'How big the net'
My word of the year for 2024 was the Tower card I pulled on the morning I left Oregon
Welcome to Wandering Grace. I share essays exploring the themes of displace(ment) and un(be)longing 1-2 times a month that follow the stops of my 2023 Migration Tour, and sometimes bonus snapshots from the road. Read more about the project here. See an archived list of essays in-order here.
I’ve previously written about the ways revisiting the same locations across different times can create echoes in our bodies and reflections in our minds. Anyone who has a death anniversary of note in their life understands the curious power that traveling the same gregorian calendar time loop around the sun has on our bodies and emotions.
Trauma is sometimes described as something from the past getting stuck in the body — and (re)surfacing in ways that prevent us from full presence in the present moment, so that we may keep moving into the future…unencumbered? lighter? free to be with the chaos and uncertainty that also contains possibility.
It is December 2024, but I have been flitting in and out of memories of a year ago, marveling at this wild ride of a year.1
Yesterday I was talking to a friend Qing on the phone who mentioned they were going to do the “Unravel Your Year” workbook as part of her holiday and new year’s reflections. Having partaken in this same ritual in years past, I asked what her ‘word of year’ for 2024 had been. They said it was: Love. When she asked about mine, I laughed because I remembered where I was in December 2023 and no way did I sit down with a cozy drink and meaningful reflection time.
“I didn’t have a word for 2024. Just the tower card that I pulled on the morning I left Oregon.”
A year ago in 2023, I pack up all of my stuff, store three-quarters of it in the basement at my co-op house, and tetris the rest into my brand new used Prius with a trunk that doesn’t reliably open. I drive away from the Common Canary in Albany, Oregon on the last day in November with what I would need to stand me up for a two-month sublet in Long Beach — enough time to find myself a place of my own in Los Angeles.
It is a grey winter’s day. I’ve told everyone I’ve talked to in the days leading up to my departure to pray for rain for me — because that would be less scary to navigate than below-freezing ice or snow, especially in the pass. It turns out to be a wet drive.
I white-knuckle my way through the heavier rain, but am grateful enough for it all. At some point, I scream to myself in the car — a release of freedom and lightness — because I’m actually doing it. I’m actually moving!2
When I pull into Shasta to spend the night, there is snow covering the lawns, and blanketing the mountains, but nothing sticking on the roads, so that is a relief. I try to leave the next day before it starts snowing more heavily as forecast.
In the morning, I get some worrisome booklength texts from Ania, who I am subletting from in Long Beach; she’s being pulled into emergency surgery and we might have to push back the move-in date. I have one fleeting moment where I wonder if I should turn around and drive back to Oregon today…but I already have plans to table at East Bay Alternative Book & Zine Fest tomorrow. Plus, the snow in the pass means I might get snowed in for the winter. I keep on driving south, like a migrating bird.
By that evening, camped out on Qing’s couch in Albany, California, searching Craiglist for alternatives, comparing street view addresses that don’t match, Ania gone silent in our text thread, I figure out that the sublet in Long Beach was a ruse and is 98% chance a Craigslist scam. I’ve long lost my deposit, and I no longer have a landing spot in LA.
My stomach curdles. The floor drops out from under me.3
All I can do is laugh incredulously, with an unfocused stare into the distance. I watch The Great British Bake-Off with Qing who’s hosting me and who has generously offered to drive with me the rest of way from SF to LA, who has graciously offered to help me get settled in Long Beach. We reorient to the fact that we are staying put next week instead. I text my long-distance SoCal crush to cancel our plans for meeting up next weekend near Rancho Palos Verde; I had been hoping to revisit that spot by the Friendship Bell with them. The next day, I autopilot through tabling at East Bay Zine Fest and am vague with friends about ‘how I am doing.’
In and out of shock, I end up couchsurfing and cobbling together housing for the rest of December. My well-laid moving plans upended, I then proceed to move 4 or 5 more times in 2024, depending on how you count things.
I had spent time in 2023 in all three places of my own accord for my Migration Tour and Healing Pilgrimage along the Pacific Flyway migratory route: Oregon and the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Unbeknownst to me, I will end up living in all three places again in 2024: San Fran and Corvallis and LA — not by elegant design but because I find myself stumbling about in the dark attempting to find ground again and again.
A year ago in November 2023, my Migration Tour had ended and I was ready to move from Oregon back to California. A year ago in November 2023, I moved states with my compass set on Southern California and Tongva Land, but I won’t step foot in Los Angeles again until late June of 2023.
Yes, I do eventually make it. But it’s a meandering path, a wandering river, a tower moment of uprootedness, of housing insecurity of ghosts-past and forward-looking determination that lasts 6+ months.
It’s December of 2024. I live in LA now. Some days I find myself so so tired and unable to move and I wonder why…and then I remember my year with a mixture of pride, alarm, and awe.
Hand on heart, hand on belly: I want to offer myself two winter memories from this time last year.
((one))
On my drive between Mt Shasta and the Bay Area, I stop at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge for a break and a walk.
It’s migration season.
The ponds are noisy with a cacophony of honk and quacks blanketing the distance. The flocking murmurrations are a spectacle that I watch rising low on the horizon and then falling again onto the surface of the ponds.
In-between homes, but at home with each other, these beings stick together by gabbing and by calling to each other.
Wild Geese4
by Mary OliverYou do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
((two))
It’s January 10th, 2024. I serendipitously find myself in the Bay Area at the same time as a contingent of my spiritual community who have gathered for a conference. I meet up with them for dinner at a brewery in Burlingame before spending a night at the Mercy Center just like good ol’ times. It’s our friend’s birthday. As he reflects on his past year, people share their ‘word of the year’ for the new year.
I don’t know that I have one as I haven’t had much time for chill reflection amongst all the craigslist scams and scam-adjacent breakups and moving and whatnot, but I chuckle when a beer can across the table catches my eye. With an eyeroll to spirit and a smile on my lips, I point and say, “I guess that’s my word for the year.”
Safety Net5
by Rosemerry Wahtola TrommerThis morning I woke
thinking of all the people I love
and all the people they love
and how big the net
of lovers. It felt so clear,
all those invisible ties
interwoven like silken threads
strong enough to make a mesh
that for thousands of years
has been woven and rewoven
to catch us all.
Sometimes we go on
as if we forget
about it. Believing only
in the fall. But the net
is just as real. Every day,
with every small kindness,
with every generous act,
we strengthen it. Notice,
even now, how
as the whole world
seems to be falling, it
is there for us as we
walk the day’s tightrope,
how every tie matters.
I know I am not the only one who has had a personally tumultuous year. And that isn’t even taking into account what’s happening on the national and international stage.
Queers in Palestine remind us…
One year later, we continue to call for the world to:
Be radical, feminist, queer, intersectional, decolonial, and abolitionist in our resistances: fuelled by rage, love and longing for justice, transformation and collective liberation.
Escalate all forms of disruption of the colonial and capitalist systems enabling this violence. Rage and strike against the use of your labor and tax money to fund, support, and endorse settler colonialism and genocide.
Radically imagine a different world and put this imagination into practice by organizing to fight current systems and build the future from the present.
I can’t be completely sure it was this drive during this month. But I will take my creative liberties because the feeling was there. During one of the drives during one of these months, I know for sure that I laugh out loud and bang on the steering wheel in awe when I turned the bend onto the 101 and see the ocean.
Often in his guided meditations, Lama Rod Owens will encourage us to feel the support from the seat and earth beneath us rising up to meet us — to let ourselves sink into and receive a bit more of that support than we normally do. I can see myself sitting cross-legged on that couch, I can feel the support of those cushions and that land underneath me from that moment.
With appreciation to Kendra for bringing this poem back to my attention during our practice space this December.
With gratitude to Janice Fialka who printed out copies of this poem for all of us during our community retreat in Waawiyatanong colloquially known as Detroit .