S3:E1: lost and found, part 2
Thursday, October 7, 2021
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Episode description: What have you lost in the pandemic? What have you found? In this ensemble interview episode, we asked these questions to people from New York to New Mexico. What they told us has given us a roadmap for finding our way home.
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Laura: We woke up every morning to blue skies and calm waters. We waterskiied until our hands fell off the rope. Even though we were both working during the day, we were more relaxed than we’d been in a very long time.
This was all thanks to my parents and our adopted Aunt Toni, who for the past fifteen years or so have been designating one week a summer to take the grandkids up to International Falls, a place so far north that you can see Canada across the lake. This year was the first time all three of our kids were old enough to go, and so while our kids were with my parents, we awaited their return at the northern Minnesota cabin where I learned to waterski and caught crayfish with my siblings and cousins as a kid.
For those few days of perfect summer, we weren’t troubled by the conversation that had plagued us all year, of whether or not we were returning to California after a year away to stay, or move somewhere where life was simpler, cheaper, and more sustainable. We were enjoying ourselves so much that we could almost believe that life somewhere else was not only probable but preferable.
And then halfway through the week, we woke up to a forecast of fog. As soon as I opened the door, I was hit with a smell that was both recognizable and impossible: wildfire smoke.
I staggered back inside, my eyes stinging, and shook my head, still disbelieving even as I scrolled through the news cycle on my phone. Canada was on fire. There were fires in Minnesota, too. It felt like a sick joke, a final blow after a year of steady punches.
Here we were in the land of 10,000 lakes, a place prized for its crystalline waters and pine forests, a place where thunderstorms made the summers green. Suddenly all of the doomsayers who had told us that you couldn’t escape climate change suddenly didn’t seem so off course.
In the span of a few minutes, we sunk into a gloom so deep and dark that we couldn’t even put words to it. The air quality index said that our air in Minnesota was the worst in the country, well over 300, hazardous for all groups. We duct taped a hepa filter to a box fan, a hack that we’d learned from five years of wildfire season that we never thought we’d need outside of California.
For the next week, smoke spread across the country behind us and before us, stretching all the way to the East Coast.
I need to back up here a little to explain the full weight of that moment. Season 2 of Shelter in Place follows the pandemic Odyssey that my family and I embarked on when we left California in September 2020 and drove across the country to Massachusetts, where my mother-in-law had thrown us a lifeline that was right up there with Athena’s assists to Odysseus in the Odyssey: she’d agreed to take our three kids five days a week so we could keep making these episodes and get our fledgling startup of a podcast training program off the ground. But we never would have ended up there if it hadn’t been for the California wildfires that made our already-challenging pandemic life in California feel downright impossible.
Now, almost a year later, we were headed back to California, seeing family and friends along the way. When we stopped in Minnesota, we were just a few weeks away from our return.
To help us find our way, we posed a single question to a dozen people from all across the country: when you look back at this pandemic year and a half, what have you lost and what have you found?
In today’s episode, we’re back for part two of stories from the Shelter in Place lost and found, starting with this one.
Zoe: I’ve lost faith in the sense that people really care about me, especially the people that have power.
Laura: This is Zoe. Zoe says plainly what so many of us have felt but not spoken. We’re struggling. We’re hoping that the systems that have been set up to protect us will take care of us. But all too often, they don’t.
Zoe works in an academic library in New York City. A quick note here that Zoe uses they/them pronouns, so you’ll hear me use them too.
Zoe: There was a point when like three, four people got Coronavirus in a two-week span, and the job didn't close and nothing really changed. It was just like a shock to the system, because I felt like people there really cared, and they would have done more to make me feel assured and make me feel safe.
Laura: The average American spends nearly 35 hours at work per week, which doesn’t sound like much if you like your job. But if work is a place where you feel unsafe, 35 hours is more than enough to take a toll on your mental and physical health.
Nearly 4 million Americans left their jobs in April, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to a Monster.com survey in July, 95% of Americans are thinking about quitting their jobs, with burnout as the #1 reason why. But for essential workers, dissatisfaction with work has become acute.
Zoe: Low wage workers have been working the whole time in the pandemic without any real protection, like grocery store workers or nurses. And they've just been called heroes. People thank them, but there's no real financial support, or real incentive. They have to do this in order to keep going, and they don't have a choice.
I've felt more like I've been seeing the inequalities that are always in the city. I just see that some people are safer than others, and some people are protected and others aren't.
Laura: Whether we’re talking about systemic racism or vaccines, this pandemic has been a kind of reckoning for our country and our world. Things we used to take for granted, we’re now questioning. The systems that we thought were there for us have let us down.
Zoe: I've lost a lot of faith in institutions. I think emerging from the pandemic, I will have my best interest in mind at all times and not letting people take advantage of me so much. Not in a personal way, with the people that I love and care about, but with the people that have power over me, I just will not expect them to take care of me. I am going to be more selfish.
Laura: Zoe calls it selfishness, but I think what they’re getting at is something kinder. It’s what we all want: to know that we’re safe. That people will take care of us when we can’t take care of ourselves. Zoe is trying to figure out how to exist in a system that won’t always look out for them. They’re trying to heal their disappointment at feeling undervalued by the people who should be taking care of them.
We talk a lot at Shelter in Place about how transforming communities—and systems—begins by transforming ourselves. But that personal change isn’t enough if it stops there. The ways that we keep ourselves and our families safe is only half of the story.
In our current situation, where the conversations surrounding mask-wearing and vaccines have become not about safety, but personal freedom, what would it look like to reimagine our public spaces so we can all feel safe? For us to look out for our grocery store clerks and librarians and gas station attendants the way we do our own families?
This next story comes from another essential worker who has thought a lot about that.
Yvonne: I'm Yvonne. I live in Philadelphia. I've got two kids. They're three and five. And just as the pandemic was starting, I was starting nursing school. And I was all set to start in June of 2020 at UPenn, and then the whole world shut down, and all of a sudden my kids weren't in school or daycare anymore. I was trying to finish up my final prerequisite and the prospect of starting school was all of a sudden very fraught. It was no longer a clear road forward.
Laura: In those early days of the pandemic, so much of life shut down. But for working parents with young children, work life became transposed onto home life, and suddenly there wasn’t enough time for either.
Yvonne: All of a sudden everyone was baking bread, and if I could only get my kids to take one bath a week! {laughs}
Even when you have work that you feel really passionate about, it is sometimes very difficult to feel justified in letting go of some of the other stuff one always has to let go of to do anything, because we always have 15 balls in the air. I experienced this single-mindedness about it, If I'm getting my kids to take one bath a week, but I'm doing really important work with my other time—work that will make the world a better place for them, and will model for them the kind of citizens that I hope they will grow up to be?—like, fine. They can be dirty. I mean, they’re happy being dirty. {laughs}
Laura: That single-mindedness about getting her kids to bathe once a week and giving herself permission to spend time pursuing her career gained a sense of urgency a few months into the pandemic.
Yvonne: The maternal healthcare crisis for people of color—I knew it was there. I'm a black woman. I have my own experiences with it. But it became very visceral in that time.
There was a lot of upheaval last summer around racial violence and racial justice. It really helped crystallize for me how much I care about reproductive health and believe that all people with reproductive organs often don't get the kind of care or the kind of education around their reproductive health that they deserve and should be entitled to.
The thing that I found in this time was real clarity around wanting to pursue midwifery. I felt called to this kind of work in a way that I hadn't always in my prior career.
And there's something about healthcare nursing, meeting with patients and putting your hands on people. Offering touch and comfort and humor and just time I think is so powerful, and I think that is nurturing both ways. I felt called to this work in a way that I hadn’t always in my prior career.
Laura: Yvonne had witnessed this power in her mother’s work, but she never thought it would apply to her career.
Yvonne: My mother was a midwife and she passed away. When I was growing up and she was going to midwifery school, like I didn't think I was going to take this path. And then when she passed, I still didn't think I was going to take this path. And then my first kid was born. And I still didn't think this was where I would end up. And then somehow I'm here anyway.
I feel like in an existential sense, we're occupying the same space again, and that’s very comforting. There's something really beautifully full circle about that.
Laura: The first time we spoke with Yvonne was back in May, so I called her this week to see how she’s doing.
Yvonne: Boy, the balance of family and work has shifted, I will say.
We are getting in one bath a week. That's the very low bar we set and I think we need it. {laughs}
Laura: After being at home for 18 months, her boys are back at school. The oldest is starting kindergarten and the youngest has started preschool.
Yvonne: So the shift in the routines, honestly, has been really jarring for everyone.
Laura: Yvonne has had some jarring shifts herself, too. She only has one semester left of her nursing program, but when she learned that her school was going back to in-person learning, she ultimately decided to take a leave of absence and not put her kids at risk.
It was disappointing, after all of this time and that sense of purpose she felt in coming full circle to her mother’s career. But she knows she’ll finish school, hopefully in the spring, and in the meantime she’s able to be there for her boys in their own time of transition.
Yvonne: Do I feel lost or do I feel found? I don't think that the answer is either because being found suggests that there's an end. But that's not the way life works.
There's this dichotomy between lost and found. I feel very grounded, but I certainly don't feel like I have finished any particular thing in my life. Something that I have realized as I move through adulthood is that you never really arrive anywhere. We're always finding. We’re always discovering.
Laura: For so many of us, the pandemic has been a time not just of losing, but of letting go. We’re collectively reevaluating our priorities, deciding if we want to go back to the way things were before, or do something completely different.
Di: My name is Di. I am originally from Vietnam, and I immigrated to the U.S. when I was 10 years old. I was working in the San Francisco Bay area as an architectural designer. But now I moved back to Arizona to be closer with family.
I have these two drawings of cacti. It was in charcoal and the other one's graphite and pencil. I spent hundreds of hours on these drawings. Each of them is drawn with very precise line work, and these were two assignments that got me an A in class. Grades were really important to me. But after all these years, these drawings represented so many things with me that I didn't like about myself: looking for people's approval of me and people to recognize that I'm good at something. And when I moved from the bay area, I look at these two drawings and then I just threw it away.
Laura: When I heard Di’s story the first time, I immediately felt sad to know that he’d thrown away his art. But then I thought about my own artistic journey. Sometimes you need to cast off the old work before the new work can emerge.
Di: The thing that I gained is that I grew out my hair six plus inches. This is the funny thing, because my family are hairstylists and barbers. It started out as I can't come home so my hair automatically grew out anyways. When everything opened up again, I could have gotten haircuts, but then I grew to like it. And I was like, Oh, wait, Why do I have issues with long hair? Hair is just hair. Like, it's part of your body. Like, it’s fine. I grew to like it.
Laura: Di started to dig deeper into why he liked it. Di says that as a kid growing up in Arizona, he always thought that there was something weird about guys having long hair. He started thinking about the narratives he'd heard in his family about what it means to be a man.
Di: I did some research. Vietnamese men, princes and kings and warriors grew out their hair, and it’s a sense of pride in themselves. Respecting it and taking care of what your ancestors gave you, which is your body. I found a strong sense of my Vietnamese identity.
Laura: In the past, Di had always just gotten his hair cut whenever he was home in Arizona.
Di: When I'm in the barbershop with my sister or my mom, it's an opportunity for me to sit down and have a conversation with them. Usually they're very deep conversations because I can't go anywhere.
Laura: Without those barbershop conversations, Di had to find other ways to connect with his family. He started calling them on the phone more, trying to explain why he didn’t want to cut his hair.
And then something remarkable happened. As he learned to embrace his long hair as a sign of his culture and manhood rather than a contradiction to it, his family started to see it that way too.
Di: All of us kind of grew with my hair. There's these narratives about what it is to be a man. I've never had this length of hair before. I've always had short hair and I just wanted to see what my body could do. So far I really like it. I found a lot of comfort, a sense of pride in myself, in my body, in my identity. My hair is giving me all these emotions and confidence. I really liked these things that I found with long hair.
Laura: Di realized that his decision to grow out his hair wasn’t just about hair. I mean, sure, it was just hair. But by growing it out, he was giving himself permission to be something other than what he thought others expected him to be.
He started thinking back to those drawings that he threw away, to the person he was when he made them.
Di: Being an immigrant in this country, where English was not my first language in a class full of kids who had parents who were architects, I felt like I wasn’t good enough. I had to be better than other people. I felt like I had to do more than them. Externally, I was working very hard to prove to others that I'm good, and internally it was the same. I got rid of a lot of internal things with the two drawings that I just threw away. I thought I would be kind of sad throwing them away, but It was so easy. I felt nothing. I put it in the trash and then I moved on to other things.
Laura: We reached out to Di this past week to ask him if he’d cut his hair since we spoke to him in May. He hasn’t. He said that the rituals around having long hair have taken on even more meaning for him. He’s still finding joy in the little things about his hair, like the way it feels to comb through it, or how intimate it feels to have someone else push a strand of it behind his ear. He says that those rituals have taught him to respect not just his hair, but his entire body. He says, “My hair is sacred to me with the history of my lineage. My mom, my sister, my grandma, and my great greats before me gave me this hair. It is a part of my Vietnamese identity that I am proud of.”
Di: I don't see myself cutting my hair soon, but maybe in the future I can donate that hair to someone. As of now, I'm still gonna continue growing it. But I know that it won't be a forever thing. It could be.
Elmer: Contributing uniqueness is living artistically.
Laura: This next story comes to us from another artist who has been a friend to Shelter in Place since almost the beginning.
Elmer: My name is Elmer Yazzie. That's what people call me, I live in Northwest New Mexico and I am native American. I'm Navajo. I grew up on the reservation, and was born in 1954.
Laura: I interviewed Elmer back in season 1, early in the pandemic, in an episode called “A Beautiful Place.”
Elmer: Our area got hit really, really hard. We were either one or two in the country as far as positive cases. My younger brother and my oldest brother got sick with COVID and their families got sick. They all made it through, but we have seven cousins who passed away.
Laura: When we spoke for this episode in May, it had been almost exactly a year since our first conversation.
Elmer: Last May, June, July, I was delivering food, delivering face masks to the remote areas of the reservation. That's where I first people not even aware how bad this pandemic was, and still hanging out together and still being culturally sociable. That's one of the reasons why our area got hit really, really hard. There was a lot of doubt, like, Oh, this isn't that serious, you know?
And now with all the people that have passed away and the tragedy of that physical death, you know, it's been an eye-opener. When we turned green this past spring, I went to several different homes to help out. And I saw all those families in greater spirits and communicating with each other, not doing the normal cultural greetings, but being very conscious of that space, using vocabulary that I didn't normally hear them use, vocabulary of kindness and patience, understanding . There was just this celebration, this lifting up. That's what I see happening now.
Anytime our whole framework is stretched. You're going to find yourself going through somewhat of a fluctuation, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, physically, you go through these phases.
Laura: For Elmer, that fluctuation has taken a very specific shape.
Elmer: One of my students, she lost her mother, her father, and two grandmothers. I was so moved to help support this young lady financially I put four paintings online. All four paintings sold in one day. And then one of those four people who bought a painting, they've continued to send this young lady $100 per month. Those kinds of things are happening. I started getting this extra money from people coming by saying they wanted to buy a drawing or a painting. And I was able to help a number of our families with financial support in the loss of their loved ones. Normally I wouldn't be able to give them a couple hundred dollars, but this one man and his wife in Tucson, they ordered a painting for 3,500 and it was like, I knew when the painting was being done, my goodness, God wants me to give this money away!
You get that spiritual momentum where you really know and feel in your heart the more you give, the more you receive. It's like overwhelming. It brings you to tears. You lay in bed at night thinking, Lord God, what else can we do? Those kinds of things become very, very real.
Laura: Elmer said he’s also found space in his life to start writing letters—to past students, to family and friends.
Elmer: Then I started writing relatives. Then I started writing people I knew that I wondered about. And I just would write them words of love and encouragement.
Elmer didn’t stop there. He felt moved to write to government leaders to address the systemic injustices he saw as well.
Elmer: I've found a greater courage to speak out to our community. I've found a greater courage to speak out politically in writing letters to our state reps and state congresspeople, to write the governor. That's a huge thing that I had not done in years.
Laura: At the same time Elmer was encouraging his students to find courage to speak out in their own way, through their paintings and artwork.
Elmer: When we talk about painting, I'm telling them, who's going to see this? How is it going to touch their heart, soul, and mind? What's going to happen to them when they see this painting? Some of the projects that have come out are directly connected to the tragedy of the killing of black people in our country and now more with Asian people.
I don't care about design composition. That's years ago. I don't teach that way. I go directly to the heart of what we need to do, and that's to teach expression and the freedom and the courage that comes along with that story. It’s the same way with words. Every word is important. Think about what you're saying.
When you contribute something that is unique, that always connects to the human spirit that's designed that way. I'm totally convinced of that. Contributing uniqueness is living artistically.
Laura: Talking with Elmer feels like sitting at the feet of sage, a master. He speaks with the wisdom and perspective of someone who has lived a lot of life, someone who’s learned from both the losses and the gains. His perspective as an artist has deep roots in his culture, and also in his faith.
Elmer: I've been asked if I was a medicine man. I've been asked if I was Northern Plains, Lakota or Cheyenne. I've been asked are you a Christian? My deep hope for the students is to get to know God as an artist and human beings as artists, and a step further, what it means to live artistically, to contribute uniqueness. I started seeing this whole theme of living artistically in the way Jesus Christ lived, and the response that the crowds had to Christ. And I was so full of excitement to share with my students and with others. Our main storyline is a spiritual journey. As an elder and as an artist, every mark you make has a purpose.
Laura: Elmer retired from teaching last spring, but he’s still active in his community, and still painting. He and his community have lost so much in this pandemic, but he says that there have also been some beautiful things to find. He says he’s clearer on his purpose now than ever before.
Elmer: It has become honed. The rough edges are off. All of what I am, my actions, my rising up my going about through the day, every part of it has become more valuable than what it was before the pandemic.
If I need to lay down and it's two o'clock in the afternoon, I'll go lay down because there's a purpose to that rest. And maybe somebody's coming that I need to speak with later in the day that I need to be up late with. Who knows? I don't worry about things. And I find myself not being late anymore. Even if I get there physically measurably behind that doesn't affect me as being late, because prior to that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.
Laura: 48 hours after I woke up to smoke in northern Minnesota, the blue skies were back, but only for a brief few days. The smoke followed us all the way back to California, and the discouragement we felt did, too.
But Elmer’s words remind me that there’s a journey at play that is bigger than the one we made across the country, bigger even than the challenges we face in healing our wounded planet.
I think Elmer is right. I think our main journey is a spiritual one. I think Yvonne is right too, that being lost and being found is a false dichotomy. Usually it’s a bit of both. We’re always losing and we’re always finding, sometimes at the exact same time. Sometimes it takes losing to find what we’ve been looking for all along.
We found out recently that we won an award at the International Women’s Podcast Awards. The award was for Changing the World One Moment at A Time. I hope we are doing that with these episodes. It’s been my effort to live artistically.
But the moments I’m treasuring most from this pandemic Odyssey will never win awards or get recognition: the voice message I got late one night from one of our Kasama Collective trainees, telling me how she’d just listened to the episode we did with Justin McRoberts, and what she heard made her feel seen. The phone conversation I had with my dad while I was walking on the trails near our apartment, hearing him say that he was proud of me even if I was struggling. The nights where Nate and I couldn’t sleep because we were too excited about an idea. The giant post-it notes with the beginnings of our Kasama Collective curriculum that covered every inch of our apartment living room walls. The 15-minute audio thank you that our first cohort sent us telling us what the experience had meant to them that had Nate and I weeping.
They’re moments that I never would have found if we hadn’t lost our pre-pandemic life first. Finding doesn’t make the losses any less painful. It certainly doesn’t bring back the people or things that we’ve lost. It’s not a matter of tipping the scales. It’s more like Elmer said, marks on a painting that make up the bigger picture. Each mark has its purpose.
I want to end today’s episode not with my own words, but Elmer’s.
Elmer: No matter how chaotic it can appear, things are falling into place. You find that type of thinking in the indigenous elders. They don't worry. They don't consider themselves late. They consider themselves on time. They don't think about, Oh, things are falling out of place. There's a reason why.
As an elder and as an artist, you sit back and look at what you've accomplishedEvery mark you make has a purpose . . Every stroke has been done correctly. things are falling into place.
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End Credits:
We craft each and every one of these episodes for you, our listeners, and we hope that when you hear them, they feel like the gift we intend them to be.
As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our little easter egg to thank you for sticking around.
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The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. This very special two-part episode was the combined work of graduates from our first and second cohort, and also trainees from our third cohort, which began last month. Clara Smith and Michelle O’Brien were Associate Producers for this episode and conducted our interviews. Alana Herlands was the Producer overseeing that process as one of her last projects while she was in our program.
Nikki Schaffer and Bethany Hawkins were our assistant editors for this episode, Meridian Watters and Zahra C. were our assistant producers, and Hannah Fowler and Nathan Wizard were our assistant audio editors.
Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 3 Kasama Collective trainees are Bethany Hawkins, Hannah Fowler, Meridian Watters, Nathan Wizard, Nikki Schaffer, and Zahra C.
Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.