Hello Darlings,

What a week. What a season we are emerging from and heading into.

I want to tell you nothing and everything.

I want to tell you my dreams were all blizzards the first few days after the US election. Vast white frozen tundras. I can’t make sense of it yet it felt right.

Can you feel the walls crumbling? Texts for help at all hours, people shouting on the roads, my neighbour smacked her dog’s nose, he yelped, and she looked at me lost, saying, “I’ve never done that before.”

I write this letter to you, to me, to all of us.

In times of overwhelm and disorientation, remember the fundamentals:

Sleep

Water

Food from the earth

Connection

In this very moment, you are held. Gently within the earth. 

As people suffer, as dreams unravel, rest in simplicity. Rest in those things outside of time and human prattle. Offer the birds small worm meals. Peek the ivy who hides white flowers in the high roof beams. 

What I am doing that you might like too

1. Concretely, I am going slow. 
2. I am silencing all alerts. 
3. I am pausing to reorient, to steady myself for a long slow uphill climb.
4. I am cooking simple meals and handwashing dishes. 
5. I am doomscrolling and saying “Who cares anyway? I’ll be dead soon” then breathing and coming back to myself (in a minute or an hour or a day).
6. I am reading diverting fantasy books like Lev Grossman’s gorgeous The Bright Sword.
7. I am reading divine revolutionaries like Tricia Hersey, and Devon Price, and Father Gregory Boyle who reminds me that WE BELONG TO EACH OTHER.

8. I am reading Yuval Noah Harari who helps me remember I am viewing the world through the tiniest window of time, a minute slice in the span of universal existence and evolution.

This Hīkoi Gives Me Hope

I hear Dr. Robert Sapolsky in my head, “Observe a single ant, and it doesn't make much sense, walking in one direction, suddenly careening in another for no obvious reason, doubling back on itself. Thoroughly unpredictable. The same happens with two ants, a handful of ants. But a colony of ants makes fantastic sense.” (link)

I remember that we may feel like a single ant, hopeless and helpless.

But I know that just north of me, a handful of people,

then a hundred,

then a thousand,

then many thousands of people,

elders, children, poets, builders, farmers, lovers, and mothers,

began to walk together

to voice a unified response.

Background and fuller explanation here.

This life is a team sport. Liberation is a collective action. Here’s to another day, here’s to remembering there is no them, we are all us.

In grief and shock and hope and love, Kerry