Soft animal bodies
We're affected by weather, we're affected by fear
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.
We ended last year with reflections on my word of the year for 2024. To continue the series following my stops along my 2023 Migration Tour, I have been slowly working on drafts of essays about my time in Los Angeles back in 2023, including one on spiritual lineages and Taoist temples.
But from the vantage point of 2025 Los Angeles — sitting some short miles south of the Eaton Canyon Fire which has burned 14,000+ acres and is 55% contained as of Jan 16 — I found myself writing (as an act of archive and re-regulation) about fear. This is the essay I want to share with you today, in advance of the U.S. presidential inauguration, as a way to sit with our soft animal bodies and as a way to honor their fears.
You 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.
the first half of “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
***
Wind whips through my heating vents and rattles the windows outside. A steady stream of sirens wail in the background, and will continue throughout the night. After my shower, I doublecheck I haven’t left the burners on because the smell of smoke has permeated my apartment despite all the windows being closed, and my monkey brain shrieks “FIRE.”
“Are you ok?? Do you have power? We lost ours,” a friend texts. “Charge all your devices!!”
“My daughter is crying because the wind blew down a tree in the front yard, and she’s scared,” a different friend texts.
“I feel a bit like a dog on the 4th of July.”
“Eaton Canyon is on fire,” sadface emojis. “I’m guessing that’s what we’re smelling.”
I fill up my water bottles, loop a headlamp around my neck for the rest of the night. I flash-pack a haphazard go bag, stuffing some clothes into a hiking backpack that was acting as storage for some of my camping gear anyway, and put it by the door…just in case.
“Okay, next time it’s this windy I need a cuddle buddy for my anxiety.”
That’s actually not a bad item to add to my disaster preparedness lists.
GO BAG1
Suggested items: First aid kit. Important docs. Non-perishable food. A change of clothes.
Comfort items: Eye mask and ear plugs and stim toys.
To purchase over time: Solar-powered battery pack.
Medicine for the soul: Hugs to calm the nervous system. A ride-or-die ready to drive.
***
I remember back in 2020 having panic attacks2 two days in a row during intense facilitated full-day work retreat Zoom calls, where we were tackling conflict and organizational power dynamics within a group of predominately white colleagues.
Partway through day one, I reach a breaking point and end up curled in a crying fetal position on the floor of my office, sound muted and camera off.
I catch my partner before they have to leave for work and ask for a hug.3 Their hand rubbing my back in circles calms me enough, so I can rejoin the call after our scheduled lunch break.
The next day, the same thing happens again — me in a puddle on the floor, emotions a storm of anger and frustration and grief. But on this day, I am alone in the house.
It takes much longer for me to be able to get ahold of myself, for my breathing to return to normal. I haven’t rejoined the meeting after break, so one of the facilitators calls to check in on me. I am sat slumped against the wall, knees pressed to my chest, talking to her on speaker phone, and I can’t stop crying, even though on some level I know I’m fine.
***
This last year, I have moved out my coop house of 8 people in Oregon (and a sublet at a coop house of 14 adults and 4 kids in SF) to live on my own in LA.
In talking to my current colleagues who are partnered, I’m realizing how much extra time I use on our work calls to emotionally process and re-regulate myself through common community-related stressors. I’m realizing just how much resource romantic partnership contributes to helping individuals survive and thrive in our current (ever) changing world. I’m realizing how much extra energy it takes for people living solo or who are single (whether by choice or circumstance, et al4) need to expend on and for themselves to regain baseline safety in their own bodies.
It’s a single’s tax I hadn’t accounted for before.
Because our soft animal bodies were not built to do any of this alone.
Which is all to say: On this Santa Ana windy night of Jan 7th 2025, as I try to come down, as I try to calm my nervous system after it has been on high alert for multiple hours through the threats of possible evacuation and jumping at loud noises and cowering at unnaturally howling winds, as I try and fail to fall asleep because my bodybrain is wired and scared…I forgive myself everything I’ve ever done to try and help my soft animal body feel less alone in this world.
I am safe. My brain knows that. I can try to tell that to my body without gaslighting the parts that jump at loud noises because fear is natural, and fear is protective. But/and it’ll take my body a lot of extra time to remember and to believe she’s safe without the physical presence of other bodies next to hers in the room experiencing this same reality: the eye contact of whoa did you hear that, the hand squeeze of we’re in this together, the physical hug a promise of you’re not alone in this.
In a chaotic phone tree that night, while everyone is checking in on everyone else in LA, an unorganized exchange of information flows from text thread to text thread. These points of connection provide a kind of comfort and gesture to the weave of a web of a safety net that you are grateful for…but it’s not the same as a hug.
I have a physical craving to lay hands on my loved ones the next day just to ascertain their safety.
***
This past December, I’ve been sharing this comic slideshow by Sophie Lucido Johnson with a lot of people.
It’s a reminder that whenever your winter is (whether now in the Northern hemisphere, or half a year from now in the Southern hemisphere), that the amount of darkness during a day and the colder temperatures affect us because we are human animals, though we try and pretend that we aren’t — with our central air and our pocket computers and our on-demand services, which we make-believe are about technology when in reality most of them are humans laboring as commoditized components of elaborate Rube Goldberg machines serving us in ‘touchfree’ ways that ultimately leave us starving…for touch.
We are soft animal bodies affected by extreme weather. Affected by fear.
I accept the fact that my monkey brain does all sorts of things to try and take care of her bodily fears:
she tries to fix
she tries to hide out in her analysis
she tries to avoid and run away and escape into books
she tries to deny by gaslighting herself that it’s not so bad
she tries to blame and shame and get angry to try and transmute the fear into
anything else that feels more powerful and less vulnerable than admitting that:
I am a small soft animal who has limits and risks and vulnerabilities.
The most tender thing is to be with those fears inside our animal selves and to know that we need each other in those moments.
The next most tender thing is to radically accept5 that some days those other bodies are not here, and we are alone in this room.
So that, once the winds die down, we might find the courage to move towards each other in the family of things.
***
The second half of “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver:
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.
The end! I will share a bonus post soon that has a list of links that have been helping me to orient to the changing times, and to the election, and to our fear. <3
Related Wandering Grace essays:
BONUS: Fire photos from Bellweather
Welcome to Wandering Grace. I will be sharing essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing every other Thursday, and bonus snapshots from the road on alternating Sundays. Read more about the project here. See an archived list of essays in-order here.
[6] Baggage around baggage
![[6] Baggage around baggage](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wzj3!,w_1300,h_650,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc5cf14c0-91d8-4ac6-90d9-e22c2226466f_2048x1536.jpeg)
You have one grey suitcase and one small duffle bag full of clothes, one backpack that includes a laptop and notebooks and art supplies and toiletries, one Moth-podcast-branded tote bag purse stuffed with odds and ends, a smaller tote bag containing snacks and leftovers in tupperware, and a winter coat that has pockets full of winter accessory necessities.
Packing for fire evacuations leads to an extra layer of impossible choices around your valuables and ‘most precious’ items. I wasn’t in an evacuation warning zone and luckily didn’t have to go through that particular turmoil this past week, but it’s been on my mind. And was on my mind again recently as I watched scenes From Ground Zero in current-day refugee camps, from filmmakers in Gaza. Years ago, I wrote this comic about what refugees pack.
In hindsight, I can now categorize these as autistic meltdowns, exacerbated by trying to navigate racialized dynamics in a predominately-white instituion over the indignities of Zoom.
In hindsight, I can now label this as co-re-regulation.
I should just speak for myself as a catless, childless, partner-free person living alone and working remotely in a large urban area where I don’t know nearly any of my neighbors. (Though I do have some friends in the neighborhood.)
If you know me, you know my anger goes more toward the systemic, the arrangements, and the patterns of our culture and built infrastructure that punish us in these ways — that withholds touch, community, care, and co-regulation from those who would live otherwise — that locks these essential types of connection up in traditional, heteronormative nuclear families. If you want something different, it requires of you extra labor, one way or another.
Let’s bookclub Dean Spade’s Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together.
There is a dharma talk and guided meditation by Kaira Jewel Lingo on Doug McGill’s Monday Friends from Dec 9, 2024 that I’ve been thinking about a lot. She talks about the powerful combo of equanimity (radical acceptance of what is) and compassion (to be able to act towards what we want).