Rest, radical dreaming, and community in the midst of so much

We've been vacationing and working remotely in Door County, WI for a few weeks. My family has visited Door County, usually every year, for several generations. I was baptized here, have made memories here in every season, and now love sharing experiences here with my partner and our pets.

Our family jokes about "the Door County effect" — how we arrive and are promptly lulled into deep naps and slower living. It feels like an enormous gift to be in a place that helps my body surrender to rest, buoyed even more by inspiration and grounding from nature, writers, and artists that are central to the Door County community.

Rest and radical dreaming are so important right now... Widespread suffering, polycrises, and cruelty are overwhelming and relentless. Widespread denial and disconnect are, too. The "answer," the balm, that I always come back to is deep connection and community.

For most of my adult life, I've felt like I've needed to "re-learn" community... In white culture, we're commonly socialized to see the world through an individualistic lens, to try to address needs and to solve problems on our own. We learn to isolate in conflict and crisis rather than to connect. All of this reinforces the distance between each other and the world.

It is radical ("grasping at the root" radical) to choose other ways of being that form ecosystems of mutual care, support, and action. As Kalpana Krishnamurthy writes, "One of the most radical things we can do right now is to build community and look after each other."

I'm deeply grateful for the many spaces that help me "re-learn" community — Black-led community organizing, Indigenous storytelling, mutual aid networks, and Buddhist and Christian philosophy being among them.

I'm deeply grateful for my friend and accountability pod member Beth Godbee and her gift as a weaver — bringing people together to support one another in our social justice and healing-centered work.

I'm deeply grateful for our neighbors who have modeled kindness and generous "we've got your back" practices since the moment we moved in.

I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity to gather in living rooms with community members who are justly outraged, aggrieved, and striving to make a difference, together.

As we prepare to head home, I'm thinking about what it looks like to sustain rest and radical dreaming in the midst of so much. I know part of this will be continuing to seek connections and community to grapple with and show up in this moment... I hope you'll reach out if you're searching, too!