Hellooooo! Welcome to the Rolling Desk, new subscribers. I’m thrilled you’re joining us. Here for tales from the road by way of my nomadic life, stories of strangers’ kindnesses, poetic waxing on life with a chronic illness, and a fantastic community in the comments section? You’ve come to the right place! Longtime subscribers, you’re my joy, my delight, my dear friends.
If you’ve been around for a minute, you know I very occasionally compile a curated list. Today, a small handful of the many, many posts giving me inspiration and breath and shaping my responses to these times we find ourselves living in.
1. Be each others’ beautiful people
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is often asked these days, “What in the Hell are We Going to Do Now?”
Her answer comes from a multi-faith gathering where:
“We were Rastafarians, Quakers and Buddhists; we were Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians. We were Orthodox, Reformed and Conservative Jews. We were Muslims, Nation of Islam, Sikhs and Unitarians. We were female, male and non-binary. We were each other’s people, and we were beautiful. …
“How will we survive this moment? Look left and right and hold hands with our neighbors. Strap in, pray with our heads, hearts and feet, and hang on to each other for love and life.”
—Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis
One of the primary reasons I live like a nomad is to broaden my perspective. I go out into the world to know, not just in my mind but also in my body and heart the ways we all belong to each other. I go to quell my knee-jerk reactions, to loosen the soil in which my biases took root.
I love how this essay taps into what feels so resonant for me—that across so many “unsamenesses”—we are all each others’ people. Now, more than ever, I’m compelled to remember with my head, heart, and feet how strangers, how those among us who are most vulnerable belong to me / how we all belong to each other. I need to gather with—by which I mean engage on a personal level with, extend kindness to, and join in direct action and creation with—all the beautiful people who are my neighbors on the road and off.
2. Go to the wild, fight for the wild
Since Ruby the van became my home on the road in 2019, I’ve spent more time than any one person deserves among the wild spaces abundant in the United States. To sleep and eat and roam and connect the dots of who you are and what your place in the world is in spaces little touched by our human foibles is the gift of a lifetime.
Thinking of those spaces being gutted for profit takes the words from my throat.
’s “America’s Last Best Thing” speaks to my heart:“I think about what it means to live in a country that no longer believes in beauty. A nation that sees its greatest inheritance—the land, the quiet, the unclaimed wild—as something to be sold for scrap. A society that does not recognize the sanctity of the rivers and mountains is a society that does not recognize the sanctity of anything. …
“It is not just the land that is being lost. It is the idea that there are things in this country that should exist beyond the reach of capital, beyond the logic of profit and ownership. That there are spaces meant for nothing but sky and silence. That there are places where no one has to buy a ticket, where no one has to be convinced of their worth. That there is land that simply is.”
—Frederick Joseph
“America’s Last Best Thing”—the title says it all—points to what this public land (left untouched as a “sliver of restraint” amid vast plundering) means, not just because of its untouched wild but moreover to the United States, this experiment of a nation that has not yet (and I say yet with great hope) ever embraced the ideal of being built for everyone:
“[B]efore America was a country, before it was a map drawn and quartered by men who named rivers after themselves, before borders and deeds and state lines, it was land. Just land. A vast, breathing thing—mountains rising like the backs of sleeping gods, rivers cutting veins into the earth, prairie grasses bending beneath the weight of wind. …
“The parks were a kind of myth, a story America told about itself that, for once, did not feel like a lie.”
—Frederick Joseph
How will I fight for the wild, for spaces where no one has to fight for their worth, for land that simply is? “America’s Last Best Thing” includes links to actions I’ll join. And I’ll keep going to wild spaces and bringing them to the page through word and photo.
3. Remember that the overwhelm and the extremity are real
Taylor’s post on the role of figurative language in a time when “it’s like we live in a children’s storybook or a parable” but without “the coherence one expects from a parable,” made me go, “Yeah” and sigh again and again:“[I]n the case of this new regime (what other word is there for it?), I find myself tired of metaphors. They are insufficient. And increasingly, it feels like what they want is for us to think in abstraction and metaphor, to immediately turn what they do into a comparison with some other thing so that we might not notice the extremity of what it is they are actually doing. …
“Maybe, to put it more simply: we are living in symbol collapse, in which everything is both literal and symbolic, in equal measure. The planes falling from the sky are symbols of a failed regime, but also…they are literal planes falling from the sky. It is endlessly recursive.”
For me, “be so serious right now homie” is a reminder that all the feelings that keep arising for me make sense. I’ll stop when I need to and let myself breathe and regroup. I’ll be tender with myself and others. I’ll counter the overwhelm by seeking what fills me up, like wild spaces and my beautiful people. And it’s a reminder that doing all that does not mean losing sight of the fact that, yes, what’s happening is extreme and requires an extreme response.
4. Embrace all the meanings of home
When
was 23, she made it her goal to publish her memoir by age 25. At 38, she hasn’t yet. But she has a new sense of timeline. She’s saying “Cheers to the Late Bloomers”:“Creativity (and the dreams it inspires in us) has no sense of time or age – it only has a sense of place. That is, I believe it wants a home just like we do. And if it arrives at your door, it stays with you. It’s loyal and patient and understanding. When you’re ready to write that book, make that film, paint that portrait, pen that song, it will be right there ready for you.”
—Adaeze Elechi
And she published a chapter from the memoir in Memoir Land that makes me certain I’ll preorder the book as soon as it finds a publishing home. In “The Rebellious Act of Stillness,” she paints the story of her immigration from Nigeria to Holland with her family and back on her own for boarding school in her youth. She reflects on a late-night encounter with her mom the night before her family left the continent of her birth:
“I still wonder if she was as excited as I was about our new chapter. Or if she knew that migration and transition are fraught with dissonance – some of it is harrowing, parts of you die or fall off like feathers, even as you watch new and beautiful things hatch into your life.”
—Adaeze Elechi
She writes about finding herself different from the people around her for the first time, and so Holland “began pecking at my soft outer shell,” and how she was a cloud watcher:
“Even before I entered the sky for the first time, I watched it from the ground, traced its many changing faces, and counted the things it brought and took away. Seasons, birds, clouds wrapped in electricity, and a dull but very present longing to grasp onto what would always be fleeting, what was never meant to stay.”
—Adaeze Elechi
The two pieces remind me that whatever I’m creating now, whatever actions I’m taking I might wish I’d done earlier, it’s not too late, that my creativity is finding its home in me. And they remind me that we are all, in our not-too-distant ancestral pasts, migratory beings who call this earth our home. Some 281 million people currently live in countries different from the country where they were born.1 And 122 million have been displaced and live without a state to call home.2 I’ll not forget this truth and let my place as citizen of the world guide my sense of home and belonging and action.
5. Create for myself and my people the world I dreamed of
In “A Trip to NY,”
writes to his son, Myles, about the trip they’ve just taken to visit old haunts and family. He says he’s happy to see how speaking only Haitian Creole at home is paying off and adds:“I also smile at a present I longed for myself but content at least I get to experience this moment through you. …
“If healing was a picture, this would be it—all of us together, with you at the center, spinning round and round as we clap and cheer you on. A love that makes you forget everything wrong with the world.”
—Marc Typo
What a beautiful reminder that what matters is what we create up close and personal. This letter reminds me how imperative it is to ask myself: How can I make my own world look like the one my child heart longed for? How can I create bounty and safety and belonging and peace for my loved ones? How can I let the people in my circles know how much they mean to me? It reminds myself I can create concentric circles of love and healing—that the micro is the macro.
I share this wish for Myles and for us all:
“I hope you find this kind of community wherever you go—the kind where you never have to ask for support; people just show up for you because of what you have created together.”
—Marc Typo
Happy Black History Month and beyond
May the powers that currently be never succeed in the attempt to strip us of the beauty and hope and truth that is our diversity, our equity, and our inclusion or of our access to unfettered land that never really was ours but belongs to itself as surely as we belong to each other. May we raise up the voices being silenced. May we embrace the people and speak out loud the words those in power are attempting to erase. May we raise up the voices giving us hope and reminding us who we are, who we belong to, and what home means.
A personal update. This past week or so has been a bit rough, a bit of a pain flare. I’m working on a piece that’s breaking my heart but paints a picture I think everyone needs to see—of what’s going on at and within the US borders as this administration recasts migration as invasion and people trying to protect or reunite with their families as aliens.
Thank you for reading, liking, and commenting. I’m endlessly grateful to each of you.
I’d love to share these beautiful posts and writers far and wide. Please restack the post (press the little recycle button) or share it with a link. And please visit these authors’ profiles and check out all they have to offer!
For the comments, what are your answers to this current moment? Who should we be reading? What post or creator or project would you love to platform? Let’s lift up each other’s voices. Please share links so we can explore! (Your own are welcome.)
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Better yet, never miss a post! Escape to gorgeous landscapes. Remember the kindness of strangers. Reflect on the overlap of our roads. Contemplate disparate connections. Get lost in lyrical prose.
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IOM UN Migration, “World Migration Report 2024,” https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/msite/wmr-2024-interactive/.
UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, “Over 122.6 million people are forcibly displaced globally,” https://www.unhcr.org/us/mid-year-trends
Good morning, Holly. I have been thinking of you. Right now we are on a journey we did not choose, you especially. This week I have definitely struggled emotionally with what's happening. Many days I can do my little piece (call or write a legislator) and then put it away and be present in my life. But last Tuesday I couldn't shake the suffering and then had a personal unpleasant reminder of what a small percentage of the people in my new area are in alignment with me. I often feel so isolated here. Of course, even here there ARE people fighting for the same things I believe in, but being the new kid plus super crunched on time lately it has been difficult to come together in community.
My daily go-to's for information and inspiration are probably known to most - Heather Cox Richardson and Rebecca Solnit. One small shift I've made is sometimes writing to my more local representatives as the State Leg is in session and deciding some very important bills. This feels like an important, but less visible act - a little less like screaming into the void at the federal level.
I'll leave with a Brene Brown quote: Strong backs, soft fronts, and wild hearts.
Beautifully expressed and written Holly, so many sentiments I hold, thank you.
Have you come across the writings of Sarah Kendzior , here on substack. I think you would like her and her books etc.