered joke, instead of all the things in choice 1, you can decide to say something. You can take the air out of the joke. All you have to do is remember that the power isn’t in the joke itself, it’s in how it’s received. In that moment, the joke teller doesn’t have the power. You do. All you have to do is say something.

And, guys, seriously, you should. Next time this kind of thing happens, you really should say something.

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So what is this new adventure?

Today, I'm very excited to announce that two amazing partners (Cat and Jenny) and I are launching a new venture, the Grove Creative Collective. I'm incredibly excited about this project, and I want to share a bit about what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what's next.

As we have documented on our website in slightly more detail, this venture started at a social event when Cat asked me what I thought about putting together some kind of creative retreat. Since she's a painter and I'm a writer, any retreat we might have come up with would, by definition, cross artistic boundaries.

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In that moment, we probably exchanged no more than twenty words on this topic. It was really just the tiny seed of an idea, but something stuck. A few weeks later, we talked about this again and we realized that the cross-disciplinary core of this idea had taken root and grown. What we wanted to do, we determined, was create opportunities for writers, artists, and other creatives to learn and grow together in shared, collaborative workspaces.

Like every human being ever, I have all sorts of impulsive ideas (Move to Spain! Become a dog trainer! Get a horse! Buy a motorcycle!). But the truth is that I'm not a actually very impulsive. Instead, when an idea arrives in my life, what I want to do is to metaphorically take the idea out to coffee like a new acquaintance. I want to spend time getting to know the idea, to see if it resonates with my heart and mind. In short, I want the ideas that stick around, to be, like friends, things that make my heart thrum with joy.

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This is exactly how it has felt as the three of us have grown that tiny idea into what is now the Grove Creative Collective. This idea of bringing people together across creative disciplines and boundaries to work and create together is the kind of idea that has kept me awake in the darkness before sleep, the kind of idea that has been with me as I made my morning coffee—and I think all three of us have each had a version of this experience.

But why?

For me, this is actually a really important question (and also probably why I'm not all that impulsive…). But, seriously, it's not like we're going to get rich by hosting retreats. Also, there are so many other good things we could be doing with our time. So, really, why?

For me, it comes down to what may be my most core belief: I believe that every aspect of our lives is enhanced by diversity. Especially now, in a world driven by echo chambers and monocultures of thought and creativity, the thing that truly lights me up is being in the presence of creative people whose thinking, whose creativity, whose way of being in and seeing the world are different from mine. And, yes, this is actually a fairly subversive idea, one that runs against the grain of specialization and production and industrialization of art. But, you know what? I like a little subversion with my diversity.

After months of research and exploration, the three of us have also come to believe that this is an underserved area in the arts. There just aren't that many opportunities where we bring creatives together across the boundaries of discipline and create opportunities for them to work in the same space and to explore cross-disciplinary collaboration. And, given how dreaming up this idea has felt to us, we're pretty sure it is also going to resonate with a certain group of creative folks out there.

And so, here we go! For us, today has been a destination, but it is also just the beginning of our journey. Today, we are launching our website and beginning the work of getting our idea out in the world through our blog and socials. In a couple of weeks, we'll announce our retreat lineup for the next eighteen months. And then, we'll be off and running.

Given all of that, here is my invitation to you: Check out our website. Follow our socials (Facebook, Instagram, Threads). Subscribe to our blog on Substack. Sign up for our email newsletter. Drop me a comment if you have comments or questions! And, most of all, if this seems like a thing you might be interested in doing, consider joining us for a retreat in 2026.

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It was over a hundred degrees, and I was a couple of miles out on one of my favorite hikes. Because of the heat I'd seen no one else. I was moving fast, drenched in sweat, and full of joy because I love a good, hot day. I looked up and saw a man coming my way. He was alone and I was alone and so, because I have been well trained as a woman, I was on alert.

We walked toward each other through the heat. The man was over six feet, strong, probably twice my weight. As I got closer, something felt off (his expression? something about how he was moving?). My level of alert bumped up a notch, but there was nothing to do other than continue forward. When we were a few feet apart, he stopped. "Just the two of us out here today," he said.

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The short story: Nothing happened. When he spoke, I stopped—far enough back to have options. And then we chatted. He was, it seemed, an awkward but entirely friendly (and completely uncreepy) guy who wanted to talk for a few minutes about the heat and the beauty of the mountainside we were both crossing in the shared inferno of that day.

A short list of things women are taught to fear
Being alone at night
Being alone outside
Being alone in your home at night (close your drapes!)
Being alone

Of course, it isn't always so clear whether a situation is innocuous. One night, walking home alone, I came around the very dark corner on the road leading into my neighborhood, and a figure emerged out of the darkness, a man coming toward me. Like the man on the hiking trail, something felt off, but this time the alarm bells in my head and body felt like a klaxon. Once again, there was nowhere to go but forward.

As the distance between us closed, the man slowed. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and speed-dialed my husband. "I'm on the corner of the canal road." I said it loud enough for the man to hear. "Come get me now. And stay on the line with me." The man was on one side of the road. I was on the other. As we came even, he stopped. I kept moving. The man watched me pass. I stayed on the phone, still talking loudly. I was five feet past him, then ten, then fifteen. I kept my eye on him over my shoulder, but it was very dark, and I could see only his outline. And then, when I was maybe twenty feet past, his outline started to follow me. I was too close to outrun him so, instead, I turned to face him and stopped. He stopped. We stood there for a minute. I calculated whether or not to pick up one of the fist-sized rocks on the side of the road, five feet or so to the left. But then he turned and walked away, disappearing into the darkness.

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Was I ever really in danger in this situation? I have no idea. Of course, there are plenty of situations where women in very similar circumstances were in actual danger. But in this specific circumstance, who knows.

Hiking alone
Camping alone
Backpacking alone
Driving cross country alone and having your car break down in the middle of nowhere
Driving alone and having your car break down at night

Do a Google search on "women safety tips," and you'll find a virtually limitless quantity of information. So many instructions! So many tips! Some sites even have cute pictures and speech bubbles showing things like a woman shrieking "HELP!!!" Also animated videos. Three things strike me about this information:

• Almost every link is about what individual women can do to be safer. Collectively, they read like the assignment was to create infinite variations on "don't be alone" and "be hypervigilant.” It is as if being alone/distracted/female is actually the problem. A particularly egregious example, courtesy of the District Attorney of Placer County, has decorated their page with a UN Women's graphic that says "End Violence Against Women."1 A lovely thought, for sure, but, just in case it's not obvious, there is NOTHING on that Placer County page (or, really the vast majority of the other pages) that would contribute to actually ending the violence.2

• All of these safety tips for women focus on the risk of violence from strangers and near-strangers (like the dude who just hit on you in a bar). While stranger danger is real, the highest risk of violence against women is domestic—a fact which most of these sites don’t even acknowledge.3

• Third: These safety tips are presented to all women without differentiation, but actual violence—both against women and against all genders—is unevenly distributed, particularly by race and LGBTQ+ identification.4 As a white, middle-aged, upper-middle class woman I face far lower risk of violence than many other women and certain groups of men.

Why? Why do all they these sites address the symptoms rather than the cause of the violence? Why is there no context in terms of who is actually at greater risk? Why, if talking about women's safety, do we avoid talking about the greater risk of domestic violence?

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Being too strong
Being too weak
Taking your eyes off of your drink in a bar
Wearing the wrong clothing in the wrong place
Talking to or flirting with or kissing the wrong man

Fear is pernicious. The first time I camped alone, I was nervous. Also the first time I made a cross-country drive alone. Probably also for many other things I’ve done alone for the first time. And yet, the reality is that my actual risk of violence in doing these things alone is very low. So far the most dangerous thing I've encountered while camping alone was a small rock that I tripped over, nearly crashing my skull into a much larger and pointier rock. In other words, the most dangerous thing I've encountered while camping alone is actually myself.

And yet , that first solo camping trip there was that niggling sense that I might not be safe. Why? Because, like all women, this very specific set of fears has been drummed into my head since forever. Because, like all women, I've been indoctrinated into a system that drives fear into all the nooks and crannies of our minds, shrinking the spaces in which we exist.

Being attacked while walking
Being attacked while running
Being attacked while driving
Being attacked by someone who breaks into your house
Being attacked by someone when you open the door

A few years ago, I was at a bar with some friends. I was the first to leave, and I had parked some blocks away. One of the men offered to walk me to my car.

This was a perfectly nice gesture on the part of this man. And, it's true that a woman walking through an unknown neighborhood at night is safer with a man. Still, when I think back on this, I'm rankled. Here's why:

1. That night, virtually all the dangers on the walk to my car were theoretical acts of violence by men.5

2. The solution to the this danger was for me to take a man with me.

3. It's worth pointing out again that the actual risk of a woman being attached by an unknown man is less than the risk of attack by a family member, current/former intimate partner, or close associate. I'm not saying that the guy who offered to walk me to my car had anything but the best intentions but, statistically speaking, I was more at risk of being harmed by someone like him than by someone on the street.

In short, here is the bargain: As women, we pay men (by sacrificing our independence and freedom of movement) to keep ourselves safe from other men. I don't know about you but, said this way, the whole thing starts to sound like some kind of protection racket run by organized crime.

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Being alone with a man you don't know well
Being alone without a man
Being raped
Being killed

In the current political context, there's been a lot of talk about about fear-based 'precompliance,' which is to say how fear is used to get people to change their behavior without the need to actually create pesky things like laws. As I was writing this, I was struck at how much of the training we receive as women drives precompliance by normalizing fear in such a way that women choose to live smaller, meeker, less independent lives?

And, of course, we do just that. Women avoid going out alone, watch their drinks at the bar, go on fewer adventures, and spend huge amounts of energy on constantly calibrating the safety of every situation. We do this because, in many situations, the risk is real and also because we've been taught to do it without differentiation or context.

I started writing this post because I was writing a story about a woman who is trying to step out of the bounds of fear and accepting the associated risks of doing so. The more I wrote the story, the more I was bothered by how reflexive all of this feels both in the world (where we have normalized the idea that we solve violence against women by making women afraid) and in myself (because it is often very hard to resist the urge to shrink).

In the end, I don't really have answers to any of this other than that, for me, as in so many other cases where the goal is precompliance and smallness, the best response may be resistance and taking up space. Of course, I'd rather not spend time thinking about how to do an end run around my own indoctrination, but I have a feeling that doing so is a critical part of what it means to be alive and paying attention in the world. And also, as part of a demographic that is both supposed to be afraid but is actually not at much actual risk, I have a feeling that this is also my obligation.

NOTE: All the pictures in this post were taken on trips I took alone. For me, solitude is a gift and a joy, and I feel lucky to have been in each one of these places.

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Recently, after a state championship loss, a small-town New York girls basketball coach yanked the ponytail of one of his players and then proceeded to yell in her face1.

Until…

This is where I'm going to actually suggest that you watch the video. However, rather than watching the coach, watch the young woman who intervenes on behalf of her teammate.

I first saw the video of the coach’s assault a few days ago when it began its clickbaity journey through the Internet. For reasons I couldn’t immediately name, it stuck with me until, finally, yesterday, I sat down and watched it a couple more times, trying to see why I couldn't get it out of my head.

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Like everything else (including this blog) my experience of watching this video is laid just over the current national drumbeat of scapegoating and bullying. Part of this hatefulness is official, but the reality is that the bills and laws and executive orders that are the official embodiment of this meanness have also emboldened all sorts of non-official expressions of hate, violence, and fear2.

The good news— (Okay, maybe it’s not good news. Let’s call it hopeful news…) The hopeful news is that resistance works, and it doesn’t take some huge majority of the population to make real change happen—and the data even show this is true.

As I watched the video one last time yesterday, I finally realized why it had stuck in my brain. I think that what moved me is the way this young woman intervenes on behalf of her friend. One moment, the coach is suddenly yanking her friends head back and yelling. And then, without hesitation, this young woman uses her body and voice to block the coach—and she keeps moving and speaking to continue blocking him, even as he pursues the issue. What I see in her actions is moral confidence and the conviction to act on the part of someone who is being bullied by a more powerful person.

Of course, this is separate from the kind of politically motivated anger, hatred, and violence that is being stirred up right now. Still, watching her, it feels like the strength she shows in this moment comes from the same muscle we all need to be exercising every day in every part of our lives. In a world where the highest authority figures in our nation and in many of our states are deriving power by legislating, facilitating, and encouraging our meanest impulses, we need—individually and collectively—to be standing up and stepping in for our fellow human beings, whether they are our friends, neighbors, or just fellow travelers on this planet. Every time we do this kind of thing, no matter how small or how big, it matters.

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I watched the weather for the two days leading up to that drive, so I knew the storm was coming. We talked about our options. We could head back home for a couple of nights, then make the drive back up into the mountains. We could try to find a couple of hotel rooms for the five of us and all our stuff for those same nights. Or we could risk making the move through the storm. No one wanted to go home and miss the ski days, hotel rooms were in short supply, and it looked like maybe the storm would be abating when we had to leave. After weighing the options and risks, we decided to attempt the drive.

When we left, things did seem better, though still not great. As it turned out, however, the predicted timing of the storm's abatement was a bit off.

I've had some nasty winter drives, and this was definitely one of the worst. Sometimes it was snowing hard; other times it was snowing really hard. The wind blasted the snow horizontally across the road, the car, and my field of vision. Sometimes, I could see the road; other times I could see some indication of where the road was, like roadside vegetation or reflector posts. Other times all I could see was white.

I'm not going to attempt enumerating the storm of executive orders, internal policy changes, firings (real and threatened), announcements of potential territorial additions to the US (Gaza, Canada, Panama, Greenland; are there others?), and so on that we have seen from the new administration. Nor will I speculate on what is happening under the cover of DOGE. Whole news organizations are (heroically) attempting to track this for us. But I will say that, obviously, it’s a lot. Dizzying is the word that comes to mind.

In a whiteout, the snow on the ground and the snow or fog in the air make it impossible to discern the terrain. In a true whiteout, all visual references vanish and with them, your spatial orientation. In those conditions, it becomes impossible to know whether or how fast you are moving. You can even lose track of up and down. The disorientation can make you fall over or even vomit.

As an avid skier, I've been in true whiteout conditions a few times and in many near whiteouts. The worst of these have been in the comparatively featureless terrain above tree line, but even when you're in a place with landmarks, the experience is disorienting.

That day on our drive, I could always see the inside of the car, so I could orient up and down, but it was very hard to maintain clear perception of speed, direction, and the location of the road. I don't remember how long the drive took, but I do remember creeping along, often at less than ten miles an hour. There were times when all I could see were the highway reflector posts--and there were substantial gaps between those where I was blind. In between, I held my course, watched my speedometer, then readjusted when the next post emerged out of the white chaos.

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For me, it's helpful to think of our current national moment as a kind of whiteout1. The chaos of orders, changes, threats, tariffs, firings, retributions, and deportations is, like an actual whiteout, dizzying. To be clear, this is no accident. Disorientation is a key part of the strategy we're all experiencing.

In theory, if you're in a whiteout, stopping and waiting it out is the right strategy. But, if you're on the road in a car, stopping is likely to lead to an accident when the next vehicle comes along. If you're on the top of a mountain, stopping is a recipe for hypothermia. So, in reality, you're usually better off if you keep moving. The strategy for moving through whiteout conditions is something like the following: Be prepared; find landmarks; use navigation tools if you have them; if you lose balance, close your eyes and let gravity remind you of up and down; keep your companions close; remember that panic is your enemy; move with intention

On that stormy day, the drive was hard and exhausting, but I was prepared. My car had excellent snow tires. I had extra food and water and warm clothes in case we ended up stranded. I had good navigation tools and, if they failed, I'd written down the route. I had years of experience driving in adverse conditions. I was sometimes afraid, but I didn't panic.

In the end, things turned out well. We arrived safely, and the next day was a brilliant day of powder skiing. In hindsight, that my decision to make that drive was right because the outcome was positive. In reality, though, things could have gone much worse. While my decision to drive was into the storm a necessary precondition for getting our beautiful powder day, taking that risk didn't guarantee any particular outcome, good or bad.

The other day I was reading the "Snow" chapter in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which includes a character who gets caught out in a winter storm. As I read, I thought about my own experiences in winter weather, and I realized the similarity between that feeling and my feelings in the current political and cultural chaos.

You could say it's not the same. After all, the weather is just the weather. It has no strategy or intent to disorient. Still, as I said above, this moment does feel like a whiteout, and I do think that one of the biggest problems we face IS our disorientation. (How many conversations have you had that included some flavor of ‘How the f*ck can you even keep up with what is going on’?) If this is true, then maybe some version of what works to orient yourself in an actual whiteout can be an antidote to this current chaos, and maybe that looks something like this:

1. Stop questioning it. Accept that we are in the midst of a huge cultural storm.

2. Use your values and core beliefs as landmarks to help orient and navigate.

3. Remember that we're prepared for this moment. There are many groups and individuals who have been doing exactly the kind of work that needs to be done. In many cases, they've been doing for generations against long or impossible odds.

4. Find trustworthy travelling companions (see #3).

5. Stay grounded.

6. Above all, keep moving forward with intention.

As with my drive on that stormy day, there's no guarantee that our actions will result in a positive outcome, but I’m sure that taking thoughtful, strategic action is a necessary precondition for things getting better. And to take that action, we have to choose to walk or drive or fly into this storm. (Sound of coat zipping, door opening and closing.)

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(A note on the pictures: As I was looking through my photos for those that would be a good fit for this piece, I realized that there is a good reason that no one takes pictures in a white out….)

But, in January, nine months before I went abroad, my dad called me at school to say that he was leaving my mom. I finished that semester, then spent the summer before leaving for Cameroon back in my childhood "home," which had become the house where my grief-stricken mother lived amongst a thousand ghosts and half our furniture. One day that summer, my father came to the house and they argued over kitchen implements, a moment that perfectly captured the banality with which the deepest foundational story of my life--my family--had been disemboweled. Come fall, I left for Cameroon in a haze of relief to be gone from all that, but that haze also obscured how unmoored I was by the disintegration of my family.

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In Cameroon, I struggled with everything. My half-decade of high school and college French was so useless that I congratulated my host family on the death of an elder and was paralyzed by simple tasks like ordering a beverage. For the first time in my life, I was a minority. Having, until then, lived in the privilege and assumption of always belonging, I found myself, in this place, a pale parade of one. Once, I even managed to scare a small herd of cattle that was coming the other way down a road with some unknown aspect of my cluelessness, whiteness, or foreignness.

Of course, these were important things to experience and learn. And, of course, there were a thousand tiny joys and successes. There were the fresh beignets sold on the street. There was pure triumph when I successfully conducted an interview in French and bargained for some bananas in the market and navigated the city by taxi. But, underneath all that, the entire time I was there, my psyche was perched precariously on the edge of an unseen precipice. Finally, when my group gathered for a final session before heading home, I lost my grip. The issue was this: More than anything in the world, I wanted go home but, somehow, I had also developed an absolutely unshakeable and completely illogical belief that I was going to die on the trip to get there. Understanding the absurdity of this belief, I almost managed to keep it to myself until, on one of our last nights, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably for hours on the shoulder of a kind but perplexed friend.

Obviously, I didn't die on the journey, but the trip, while externally fine, was terrible--five flights and nearly forty sleepless hours of self-imposed, white-knuckle terror. By the time I walked into the airport in Missoula, Montana and hugged my parents--who stood at some remove from one another--I had been awake for nearly two full days and, on my final flight had begun having waking dreams of huge spiders crawling on the inside of the airplane. Aside from taking a bath before going to bed that first night, I remember nothing--not even Christmas with my mom--until some unremembered number of days later, I left on a road trip with my father.

I had been staying with my mother, and the trip started off badly when my father came to pick me up. She didn't say it, but, as I said goodbye to my mother at the front door, I realized that my choice to take this trip with him rather than to stay home was, for her, one more terrible blow in a year of unremitting heartbreak. Still, I went out into the dark morning toward my father's truck, and we set off. I was still exhausted and infused with sadness over the ever-present loss of my family, but, as we drove south, the day broke with the muted, slanting light of a northern winter no more than a week past the solstice. As the day came to fruition, the light caught my eyes and mind and heart.

That light! The washed pastels of blue and gold and gray as the weak sun arced across the southern sky and the shadows slanted across hills of dry grass and snow. Maybe it was the fact that the light was so completely different from the relentless equatorial consistency I had just come from. Maybe it was the reminder that this winter darkness was temporary, the reminder that, like the seasons, we are all always in flux. This light didn’t fix the things that had been broken in me, but something about that morning made it feel possible to move forward into that trip with my father, then back to school, and on into my life.

I was still struggling. There were new, illogical fears of earthquakes, of going over high bridges, of falling asleep. One night I dreamt that I looked up and watched the moon descend toward the earth, growing ever larger. It went out of sight over the horizon and then there was a tremendous shudder as it crashed into the earth. I woke up then, but I carried the incipient terror of that dream on the surface of my heart for a week. So, yes, I was still struggling, but I also didn't hang back from those fears. I walked into them and, slowly, I began to rewrite the story I carried about myself in a way that would accommodate the brokenness of my family.

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On any reasonable scale, the amount of actual struggle in my life has been minimal. I've never been hungry or without a place to call home. I grew up with two loving parents in one of the most beautiful places on earth. I've been healthy throughout my life. I have a comfortable home, an admirable husband, three wonderful children, work I love. So, when I say that, recently, I've been struggling, it should be seen within this context. Still, it's true. I have been struggling with the distressing state of civil discourse, the threats to our rights and freedoms, the persistent failure to address the climate crisis. I've been struggling with faltering personal relationships and enduringly thorny family conflicts. All of these things have caused me to question my own truths and the stories I carry about my family and my country, about who I am as a mother, a partner, a writer, a citizen.

On a particularly difficult day, I take my dog for a walk in the park. It's early afternoon, a beautiful but unnervingly warm Colorado winter day. My dog hops out of the car. We set off first through some trees, skirting the bottom of the grassy hill at the center of the park. I’m distracted and ungrounded, and I'm trying to focus on the movement and the dog rather than on the rolling waves of unfounded anxiety looping through my mind.

And then, as I walk around the hill, we come upon a medieval battle--or, more accurately, we come up to where the Society for Creative Anachronism is holding battle practice. My dog, who hates both strangers and yelling, is not impressed, and so I turn and we head up the hill. To other people, we probably look like serenity itself: a middle-aged woman walking her goofy looking dog in the park on a beautiful day. Underneath, though, we're both a mess. The dog is worried about the knights as they yell and bash at each other. I, on the other hand, am worried about absolutely everything else.

This close to the winter solstice, even though it's just past mid-day, the sun is visible just above the hill. As I climb, I look up. Between me and the sun, there is a big, winter-barren tree. The light shining through it casts long, skeletal shadows across the dry grass.

I stop. Something about the angle or the color of this light reminds me of, all those years ago, the day I drove south with my father, and I remember. I remember the pale blue of the sky, the color of the light, the reminder of cyclicality and movement. And now, here, there is this tree, its naked branches and attendant shadows. Like that other day thirty-some years ago, it is a reminder that this darkness is seasonal, that everything is always in motion. It's a reminder that I, too, can shift and evolve, that I can rewrite the stories that make up who I am, but the only way to do that is to keep moving forward, to walk into the mess, to move toward the things I fear instead of away, to evolve and adapt.

And so we do. My dog and I keep going. We walk up the hill, through the long shadows of the tree, past the end of the fake battle, and into the next moment.

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"Stories constitute the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal."
—Dr. Howard Gardner, professor Harvard University

I have always told stories (even when I was just telling them to myself). As a child, I created elaborate games of make believe and, when riding along on road trips, I imagined myself galloping a horse or bravely trekking across every type of terrain we traversed. Later, in both college and graduate school, I studied writing and literature. As a corporate leader, I used storytelling to create a coherent vision for my team. And now, of course, here I am, still telling stories.

Nancy Mace, a Republican House member from South Carolina, recently introduced a measure to bar a single person (the newly elected Representative from Delaware, Sarah McBride) from using the women's bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol. Of course, the measure wouldn't actually bar Ms. McBride by name--rather, it would restrict bathroom use based on sex assigned at birth.

Her reason? "This is about women and our right to privacy, our right to safety."

This move is a part of a larger, ongoing narrative claiming that the presence of transgender women in women's bathrooms creates a physical risk to women and girls. This narrative is not true. No such increased risk exists1.

The relationship between stories and the world is not a one-way path. Rather, we are in constant conversation with stories that shape what we believe, how we see the world around us, who we are, and how we interact with each other. And this is true both for good and for bad.

To be clear, when I say stories, I don't just mean words.  We tell stories through music, theater, words, painting, advertising, propaganda, and so much more. These stories can uplift and shape us for the better, but they can also do tremendous damage. Germany's Nazi propaganda machine was, of course, a story machine.

As a reader and as a writer, I'm fascinated by the question of why certain stories take root in a culture despite being empirically false. Why, for example, have we hung on to the belief that sugar causes children to be hyperactive (it doesn't)? And why, amongst a particular portion of American society, has this false belief that inclusive bathrooms endanger women and girls both developed and persisted?

"Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country."
—J. D. Vance2

"In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there."
—Donald Trump during 2024 presidential debate.

"This is a piece of garbage that is simply not true….Discussion about Haitians eating dogs is just not helpful. And, again, these people are here legally.”
—Republican Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, in response to the stories amplified by Vance and Trump during the presidential campaign3

In some capacity, all stories are told to manipulate the beliefs, minds, and actions of an audience. Some stories intend to entertain, others to educate, others to shift opinions. The list of reasons for stories are endless, but the baseline reason is always true: We tell stories to bend others to our will. This is true for writers, artists, advertisers, door-to-door salespeople. It is even true for the brother-in-law telling some "big fish" story over Thanksgiving turkey.

Obviously, it’s also true for politicians. Every politician everywhere is always telling a story. Why? Because the ability to tell a story that resonates with voters is what gets them elected. And don't, for a moment, think they don't know what they're doing. As J. D. Vance himself said in response to criticism regarding the stories of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio:

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention … then that’s what I’m going to do."4

Scapegoat: "A person who is blamed for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency."
—Definition from Oxford Languages dictionary

Superficially, the narratives about women and girls being unsafe in gender inclusive bathrooms and the story about Haitian immigrants eating pets don't seem to have much in common, but both are classic (and depressingly successful) attempts to scapegoat:

1. Both stories identify a vulnerable group (trans women in one case, immigrants in the other).

2. Both stories make false claims about threats to the majority posed by the scapegoat group. 

3. Both stories use those claims to create fear and then use that fear to garner support and power (that is, for reasons of political expediency).

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Questions: If all politicians are always telling stories to get and stay elected, then what difference does it make if Vance and Trump tell scapegoating lies about immigrants eating pets or if Mace uses a false narrative about the safety of women and girls in gender-inclusive bathrooms? If this is just a way to win an election, what makes it different from all the other stories that politicians tell?

Well, let's look at the actual outcomes, shall we?

In Springfield, rather than helping the city address the actual challenges associated with the recent wave of immigration, the results of amplifying the pet-eating lies have included bomb threats and neo-Nazi marches. Meanwhile, in our bathrooms, anti-trans narratives have increased the already-present (and real) dangers faced by transgender people when they go out into the world and attempt to simply use a public restroom.5

In the real world (which is where we all live), this kind of rhetoric does actual damage to real people, including physical violence. Sure scapegoating is an expedient route to power (one that has been successfully used by authoritarian leaders across history), but it creates a fearful, violent, hateful society where everyone is eventually a potential target. Is that really the world you want to live in? The world you want your children to live in? 

For me the answer to those questions is a resounding NO.

We have elected leaders who routinely scapegoat and harm our family members, neighbors, friends, and fellow human beings (by, you know, 'creating stories') in order to gain power. They do this consistently and consciously. It is their strategy. How do we counter this? How do we fight the cruelty and cynicism of such a strategy?

Part of the answer, of course, is that we lean into the structures and rights accorded by the Constitution: We rally, we protest, and (most importantly) we fight for our rights in the courts.

But also, we tell stories.

Yes, we have elected leaders who are whipping up support by telling stories about nonexistent strangled cats and by fretting about who is peeing next to them. But we, too, can tell stories, and we sure as shit can do better than that. We can tell stories about courage and compassion and inclusion. We can tell stories about the heroic lives that our loved ones are living.

Yes, we are a nation with a deep history of racial and gender-based violence and we have elected leaders who are building their legacy on that history. But we are also a nation of dreamers who hold in our hearts the belief that a nation built on laws is stronger, more equitable, and more just than one built on fear, authoritarianism, and individual power. Even today, that dream is a story in the making, one that each of us has the ability tell.

So, yes, let's fight in the courts. Let's rally in the streets. And let's go tell the stories about the world and the nation that we want to live in. None of this guarantees that we will prevail, but it does guarantee that we will have been on the side of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I'm going to leave all of us (me, most of all) with this quote from Tennessee Williams:

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“The global warming hoax, it just never ends… To which I say, great, we have more waterfront property.”
--Donald Trump, 2022

“The Pollyanna principle (also called Pollyannaism or positivity bias) is the tendency for people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant ones. Research indicates that at the subconscious level, the mind tends to focus on the optimistic...” (From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna_principle).

The writing retreat is in Grand Lake, Colorado. Nestled into the mountains and billing itself as the “Western Gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park,” Grand Lake is a tourist hot spot that boasts lakes, mountains, forests, and wildlife. The writing retreat is held in a stunning home with huge, exposed log beams, a stone fireplace, cozy rugs, comfortable leather couches, and a perfectly appointed kitchen for this kind of event (two dishwashers!). Outside, there is a deck with a large fire pit and a hot tub, all of which overlooks a small lake. My bed is tucked into a cozy side room and is directly underneath a skylight where I can look up at the twinkling stars before drifting off.

2020 was the second driest and seventh warmest year in Colorado. That summer, Denver recorded a record seventy-five days above ninety degrees. In August, the Cameron Peak Fire began to burn. When it was finally out in December of that year, it had burned over 200,000 acres, becoming the largest fire in Colorado's long history of fires. From our Front Range home, my family spent much of the fall of 2020 under a pall of smoke that sometimes came down in choking thickness and sometimes fell like snow except that the flakes were ash. Mostly, though, the smoke flowed across the sky above us, turning the light a color that, if it was a crayon or a paint color, I would call “Apocalypse Orange.” With everything still in pandemic chaos, my three teenage children struggled to find psychological purchase in a world that, already under viral assault and in political tatters, now appeared to be burning to the ground. (Later, my daughter, Sadie Forkner, would write a poem entitled “In the fall, the forest burned down & it was not a metaphor,” which is scheduled to be published in early November in Beaver Magazine.)

This year, on the day that I drive up to the writing retreat, October 24, the National Weather Service declares a “red flag warning,” indicating low humidity, dry fuels, warm temperatures, and high winds—the perfect recipe for a dangerous wildfire. Before I leave, I have to rescue my election signs from the front yard where their metal legs have been bent sideways by the wind. Driving to the retreat, I go south to Denver before heading into the mountains. All along the Front Range, the air is hazy with pale brown dust kicked up off bone-dry hills and fields by the wind.

In 2020, the period from July first through mid-October was the driest such period in the hundred years records had been kept. Over the prior two decades, forests across the western US have experienced very high rates of beetle kill. While bark beetles are native, the combination of human forest management practices and climate change have increased the impact of the beetles. By 2020, in many areas around Grand Lake, 70-90% of the trees had been killed by the beetles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Troublesome_Fire ). These trees were standing deadwood, an entire forest of perfectly dry tinder waiting for any spark.

The day I drive up for the retreat, the New York Times publishes an article noting that, despite all the big conversations and discussions, the world's nations have basically made no progress on curtailing emissions that impact climate (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/climate/un-climate-change-global-emissions-report.html).

On October 14, 2020, an elk hunter reported a plume of smoke north of Kremmling, Colorado and called it into 911. Over the next week or so, this fire, now named the East Troublesome Fire grew to just under 19,000 acres. On October 20th, 2020, the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for the following day.

As in October of 2020, the day I arrive at the retreat, the US is days away from a presidential election. Both in 2020 and now, we are, as a nation, split almost fifty-fifty across a political and ideological abyss. On one side of that abyss, something very close to half our voting public wants to elect a man who continues to claim that climate change is a hoax and who also happens to be a convicted felon widely seen (even by many of his supporters) as audaciously dishonest, predatory, and racist.

The afternoon of October 21st, 2020, driven by the wind and exceptionally low humidity, the East Troublesome Fire experienced unprecedented growth. At 6:00 PM the fire had doubled in size to 40,000 acres. Twelve hours later, the fire had grown to over 125,000 acres. The pyrocumulus clouds generated by the fire rose to over 45,000 feet. The fire jumped across the treeless continental divide. The incident commander described the fire's expansion of "unheard of" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Troublesome_Fire).

When I arrive at the retreat, I arrive both at this beautiful home and at the scene of a four-year-old apocalypse. The home is nestled into a little community of cabins and second homes around a peaceful little lake. Right around the lake, there are a few pockets of live trees, but everywhere else around us, the hillsides are covered with the skeletal trunks of burned trees. Four years ago the fire raced through this area, burning the forest as well as people's homes and ultimately killing two people. The house we are in is new--rebuilt after the previous house on this lot was burnt down by the fire. The next day, I take a break from writing and go for a hike up into the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. For almost two hours, I walk through a vast graveyard of trees. In many places I can turn in a full circle and see no area not fully burned by the fire.

In this part of the world, bark beetles are native and fire is an expected, natural process for which the plants are well adapted. As an example, lodgepole pines have serotinous cones specifically adapted to open and re-seed the ground in the event of a fire.

As I hike, there are the burnt trees, but there are also signs of regeneration all around. In most places, the ground is covered with grasses and small shrubs, and some patches are full of knee-high lodgepole pines, re-seeded from fire-opened cones. The landscape is stark, but it is also rife with beauty: grasses backlit by the sun, the black of scorched wood against the new green of the baby trees, tree trunks carved by flame into improbable shapes. If you disregard the context of this fire (the reasons behind the beetle kill, the timing of the fire, the changes in temperature profile over recent decades, etc.), it would be easy to see this landscape as evidence of a normal and expected process within a stable climate system. In other words, if you ignore the human-driven changes to climate and landscape, it would be easy to see this fire through a lens of hope.

The election of 2020 was followed by months of political and civil uncertainty, disinformation and lies, recounts and lawsuits, all of which finally culminated in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump. In the days after that attack, the nation slowly settled back into a kind of tenuous normalcy that has, over the last four years, solidified into a fragile veneer that partially obscures the cultural realities of our time. Outside the current social and political context, it has, in other words, been possible to look at our political situation through the same pollyannish lens of hope that obscures the truth of climate change.

Before I drove up to the writing retreat, I hadn't put the maps together in my head. I knew where the retreat would be held and I knew that the East Troublesome Fire had wreaked havoc around Grand Lake. In my mind, I was thinking of the retreat as a kind of escape into a cool green forest and away from the political, social, and climate realities that are all around us. Of course, it was an escape: after all, I spent most of my time writing in this astonishingly beautiful house and being in a kind of communion with other creative minds. On the other hand, because of the location, it was also a view into the reality of the fire.

Last January I wrote a blog post on hope (https://lisametzgarauthor.com/hope-in-the-new-year). I still believe what I wrote then, that "Hope is muscled up, has calloused hands, and shows up in work clothes because the better part of hope is work." But also, I think that I'm increasingly wary of my own hope because it feels like so much of that hope is just the pollyannish pull to see the better, more optimistic side of things, a pull to avoid looking truth in the eyes, to avoid seeing the world as it really is.

Don't get me wrong--I want that hope as much as the next person. I want to hope that yes, we really will be able to address the climate crisis, that yes, we can re-embrace the political sanity that democracy requires. But there is also reality. No matter how many baby lodgepole pines there are in the forest I hiked through, the fact is that the climate is changing and we are failing to address either the causes or the impacts of that change. Also, no matter who wins this election, something very close to fifty percent of voting Americans believe that a dishonest and fascistic leader is the best solution to our current problems.

The writing retreat is everything I hoped it would be. During the day, I work in a comfortable chair in the living room. In the afternoon, sunshine streams though the huge windows and makes the room feel like it's glowing. Outside, the light glitters on the lake. Later in the afternoons on my hikes, I see the tracks of raccoons and elk and moose and maybe coyotes. At dinner, we gather as a group, eating, drinking, and laughing. After all of that, I go upstairs, tuck myself into the warm bed beneath the skylight and look up at the star bespeckled sky. One night, I'm awakened by a light that, for a moment, I think is daylight but that I then realize is the moon shining down through the skylight onto my face. It feels like waking into a benediction.

Driving home from the retreat, I try to hold these things together in my mind: all the simple, joyous pleasure of these few days right there alongside our often terrifying current realities. Maybe this I think, is the task of this moment, to see beauty without looking away from failure, suffering, grief, loss, even horror, to feel the pull of hope without looking away from the world.

I have come back to Missoula, Montana, my hometown, to visit my father, who still lives here, and my son, who is here for college. It is October, right at the moment where everything--the light, the trees and grass and bushes, the air itself--has shifted into a season of change.

My father starts walking again, and I follow him, listening to the quiet thunks of his hiking poles. We're going downhill now. We move slowly, my father careful of his knees. I grew up following this man on trails (in the woods, over the prairie, across the snow) or with him following me. (When I was a child, I hiked in front because my short legs were the slowest. Now, the order is reversed). I remember cross-country skiing through sparkling snow in the full moon. I remember the crunch of prairie grass and the feeling of a shotgun in my hand when we were hunting birds. I remember the smell of deep woods and rivers and high-country tundra. I remember learning to read tracks in the dust and to see the shape of a deer between the trees. There are so many memories.

The next morning, my son and I hike up a mountain that overlooks the city (a mountain that, in some kind of strange magic, looks like a sleeping elephant). It is just the two of us, and we're moving faster than the day before (though I'm sure my son is going slower than he would if I wasn't here) and we are heading up the steep, open, grassy flank of the mountain. The sunshine leans into us, slanting into the grass and, again, it sets the world aglow. We are hiking up hills where elk winter, hills where native peoples lived for well over 10,000 years before the invasion of European settlers, hills that are marked by the shorelines of a glacial lake that repeatedly filled the entire valley then emptied out with enough force to scour the eastern plains of Washington state. Ahead of us, four grouse rise up in a flurry of wingbeats. Again I remember those days of tramping across the prairie with my father, shotgun in hand, the smell of the dust and the grass and, later, the blood of the grouse. I also remember how my son, when he was  little, would stop to inspect the bugs when we hiked and how I was filled then with this contradictory combination of joy at watching his wonder and a deep desire to just keep moving. Now, of course, we do keep moving, and I soak in the pleasure of the steady climb, the light, being in this place with this person.

The following day is the last day of my visit. My father and I drive forty miles northeast from town to climb up an overlook above the Blackfoot River. Hiking up, the trail is dusty and we see tracks of deer and likely coyotes and perhaps a bobcat. At the top of the cliff there is a pine tree that someone cored and marked with a plaque--the tree  is nearly four hundred thirty years old. (When this tree sprouted, Ben Jonson was actively writing, Marie Venier made the first stage appearance by a woman in Paris, the native populations of what was to become the Eastern United States were being decimated by disease brought from Europe, and Galileo was trying to figure out the tides.) Looking out across the river and the valley below, my father points out how the river has been moved over time by tectonic movement and the paths of glaciers. Below us, the river and the valley and the trees and the patches of grassland and sage brush stretch out before us, an illusion of stability and permanence in a landscape that, even now, is shifting and changing.

Later that evening, the three of us have dinner. I sit across from the young man that is my son and the old man that is my father. We talk about the hike my father and I took and about my son's classes and about current politics, but I am also thinking about how we are sitting (in this restaurant filled with music and food and quiet voices) on a spot that was periodically under thousands of feet of an ice-age lake in a valley that has also been home to eons of animals and hundreds of generations of indigenous people. This moment, I know, has no permanence. It is nothing more than a fleeting shard of time, and I try to breathe it in as deeply as I can.

When the meal is done and I have said my goodbyes, I go out alone to my car and drive back to the apartment I rented for my stay. Driving back across a web of streets that are mapped into the deepest parts of my brain, I pass trees that are redder and yellower and dropping more leaves than when I got here just a few days earlier. My heart clenches with something that feels like a grief so deep it takes my breath away. (I did not mention that my mother's ashes are scattered on the flank of that elephant-shaped mountain I climbed with my son. I have only barely mentioned the aging of my father.)  But then a second wave of feeling washes over me that isn't just grief: It is also the joy of moving up that hillside with my son. It is also the way the tilting sunshine has lit up every daylight moment of this trip. More than anything, it is the way that moving through this place with my father has felt like moving through the nearly fifty-four years of life and history that we share and of feeling both the depth and the fragility of the connections I have to him, to this place, to time and life and breath and love.