S3:E13 Trés Corazones — an audio holiday card // 12.23.21

Episode description: If there is no one perfect partner, passion, or place to live, what should we do? As we look back on an eventful year for all of us, a three-part mindfulness practice from our second-grader gives us a way to organize our audio holiday card: creativity, community, and commitment. 

Transcript:

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Laura: This past week, Nate, the kids, and I were having the sort of idyllic family dinner that has characterized our home life this past year:

Mattéa: Thank you, Daddy, for dinner.

Nate: The kids were all there, feeling grateful for some family time. 

Gabe: Hi mommy and daddy. I just finished vacuuming. 

Grace: I set the table, and I did a load of laundry, and then I put all my clothes away. It just makes me feel happy.

Nate: As usual, my cooking was received with nothing but gratitude.

Mattéa: I appreciate how you upcycled this mac and cheese with minced rosemary and a dash of white vinegar to add acidity.

Gabe: I appreciate everything you do as parents. Can I clear your plate so I can load the dishwasher after?

Grace: What can I do to help? I think it's really fun.

{Record Scratch/glasses smashing Sound}

Laura: So obviously THAT wasn’t real. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if our lives were as perfectly staged as the typical holiday greeting card? Here’s a more honest picture of what evenings at the Davis house look like:

While I’m out in the backyard writing shed removing every extra breat and mouth clicks from that week’s episode audio, or coaching one of our Kasama Collective trainees through getting their episode script from that third to fourth draft, Nate is stress-cooking with one hand, sipping a beer with the other, and reminding himself to do some deep breathing while the girls fight over the markers and Gabe protests that his sisters did not wash their hands for the requisite 30 seconds after using the bathroom. 

Nate roots through the non-perishables from the cupboard—which, yes, do often include that upcycled mac and cheese with rosemary and a dash of white wine that fantasy Mattéa so appreciated—and Grace complains that despite being around her friends at school all day and in the constant presence of her siblings, she’s so lonely and really wants to play with someone. 

Gabe retreats to his room with a copy of Hombre Perro and pretends not to hear when Nate asks him to do his homework. Meanwhile, the water is boiling on the stovetop and Mattéa eagerly places the stool in front of the stove so she can help Nate “cook” while dispensing four-year-old wisdom.

Mattéa: Do you know trees are made from salad? Do you know stars are made out of light sabers? Do you know Mommy drives faster than Daddy?

Laura: Busted. By the time dinner is actually served, Mattéa has located the kid scissors and in a matter of seconds covered the dining room table—and floor—with tiny scraps of paper that are just small enough to make picking them up by hand difficult, but just big enough to clog up the vacuum.

Nate: Too fried to walk the twenty feet to the shed, I text Laura a single food emoji to notify her that dinner is ready, and serve my not-so-easy mac, which is met with complaints and picking out whatever herbs, sautéed onions, or whatever I put in to jazz it up.

Mattéa: How can this be? Why do I have the littlest cup in the world? Ugh! Where are my clapping shoes? I can’t take this anymore! Ugh!

Laura: that “I can’t take this any more!” feeling, and the feeling of surprising insights like what trees are really made of, are something all five of us have shared this year. So for this audio holiday card, you’ll hear from each of us: things we loved, things we wished were different, and what we hope for in the coming year. And since we couldn’t help scripting this like an episode, we’ll also share reflections on our three big themes for 20212: creativity, community, and commitment. 

We’ll start with Mattéa, our youngest, whose world can be summed up in one word: creativity. 

In the midst of dealing with the frustrations of misplacing her clapping shoes and tolerating the horrible inconveniences of drinking out of the littlest cup in the world, Mattéa has learned a lot this past year. 

She’s a beginner at everything, and she’s still young enough to understand that being a beginner can actually be really fun. She’s too young to care if she’s good at the things she tries. Even when it doesn’t work out, there’s always the chance to try again.

Mattéa: I love cutting things with paper, unicorns, cutting my hair . . .  

Laura: Did you cut your hair?

Mattéa: Yes.

Laura: Did you have permission to cut your hair?

Mattéa: No.

Laura: Is it very short now?

Mattéa: Yes.

Laura: Did you also cut Greta’s hair?

Mattéa: Yes.

Laura: Was she happy about that?

Mattéa: No.

Laura: Did she also cut your hair?

Mattéa: Yes

Laura: Life, like creativity, is messy. Often we have to try a lot of things that don’t work before we land on the one that finally does. 

Mattéa is almost five. She has no memory of life before COVID. Her world is very small, just her two siblings and Nate and me, and since August, a handful of classmates at her Spanish-speaking preschool. That friend Greta, lives three blocks away and has been in her life since infancy. At this point they’re more like siblings than friends, which means that sometimes there are unauthorized haircuts. Sometimes they hurt each other, or make mistakes. Sometimes there are creative messes to clean up. 

Mattéa: Sometimes my friend Greta, I ask her that I would give her her doll back, but she still didn’t want her doll back because I wrote my name on the doll.

Greta, if you’re listening, I’m so sorry. I love you, Greta.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 –
Gabe: Hello, Mr. Mickey, the mic. I'm Gabriel and I'm almost 10 years old. 

Laura: Gabe has probably been the person in our family who has changed the most since this pandemic began.

Gabe: I don't really remember how life was before the pandemic.  It's been so long ago.

Laura: Those of you who have been listening know that we spent the better part of last year in Massachusetts to get support from our extended family on the east coast in what we called our Pandemic Odyssey. We’d reached a breaking point as a family, and as a kid who was struggling in school even before it went online, Gabe was feeling the brunt of that breakdown. That story is the backdrop of season 2, and one of the best parts of that year was getting to see Gabe revive and embrace life in a way we’d never seen before. I asked Gabe what the past year was like for him.

Gabe: ​​Sometimes really annoying. Sometimes really fun. I know there was a lot of time being on the road, that's for sure . . . being in the car, maybe a bit of watching TV, being a bit bored, a bit cramped. Just looking out the window. 

We got to see some of our aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents even. 

Laura: For Gabe, the most important part of this past year can be summed up in one word: community. 

Gabe: We didn't really have many friends in Massachusetts.

Laura: But Gabe says this was okay, because he had his sisters. I asked him if he felt like he and the girls had become friends during this time when friends were hard to come by. 

Gabe: We were always friends. 

Laura: This was a good reminder to me, that the kids still see each other as friends even though it feels like they’ve spent a lot of the past year together squabbling and getting on each other’s nerves. But that’s real friendship; sometimes you annoy each other and life together feels a bit cramped. But you work through those things and hopefully come out on the other side closer. Gabe says he does miss certain things about our life in Massachusetts, but he’s also glad to be back home.

Gabriel: I miss being with my grandparents  and I miss shoveling snow. 

For now, home for me is Oakland, California. I’m glad to be back in Oakland because I get to see my friends more often, and also my new teachers and neighbors and house and a good community. I don't know. It's home to me.  

I hope you all have a good Christmas or whatever you celebrate on the other hand. I hope you have a fun time! 

—--

Grace: Hi, this is Grace. I’m seven years old. I really like writing letters and making cards because it's fun, and I like to draw and I like to write a lot. And it just makes me feel happy when other people know that someone's there . . . that someone loves them. 

Laura: Of all our kids, Grace missed home the most while we were away. I asked her how she felt about our year away, and if she’s glad to be back.

I’m really glad because I really missed my home but also I'm a little sad because I liked the winter and I liked snow and making my grandparents and my uncle. And what makes it home is that I have a family and I have a house and I have lots of friends that I know, and I know Oakland a lot. 

Laura: She’s also the kid who has taken the most ownership of our work with Shelter in Place. Sometimes Grace and I joke that she’s training for a future in podcasting. You may have heard Grace in our outtakes, our little easter egg for anyone who listens beyond the end credits. 

Grace: I think it's really fun. One of the most things I like about it is the outtakes, because I like hearing myself  talking.

Funny little things that make people laugh at the very end. So you have to listen to the whole thing and then you get to listen to the outtake.

Laura: Grace is often the person in our family who reminds me how important it is to slow down long enough to give each other hugs, or tell each other what we appreciate, or just sit still long enough to breathe. 

She’s seven, so she fights with her siblings and has whiney days and feels grumpy about life just like the rest of us. But a few weeks ago we were out on a family hike in the Oakland hills when I found myself learning from her in a new way. She told me about something called Tres Corazones, a mindfulness exercise she learned from her 2nd grade teacher, that she does sometimes when she’s feeling angry or sad or bored.

Grace: Why it's called trés corazones is because if you do this, you get a heart and an also the first step to do it is you put your hands together. Kind of like when you're praying, right in the middle of your, chest.

And then you go up slowly Above your head and reach as tall as you can go, and then you go back down over, and then you kind of come up and do it again and you do it three times. So that's why it's the best and then go down. So miss, cause if you do it, you get so, it's basically like a heart except a line in the middle. And you do it and also it's called the risk as soon as is because the shape, your a brief thing., it's like a heart and there's a line in the middle. And then the second step is you close your eyes for a little bit, for like a minute.

So, and then when you're ready, you can slowly. And this usually helps a lot when you're like angry at someone and my family, our tradition, is to try to do every time we get in the car,  a lot of the times Matea gets angry because she lost something or Gabe somewhere near her and then she gets angry and then mommy's like, oh, why didn't we do that today?

SCOTUS and this, and I always get to leave it. I really like leading that.  Because I learned from my teacher  she was the one who taught me how to do that. And then I decided to tell it to my female.

Laura: In our family, we’ve started thinking about the past year in terms of 3 key words, or—to use Grace’s words—tres corazones: creativity, community, and commitment.

Whether it’s through unauthorized haircuts or podcast episodes, creativity has gotten all of us through some hard moments. 

Our community—which has ranged from grandparents on the east coast to neighbors to our Kasama Collective trainees to listeners of this show—has kept us together when we’re feeling discouraged and alone. But that last word—commitment—may be the most important one of all. 

Shelter in Place began on March 17, 2020 as a Covid time capsule to get me through what I thought would be a couple of hard weeks with the kids at home. I’ve said often that if I’d had any idea what I was getting myself into, I never would have had the courage to do it—but I don’t regret it. 

It’s the hardest, most rewarding work I’ve ever done, and it’s pushed Nate and me to reevaluate just about everything: was where our life was going before really where we wanted to go?

I’d been writing for more than twenty years when I started this work, but I didn’t really know what I was doing when I began Shelter in Place. If you listen to those early episodes, you can hear me get better. You can hear my voice become more confident. You can tell when I started to learn how to edit my own audio, and how to mix in music and sound effects. You can hear me get more comfortable as a host and as an interviewer. You can hear me learn to trust myself. 

You can hear the evolution of our family, too, how Nate started doing this work with me, how even our kids occasionally got in on things and embraced the podcast as a key part of our life together. 

You can hear us evolve as we launched the Kasama Collective, our audio storytelling  training and mentorship program, where we’ve brought 17 women and non-binary creators into the creative process and coached them through episodes so they can emerge with their own knolwedge and production credits. 

We’re halfway through our third season and in the top 1% of all podcasts globally.

We just opened registration for our Kasama Labs, a self-paced, independent study version of our Kasama Collective audio storytelling intensive. This fall we won the Changing the World One Moment at a Time award at the International Women’s Podcast Awards, and just this week we received an honorable mention at the Golden Crane Awards. 

We’ve supported this work out of our own pockets and freelance work from the beginning, and thanks to a handful of you who have generously donated as Patrons of this work, we’ve been able to keep the lights on. The good news about all of those accolades is that it’s opened the door for conversations with advertisers and sponsors, people who can actually help us get paid. In the podcasting world, downloads are everything, so to all of you who have listened and subscribed to the show and then shared it with friends, thank you. It’s free to do all of those things, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that you are putting bread on our table by taking just a few minutes to spread the word.

But we are still here doing this first and foremost for the joy of it, and because it has given us a way to see others and feel seen during a time when real connection is hard to come by. 

Before I started Shelter in Place, I spent a lot of time feeling bad about the fact that I’m very sensitive, and I have big emotions, and sometimes I can be really intense and really vulnerable. But guess what? All of those things about me are what makes Shelter in Place what it is. I finally stopped apologizing for myself and realized that the things I thought were weaknesses could actually be my superpowers. They could be my gift to my listeners, and to the folks that I’m training and coaching. Listen to Shelter in Place, and you will actually know me pretty well. Not the curated Instagram-feed, Christmas card version of life, but the person I try—and often fail—to be every day.

First, creativity. Creating weekly episodes of Shelter in Place has been a common thread throughout 2021, but outside of the core activities of writing, interviewing, and sitting stock-still under my blanket fort to record, almost everything else has changed since a year ago. A year ago, we were living in our temporary apartment at the seminary, beige and affordable. We’d just gotten our first two trainees — one through an intern screening service, one a referral from a former grad school classmate — but we had little idea what we were going to do with them. (Our first projects with them were the 12 Days of Delight, funny videos and quirky slideshows, little things that amused us (and we hoped would amuse listeners), but that had almost nothing to do with podcasting. 

Tentative as a toddler taking first steps, we were stumbling our way forward to creating an all-remote team, with our first Voxer audio messages, first group Zoom meetings, first Shelter in Place email accounts. None of us felt much pressure, because none of us knew exactly what to expect, or what was at stake. 

Flash forward to today, and we’ve taken three cohorts of audio storytellers through our semester-long Kasama Collective intensive training program, with the grand mission for that program being to close the gender and equity gap in podcasting (thank you to our friend Sarah Valor for articulating that mission for us in a way that was both succinct and true).

We’ve learned so much teaching those intensive programs, that we’re now getting ready to launch a self-paced online version of the training, called Kasama Labs, so we can extend those lessons to a wider group of aspiring podcasters, audio storytellers, and creative people. 

Those of you who have been on this journey with us have listened to the bottom drop out on the Davis family one episode at a time, and then slowly find a foundation that is flexible and fluid enough to move with us. But you can also hear me change. You can hear my voice get more confident as time goes by. You can tell I’m learning how to edit my own audio, how to bring a lifetime of being a storyteller into everything from script writing to sound design. 

And yet there is nothing like the crucible of creativity to promote deeper understanding and self-awareness. And just as important, sharing that creation with others! We often include an invitation in our episodes, so for this section of our audio Christmas card, here is the invitation: write about something! Then share it with someone important to you, someone you trust. Have a conversation about it! Your understanding, and your relationship with that person, will be deeper. Speaking of deep conversations, that’s a nice segue to talking about our new sponsor!

Better Help Ad:
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By being online, BetterHelp removes some of the traditional barriers that go with in-person therapy. Instead of having to rehash my past repeatedly, on BetterHelp’s website you just click through an intake questionnaire. It only took about eight minutes — and you can filter counselors for gender, age, religion, and more. 

I got matched with a therapist within 24 hours, and the rate was way more affordable. My first appointment is next week, and I'll let you know how it goes. Join me — and a million other people who have taken charge of their mental health — in doing some pre-emptive holiday counseling, and as a listener, you’ll get 10% off your first month with the link BetterHelp dot com slash listener. Again, that’s BetterHelp (h – e – l – p) dot com slash listener.

Nate: “If there’s one thing I took away from our 12,000 miles of driving across the country and back, it’s that there are plenty of good places to make a life — but no one perfect place.” 

Eighteen years into marriage, we’ve seen all of each other’s scars — and given each other some as well. We vowed to stay together for better and for worse, and there has been plenty of both. This far in to marriage, there is no one else on Earth who has hurt each of us as much as the other has. 

These three areas — our marriage, our city, and our church — are some of the most important things we’ve built our life around. They each have some wonderful strengths, but they aren’t perfect — and we now know enough to know they never will be.

We’ll never get our 20-something bodies and innocence back. Oakland will never be affordable. Our church will never be the same as it was a few years ago. And yet we choose them, and in that choice is a measure of rest and peace.

One of the hardest aspects of this past year was living under the looming shadow of this great question, from Massachusetts to Minnesota, Madison to Montana: “Is this where we should really be living?” In all those places (and the others we visited), beloved friends and family were making good lives for themselves — with more space, less stress, and lower cost of living. Yet living with everything up in the air makes it impossible to be grounded.

After our pandemic Odyssey, it caught my attention that even our kids have internalized some of life’s uncertainty: when we asked Gabe and Grace where home was, they both included the phrase “For now. . . .” With wildfires, they know that Oakland may not be forever. Like us trying to make a profitable business from a podcast that people get for free, there’s a degree of contradiction in calling a place home that may become uninhabitable within their lifetimes. Yet we could also say that this past Covid year has simply highlighted what has always been true: we never really have control over our lives. We need to have, as my pop said in his interview, “epistemic humility” — knowing that we can’t know everything. 

The ground beneath our 914-square-foot home in Oakland is mostly clay, so the drainage is terrible, and the French drain installed long ago is clogged with our neighbor’s tree roots. So between the clay and the slope, heavy rains always mean a lake in our backyard patio, and flooding in our unfinished basement. Every hour one day last week, as we were pulling an all-nighter to finish “Dancing saved my life” and write a manifesto for our Webby awards entry, I was alternating working on the computer, with walking through the downpour, across the gangplank I’d put to span the backyard pond, to rotate the balky sump pumps in the basement.

And yet we choose this ground, as we choose this marriage, this city, this church — and this work. We’re in Wisconsin now with Laura’s family for the holidays, but seeing almost a week straight of rain forecast for Oakland while we were gone, I was thinking thoughts of quiet desperation. So I texted my neighbor Scott, to ask if he could stop by to check on the basement. Now the funny thing is, Scott doesn’t even fit in the basement: the ceiling is about five eight, and Scott is six five. But he stooped in, ran the pumps, and Facetimed me with the report. He also volunteered to set up an extra webcam so we could monitor the situation from afar. His rain-jacketed face was a picture of our life — creativity, community, and choice. Thank you, Scott, for being a true neighbor.

Laura: As we bring our audio Christmas card to a close, we wanted to end with a song from our friend and music pastor Eric Gilbert. He recorded it in his house with his daughter Audrey (who, like many high school graduates that year, postponed going to college.) When he first shared it a year ago — via Zoom church, of course — we cried because it distilled all of our longing and calls for help into a few minutes of transporting beauty. 

It’s called “An advent prayer,” because for Christians, advent is a season of waiting. In December 2020, a lot of us hoped that we’d be “done” with Covid by now, but a year after we first heard this song, we’re still waiting. This song is coming from a faith perspective, but it’s bigger than that. We trust it will speak to you as well.

Grace: Happy new year. And I hope you guys have fun Christmas and that you guys make other people feel loved and other people make you feel that.