Beloved friends,
Last year we had a neighborhood fire safety meeting. Afterward I walked up to two women who were chatting and said, "Hi! We moved here a year and a half ago, I don't drive yet, and I need friends. Can I join you?" They welcomed me kindly. As we were describing where we lived, I realized that one person's property contained a tree that I love, a gigantic moss-covered bigleaf maple with numerous trunks. I said, "Oh! You have the magic tree! Would it be okay if I walked over to introduce myself to it?" She said yes, and the other person said, "Oh, you should come over to meet my magic tree!" I took her up on it, and while we were walking through her forest to meet her tree she waved at a quarter-acre patch of thistles, saying she really needed to dig that up sometime. I said I had just the spade for the job and offered to help. She took me up on that! By the time we finished digging a quarter acre of hip-to-chest-tall thistles, Susea Albee and I were friends.
Susea joined the yoga class I'd recently begun teaching at my home and invited a friend. Emma had an interesting snag at first – her palms were blistered because she'd just finished rowing a 70 mile race – and before the blisters healed, was already planning to do it again the next year! James immediately said we should offer to help. That, my friends, is how I came to leave the house at 6:30 in the morning last Saturday to support team Grit & Giggles in the Seventy48 race. Thanks to Grit & Giggles, aka Emeline MacLaughlin and Meredith Milholland, for their permission to share about this.
The Seventy48 is one of a set of endurance races organized by the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend. Participants in the Seventy48 get into their boats on Friday night in Tacoma and try to get to Port Townsend entirely under human power. Lots of folks do this rowing kayaks and shells; some do it with pedal kayaks or custom pedal boats; a few wild souls do it on freaking stand-up paddleboards. I say wild because the Seventy48: is a SEVENTY MILE race, and you have 48 hours to complete it.
On the left is the race tracker (those are names of boats along the track; we go hard for whimsy up here!) showing the water route. On the right is Google Maps so you can get a sense of how darn far this is. The big blue dot is my house, which is on the eastern side of the Quimper Peninsula, about 20 minutes from Port Townsend, and it's there because I simply didn't know how to get Google Maps not to do that.
Meredith and Emma began to row in Tacoma on Friday night at 7pm and finished in Port Townsend at around 4:30 the next afternoon. In between they rowed. And rowed. And rowed.
James and I planned to accompany Susea and another friend, Holly Rasmussen, to offer love to Grit & Giggles at a particular beach where our racers hoped to lug their boat up the rocks to rest and wait for a tide change. Emma's mom, who did the race with her last year, and stepdad were there, too, bearing Gatorade. A cool thing about this event is that racers aren't allowed to have dedicated support. Any support which is offered to any racer must be offered to all racers. So we offered Gatorade to anyone else we saw, carried away their trash as we'd done for our friends, and Holly, who has done the race several times and has a genius about the movement of water, strictly adhered to the rules by offering her sage thoughts about route planning to anyone and everyone. Our racers were exhausted after rowing all night, land sick (when your body still feels the bobbing of the sea after on land), and experiencing all kinds of cramps and blisters and weird body issues from, you know, rowing for 12 hours straight instead of sleeping. They were also giddy with joy about a close encounter with an Orca on the water, and determined to carry on.
After they got back on the water, Grit & Giggles got caught in a riptide. Apparently that happens a lot in these waters. They'd been through it before and brought all their wisdom to bear, but this was the worst riptide they'd ever seen. It held them for a solid hour in which they rowed very hard just to hold their position. When our dears finally got out of the riptide they came to shore to rest and regroup. The beach they pulled up on was private land, so we drove up and down the street between us and the beach, hunting. One house had a Vacasa sign. Bingo! No cars in the driveway. James did a little reconnaissance and saw no one about, so we parked nearby, found the house's rickety stairs down to shore, and hiked up the beach to our friends.
Those brave women were TOAST. One was just lying sprawled face down on the rocky beach. I thought she was napping; later she said she'd been sobbing – a good sob, apparently, the sort that clears you out so you can carry on. Because holy stars, after some time to recover, counsel from Holly, and a donut from Susea, Emma and Meredith got right back on the water. It was heroic!
Emma's mom brought supplies for a bubble serenade as the boats came through a narrow channel. Look at them out there, so tiny, with those giant mountains, container ships, and that wild landscape!
We spent the rest of the day hopping along the coast, following Susea and Holly to little beaches James and I had never seen. Each beach had some people there to cheer on the racers. It was incredible to feel how quickly the sense of community built: each racer who we filled a water bottle for, gave some advice to, took some trash for, or fed a donut became someone we knew, cared about, and rooted for. Folks onshore shared information and sightings; one woman had missed a planned meetup with her husband and we were able to tell her that we'd talked to him and his spirits were great. Racers don't know how they are doing unless someone on shore tells them, and after offering donuts to one pair of rowers and asking if they wanted to know their standing, I got to watch them light up as I told them tell them that they were in the lead among the kayaks.
The finish line is the boat ramp at the Maritime Center in town. Folks row or peddle up, met with screams, cheers, race officials, loved ones, and kind volunteers who lug their boats out of the water as they try to remember how to walk. It was powerful to watch folks we'd met along the course made landfall. There were the two guys who had re-rigged a boat so that they could sit back to back with one sculling (rowing with two fixed oars) and the other paddling (rowing with one handheld oar). There were the two guys who hadn't registered for the race; they just tossed a boat in the water, taped sticks at either end, and tied some glowsticks to the string for safety lights. "HOOLIGANS!" a race staffer shouted with delighted horror upon learning they weren't registered. There was Emma, who I've been adoring sharing yoga with for the past year, and our new friend Meredith, who allowed us the honor of bearing intimate witness to her doing this incredible hard thing. She's a midwife, so doing long hard physical things is her jam, but... still, WOW. And then there was the woman who did the freaking thing solo IN HER 80s. Utterly inspiring.
I loved watching Holly, who is an osteopath and an avid water athlete, giving advice about how to use the currents, how to choose your timing with the tides, how to handle the weird stuff your body does when you demand so much of it. She explained to us that the whole time, your body tells you that it is breaking down, that it can't do this, that you have to stop. This is why we spent the day driving from beach to beach to offer cheer and encouragement, and our friends said that it was a helpful, orienting tether to have us there.
I was so lit up by this event! By the determination of the people I bore witness to, suffering through deep discomfort to accomplish their goals. By the wonder and glory of human interaction with wild nature, people navigating these small boats long distances overnight, some of them over TWO nights. And, with wider resonance: by the way we form community so rapidly in service of one another.
All of this entwines in my mind with what I did this weekend, which I imagine many of you did, too: attended my local No Kings protest. There were an estimated 2,000 people there. There are 10,000 people in town! Everyone was grinning, saying how inspiring it was to be there, how good it was to see other people caring, how good it felt to do something.
Me and James, a call for revolution, a sign hand-painted on a pizza box stuck through a stick, a veteran, and a woman dressed as the weeping statue of liberty chained to a man dressed as ICE.
This is how we do hard things, like enduring the challenges of this moment in our shared life as a people: we lean on each other when we need support. We step up and offer support to those who need it. Sharing challenging experiences can strengthen bonds and build community. Together we endure, singing and blowing bubbles and falling down and sob face down on the rocks – and carrying on. Together, together, together.
Resources
Summer Workshop for Loving with Dahlia
This past Saturday was the Preview/Review session for Energetic Integrity 2, my summer workshop, which will begin this weekend. You can check out the Workshop here or view the session here.
We Are Not Alone
"More evidence that trees display group cognition and communication has arrived from the Dolomites where a multidisciplinary team monitored a forest during a solar eclipse. Their research witnessed two things, that the trees of the forest synchronized bioelectrical activity during the eclipse, and that the process of synchronization was started and directed by the eldest trees—a full 14 hours before the eclipse even started." Press coverage and the actual study. Thanks to Kirsten N.
Zooming Out: Galactic rotation
Our sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy in an orbit that takes 225-250 million years to complete. This animation of the solar system orbiting the sun while it hurtles through space at 514,000mph is astonishing and very soothing. We are so small.
Being Alive
Lovely little piece from the Washington Post on the use of breath for easing stress. If you've practiced with me, you know this! But reminders are useful and mainstream sources can be a sweet access point to share with loved ones.
Resistance: Because it isn't true that there is nothing you can do, darling!
Resistbot App
This is some low-hanging fruit: you can choose pre-written messages to email your elected representatives every day for free by text. No cost, no need for conversation, no need for composition. Fast, free, easy. You can also for a small fee send these messages by fax or postal mail. Jess Craven is a well-known activist who uses Resistbot, and you can follow her to get a text message when she makes a new campaign available.
5Calls App or Website
Calling your representatives matters. Hearing what constituents value matters. Seeing that the volume of calls is high matters. If you have social anxiety about phone calls, just call after business hours and leave voicemail. 5Calls.org or their app can provide scripts and phone numbers of your reps to make it easy.
Vote Forward
These folks organize strategic get out the vote letter-writing campaigns. You commit to groups of 5 or 20 voters, print letters, and add a couple of sentences of your own. You only have to draft the sentences once and then write them as many times as you commit to. There is currently a campaign around a Pennsylvania Supreme Court election this fall. You can start writing letters now and mail them later. You could write A LOT of letters between now and fall!
Get Organized or Volunteer
Indivisible, Working Families Party, SURJ, 50501 are some of the biggest groups organizing. Or you can go local; my options include friends of the local parks, a state trail support organization, a local climate action group, land trusts, folks who work to support the salmon or specific bodies of water. You could get active with your county Democratic party. Your local schools, food banks, and all sorts of organizations that work with children, elderly people, and people without housing are certainly looking for volunteers to step up to protect beloved and vulnerable folks.
Giving
I continue to tithe 5% of my gross income quarterly. My-and-therefore-our-if-you-have-paid-me donation for the turning of spring to summer went to CHIRLA, the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights, a longstanding immigrant rights support group in Los Angeles.