rewilding

When you're out running the same trails through seasons, shifting weather, and varying times of day, you start to notice the small things. The branch bent by howling winds. The way the sun breaks down the cool forest fog. The reaching growth of a sapling. The flush of mushrooms after the rain.

As I watched the wild of the Monterey forest change, the wild within reclaimed a little space. I watched that, too: the rewilding of myself. With care, I protected that nascent inner wild so that it grew resilient enough to be a place from which to live rather than visit. The world feels different from this rewilded place. More expansive. Shorn of the limiting stories that restrict who we are and who we can be, there's an abundance of freedom. You quickly realize that the map is not the territory.

I've let limiting stories define me in the past. Many years ago, I quit a 50 mile ultramarathon halfway through. Though I was undertrained going in, I let that truth narrow what was possible. After picking up running again, I went back to the same race determined to finish the challenging route through the Marin Headlands. Race officials pulled us off the course at the last aid station with just a few miles left because a runner had an incident with a coyote. They dropped us off at the start and I ran laps around the parking lot until I covered the remaining miles. The wild in me demanded redemption. I've heard someone say that ultras can be an opportunity to spend time with a version of yourself that you don't always get to see. Jasmin Paris, the first woman to finish the infamous Barkley Marathons, reflects that "modern society is built on this idea that safety is civilization and what we've built up around ourselves to separate ourselves from the wilderness. . . . where I feel safe is actually those wild places." On those rolling coastal trails, I felt safe where the wild things are, with a wild version of myself.

Adventures like these can strip away what doesn't serve you and leave you in a raw afterglow. Still in that liminal place a week later, my brother shared a social media post with me:

"Transformation work is a practice. In systems designed to stop us from imagining alternatives, the only way we cultivate other realities is through practice. Rehearsing freedoms. Which is to say we're going to get things wrong and need safe space to do so."

I felt this in my body. Transformation work happens everywhere. Freedom is a practice. Living from the wild place lets us imagine alternatives.

Over the years, I've quieted or ignored without a thought an inner voice begging me to show some curiosity towards myself. The strength and clarity of those calls varied. For the longest time, I had no idea that those thoughts might have anything to do with gender identity. Though the map is not the territory, I didn't even have the map. In the wild state I was in during the weeks that followed the race, I was finally ready to listen.

I had to allow myself the possibility that I could be wrong about my gender identity before I could begin to question it. I needed the safety of the wild. And once I allowed for that, once I let my roots dig into this wild space, curiosity took over and guided the way. In the time since that initial impulse to explore, I've rehearsed my own freedom enough to know that the little box given to me marked "cisgender man" is inadequate. The most authentic version of me contains multitudes. Different words point to parts of my rewilding growth (queer, trans, nonbinary, genderfluid), but they will never capture it all. Language cannot cage a wild thing.

There is something wild in all of us. Give it your care and it may surprise you.

sempervirens

Art by Asha (@asharoset)

For a couple of years in Monterey, we lived by a forest. As I learned to walk away from Omelas, I felt a great urge to move my body, so I started to run the trails. With an exploring spirit, Kaya (our dog) and I mapped the trail network patiently. If we wondered where a trail would take us, we would find out. I found the closest redwood tree about two miles from our house. I gardened my soul there, in that forest, with that dog. I saw the forest breathe and bloom, break and repair. Me, too. For many miles and minutes we flew over those waves of earth. Always growing.

Something in me shifted. Rewilded. As we packed up our things and moved up the Monterey coastline, north, to San Francisco and our new home, tears welled with gratitude for a place that cared for us during the strange years of the pandemic. I left a parent. Queer. Radical. Rooted. Stories of becoming for another time.

A couple of centuries ago, redwoods ruled the California coast. What conversation was the forest having? What did the trees know? I call to mind my late grandmother reading the prologue of The Overstory in a redwood grove for our wedding. "A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning."

Here's what I know. I will grow where I am. I will reach for the sun. I will lock my roots with others, deep underground. I will share what I have. I will receive help. I will be in community. I will be here.

If I only had one word to sum up my philosophy of life, it would be the coastal redwood's species name: sempervirens. Evergreen; always flourishing.

new year

"On your toes; chest forward; knees high; arms locked," I think, racing my dog, Kaya, down a quiet forest path in Monterey. The never-ending shades of green and brown blur around us and nothing but the thrill of movement crosses our minds. Kaya throws her whole body into the hurdle forward as I do my best to keep pace. Like magic, we lose contact with the earth: four paws and two feet in the air. We are floating. Carried by the ferocity of our speed, we are weightless and for a moment, the masters of the universe.

The new year knocks and wonders about our intentions for it. I've always had an holier-than-thou response to new year's resolutions: don't wait for the turn of the calendar to make a change, just do it now. That's true as far as it goes, but I should probably just shut up and let people imagine what can be different. With these inspired plans, failure is an option, even likely, and that's okay. Let's be happy with growth, however uneven.

Maybe I have a standoffish approach to resolutions because I haven't figured out the right container for them. Sometimes it seems like I'm waiting around for the right metaphor. It's a lifelong habit, I suppose, even an obsession. For example, the idea of marriage didn't make a lot of sense to me until I thought about trees for a long time, now it's so firmly rooted in me that I don't know another way of being. Maybe to craft resolutions I just need the right vessel for them, some metaphor to build the year around.

In that earnest spirit, out of the dark yesteryear, I hope to be running fast enough to be weightless, lost in the bliss of movement. Now my feet won't touch the ground.

did it change you?

The tide comes in and I can almost taste it — the promise of the vaccine. In our minds, hope is infinite. Everything we lost will be packed into a collective memory of a dark year. Things will be good again, or, at the very least, a version of what was.

That's all fine. We all deserve to gather, to see a smile, to enjoy good health — these are the small comforts of life. I hope, however, that when we do the sorting of what we lost, when normal rears its comforting head, we spit in its face. Normal isn't good enough, not by a long shot.

Did this pandemic change you? For me, it revealed plain as day the cracks in our thinking about health care, work, and community. If we return to normal in the new year, we've failed each other. I understand the temptation. It's been a hard time and any respite will be welcomed with open arms. But once we take that first deep breath, we have to push past the relief and activate our most courageous moral imagination. Dream big, then walk.

Many will conspire to deny us this dreamwalking. The fruits of our imagination will cost them power, control, and money. We must not let them dampen our demands for better with the comfort of normal. This year changed me forever and I will not forget the metamorphosis.

move the trenches

I once heard a law school classmate describe the role lawyers as "defending the trenches." They weren't talking about the mundane practice of law, where attorneys facilitate civil society with work like structuring business transactions, interacting with the government, or appearing in court for routine matters. Rather, they were describing the function of lawyers in movements. The idea brings to mind a battlefield with two sides locked in conflict over territory. The trenches on the backlines represent the space that one side has a hold over. When a movement advances, so does its trenches.

Lawyers, then, defend these trenches -- the rights a movement has "won". For example, we might think about the long civil rights movement culminating in the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and the crucial role of lawyers in following through on the promise of those statutes in courts across the country. Or sometimes, lawyers will fight tooth and nail to prevent the dismantling of a movement's gains. Without this trench defense, a movement can backslide and lose the fruits of its labor.

I'll note that I do think that lawyers can play a more holistic role in movements than simply defending its trenches. As a profession, lawyers have working knowledge about what works and what doesn't inside the systems that affect our lives and movements can use these insights for both leveraging powerful critiques of the status quo as well as offering up visions of the future. However, the integration of lawyers with movements presents its problems and like most professions, lawyers have taken on an increasingly narrow view of their expertise and contribution.

I can't shake this feeling that there is an urgent need to move the trenches up. I know that things have changed in my lifetime. Same-sex marriage comes to mind: the larger cultural movement and its corresponding legal battle was no small win. But in a larger sense, I can't help but feel like that the trenches have sat, unmoving, for far too long. We need a collective movement that will advance deeper into the battlefield. We need lawyers to defend the promises of new trenches that reflect the needs of today.

broken things

I am here for the broken things.

The daily struggle to just make ends meet. The harsh unfairness of dumb chance. Cracked dreams. Unbearable cruelty.

I am here for the broken things because in them I see the hope of a world repaired.

An unshakable foundation of well-being for all. Triumph over the privilege of circumstance. The unimaginable fruits of dreamwalking. The joy of a true neighborhood.

Things are broken. That hurts. It should. But even brokenness can, in a way, break.

the current

Derek Sivers wrote a great little blog post called "Relax for the same result" about riding his bike. He compares the time to complete a fifteen-mile loop while hustling ("full-on, 100 percent, head-down, red-faced sprinting") and relaxed ("[t]ake it easy, nice and slow"). The difference? Two minutes. He notices:

And what a difference in experience! To go the same distance, in about the same time, but one way leaves me exhausted, and the other way, rejuvenated.

I've seen something similar with my bike commute. The difference between pushing it through the four mile ride and just drifting through the journey can be about five minutes.

It's nice to move in a way that I arrive rejuvenated. Sometimes I'm so in tune with the current that my ride feels like an expression of the Taoist concept of wu wei, a kind of effortless flow. I think to myself, "Yes, this is what it feels like to be alive."

But I think there's value to remembering what it feels like to ride the edge, to see what's on the other side of that five minute difference. I don't mean a frustrated effort, but rather slipping into the current intentionally. Summiting a hill with vigor, expertly leaning into a turn, or racing through a straight stretch leaves me pulsing with energy. Here, too, I think to myself, "Yes, this is what it feels like to be alive."

Ebb and energy: two sides of the same coin; two journeys on the same river.

forest for the trees

I've been sitting underneath the idea of trees for quite some time.

It started nearly two years ago. On a trail run with my mom, we reached the top of a particularly steep hill. I looked over the Californian headlands and told her, "I don't know if I'm ready to get married, but I know where I want to propose." Hiking with Asha some months later, we set off onto separate trails as I wanted to get a short run in. Racing through a shaded trail, surrounded by trees, I knew. I met Asha back at the car and I breathlessly uttered "I think we should get married." Months later, I proposed under two redwoods in Muir Woods. This July, we're getting married in a redwood grove. The thread of trees runs through this major development in my life.

I've read The Hidden Life of Trees, a delightful exploration of the depth of story in the forest among the trees. With careful observation, the book reveals drama, community, strength, love, and friendship.

I've remembered how trees are embedded in our great stories. The Bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. The tree of knowledge of good and evil. The pervasive expression of the world tree.

I've dwelled on the ubiquity of trees in our idioms. One in particular stands out: you can't see the forest for the trees. This idiom -- that you can be so overwhelmed by individual details that you miss out on the bigger picture -- is particularly rich having read The Hidden Life of Trees. The book is the positive version of the idiom's common negative expression. What that book does is open your mind to the forest through the trees.

It's important work to make story through connecting the details. At the end of day, that's what I hope my writing does: help you see the forest for the trees. Good writing can shine a light on the unknown stories. Alone, no one can expect to illuminate more than a fraction of the forest. Even together, our collective directed curiosity can only serve as an incomplete sketch of the forest we live in. That's because the forest keeps changing and us with it, but that just means that we are never done making the story. We are never done seeing the forest for the trees.

fin

When I first started this experiment, I said that I would post every day, but give myself three points along the way to quit. One month in, I'm at the second point, and I've decided I'm done.

It's not that I haven't enjoyed the daily writing. Taking something from thought to post is an incredibly satisfying experience. Some of the posts in the last month were churned out in a short morning session; others went through many drafts as I tried to find my way to something worth posting.

Nor is it that I couldn't really keep up with the commitment. I missed one day (it was intentional). I found it relatively easy to keep to the schedule of regular posting once I became less afraid of posting something.

I'm stopping daily posting because I think I've earned the title again. That was the goal of the experiment in the first place: flex my writing muscles and remember what it feels like to make something. It wasn't about getting readers or getting traffic, although the last month was good on those ends. So, I'm not so much as quitting as declaring a successful experiment. The archive proves it.

I will still write and post, though the site will be quiet for at least a few months. I have a lot of writing and important projects on the docket at work, and I want to channel my energy there. Once I get some space, though, I want to dive back into writing here. I may even repeat another cycle of daily posting at some point.

I'll conclude this experiment with gratitude: thanks to those who read along and shared in the past month. Your support and comments meant a great deal and kept me coming back to the blank page. You helped me fill them.

the second arrow

In her book True Refuge, Tara Brach relays this timeless parable of the second arrow:

The Buddha once asked a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful?” The student replied , “It is.” The Buddha then asked, “If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student replied again, “It is.” The Buddha then explained, “In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. And with this second arrow comes the possibility of choice.”

I often return to this teaching. For myself, when I can pause and see the second arrow coming, I can prevent a lot of pain. In others, when I see them getting hit by the second arrow (and the third, and the fourth, and so on), I see an opportunity for them to escape suffering.

When mulling over this concept of the second arrow, my recent kick on the idea of the attention war also made me connect this Buddhist parable to the OODA loop (a decision cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act developed by the military strategist John Boyd). When someone dodges the second arrow, we might say that they go through the OODA loop for their emotions. The OODA loop dovetails with another Buddhist teaching, the RAIN technique, that I've found helpful in difficult times.

The parable of the second arrow, the OODA loop, and the RAIN technique all point to the same fundamental truth: we gain incredible insight and power in the pause. There are different ways of getting to this space. I just know that it is important.