"Why does everything have to be expanded?"

On reading Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Lynch, and more.

Well, I made the most of my vacation last week—which for me means that I ate, drank, and read abundantly. I tend to read nonfiction the most, and that didn’t change while on vacation, though I steered clear of some of the more pessimistic prose that can dominate my reading list.

I selected books that would provide some inspiration:

• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer;

• Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch;

• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown

• re-reading portions of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine by Sophie Strand;

• And I dabbled in and out of Maria Ressa’s How to Stand Up to a Dictator, Francis Spufford’s speculative fiction Cahokia Jazz, and some others.

Prior to my vacation, I was in a pretty discouraged place. (There’s ample reasons to be discouraged.) But in order to maintain any semblance of resiliency in this climate, you have to find ways to feed your soul, too.

I spent time with my family, and found solace in authors who dared to dream of better futures. And for that I was replenished.

Of all the things I read, this passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer stuck with me:

“The question that’s often asked is how do we take gift economies from individual relationships and scale them up? I have to say that I’m not sure that’s the right question. Why does everything have to be expanded? It’s the small scale and context that make the flow of gifts meaningful. But if gift economies are to have impact, I’m willing to think about what that might look like on a community scale.” [emphasis mine]

Given the way we are all so interconnected now, I often have a hard time knowing how to delineate between what is appropriate at an individual level versus a more systemic level.

This is complicated further given the speed at which Musk, Trump, and the GOP seem to be dismantling systems that were built up over decades and which millions of Americans depend upon (as well as millions of others abroad who received aid via PEPFAR or USAID or similar programs).

Complicating things further still, I also think that since our primary interaction to the broader world is through our phones—and the fact that our society was so rapidly and thoroughly changed by the smartphone and social media—I think a lot of/most of us assume that all substantive change has to come all-at-once or not-at-all.

While on vacation, three different ideas started to dance around each other:

• The first was “why does everything have to be expanded?” From the Robin Wall Kimmerer quotation above.

• The second was an insight shared at the 2024 Election Postmortem organized by

  Kristin Du Mez
  . At that event, Elizabeth Neumann (who has worked for DHS and is National Security Advisor for ABC News) said “you can mass radicalize, but you cannot mass de-radicalize.”

• The third was a quote from

  lenny duncan
  that I cannot directly cite (despite searching through my copy of Dear Revolutionaries to find), but I hope they will forgive me for loosely paraphrasing: ‘you will have the most meaningful impact on the 300 mile radius area you live in.’

And it’s in those thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of individual local efforts that I think we will find our paths forward.

Paths plural.

Because it will take more than one path. And those paths won’t be provided by online platforms. Mutual flourishing and liberation won’t be found with a free Facebook account.

While I’m largely certain that tools like social media will play some sort of role in building awareness—as it has in so many ways, through things like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo and #ChurchToo and #exvangelical and on and on—we cannot look to these platforms for much else. Their proprietors have decided they prefer the taste of boots. Even if they seek to downrank content they don’t like and spend millions on trying to buy elections, we’re (re-)learning, slowly and surely, what it takes to secure the present and the future we deserve.

We may see lots of big, immediate changes happening in front of us each day. When we see injustices, we have to stand against them to the best of our ability. Yet some big changes take time, and take place much closer to home.

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