It takes a village // 3.17.22

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Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about reimagining life through creativity and community. Coming to you from Oakland California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

This month, we’re celebrating our 2-year anniversary as a show—and also taking a moment to celebrate the journey we’ve been on for nearly 200 episodes that has brought us deep into the lives of our more than 100 guests, and also into your lives as you’ve been listening.

We also know that while some of you have been with us from the very beginning, a lot of you are new. We are so thrilled that you’re here, and we hope you feel in each and every one of these episodes all of the love and care we’ve poured into making them for you. 

You’re always welcome to jump in anywhere, and to help you know where to begin, you’ll find our episode starter pack on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.org at the top of our episodes page. Think of it as a mix tape of our favorites that will help you get to know us.

You’ll hear a common thread through all of our episodes that we’re asking the question of how we can live well in a world that is broken. Our answer to that question is to reimagine life through creativity and community, one episode at a time. 

Last week we celebrated our anniversary by doing a season 1 retrospective, a look back at where we started. Today, we’re looking back once again, this time to the episode we released on our 1-year anniversary, when we were seven months into the Pandemic Odyssey that took us from California to Massachusetts, and back again, in the span of a single year. That story is the narrative arc of our second season, and we’ve provided in the show notes for today a list of our favorite episodes from that season.

A lot has happened since we released this episode exactly one year ago. We came back to California, and much to our surprise, felt a sense of home that we thought we’d lost in our time away. We’ve had some wonderful things to celebrate in that time, including winning the “Changing the World One Moment at a Time” award at the International Women’s Podcast Awards for our season 2 episode “An Affront to Zeus,” featuring Sarai Waters and her story of being homeless for six months. We received honorable mention at the Golden Crane Awards for the episode “Hyphenated Identity,” where Melissa Lent reconnected to her Chinese identity in the wake of Asian hate crimes. Our Kasama Collective training intensive, the non-profit arm of our work with this podcast, became a finalist for the Social Impact awards, which is holding its ceremony next month. And much to my utter dismay, Podcast Magazine included me in their list of Top 22 Podcast Influencers for 2022.

If you heard my conversation with the Pulitzer-prize winning author Anthony Doerr, then you’ve already heard me talk about how I’ve learned to take these successes very lightly. We never know what life will throw at us, and while I’m of course grateful for the wins, I also know that rarely do they change anything in my daily life. I’m proud of the work we’ve done here and it’s wonderful to see that others are appreciating it too—but the things I’m most proud of in these last two years have nothing to do with success, and everything to do with learning how to live better.

Today’s episode is a great example of this. I’ve learned so much in this work about how to not take myself so seriously, and how to approach life with a sense of playfulness and adventure. Some of the best teachers of those lessons have been my own kids, who are all still in the single digits—at least for a few more days until my son Gabriel turns 10. We did a very playful episode devoted to him earlier this month called “Fixing the World in 10 Easy Steps.” If you need a pick-me-up after you’re done listening to this one, I think you’ll enjoy it.

I want to be quick to say that while I’ve learned a lot in this work about becoming more playful and finding joy, finding those things hasn’t been the result of an easy, comfortable life. If anything, it’s been the moments of darkest despair or overwork that have pushed me to understand that I desperately need joy and rest if I’m going to live well even when life gets hard. And let’s be real—isn’t it always? Even if our own lives are going great, all we have to do is open our eyes to the world around us—whether that be in the daily news or on our own street—to see the pain and suffering that is everywhere around us. From the beginning, this show has been about living in that tension between the pain and the joy, embracing the paradox that is life. And that is what today’s episode is all about. 

So without further ado, I want to invite you to join me today in “Peaceful Village.”

The pandemic began with a canceled party on St. Patrick’s Day, the day my son Gabe turned eight. California was one of the first places to shut down, and our county announced Shelter in Place orders a few days before the state did. At that point we couldn’t imagine that the rest of the world would quickly follow suit. We thought the lockdown would be temporary, that we’d look back on those couple of weeks as that weird time when life stopped for a little while. Gabe was a good sport about the whole thing, especially since he didn’t have to go to school. We painted four-leafed clovers on our windows and made a green cake. We promised a substitute party as soon as things went back to normal. 

This week, Gabe turned nine. All across the globe, this week marks a different kind of birthday--the pandemic’s birthday. It’s a party no one wants to come to. Instead of cake and streamers, we got shuttered businesses and canceled vacations. Instead of celebrating life, we grieved sickness and death. Instead of hugging friends, we covered our faces. Instead of lining up to wack a piñata, we lined up for COVID tests. 

We’ve lived through a terrible, defining moment in history. My grandparents survived the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and World War II. My parents lived to see the Vietnam War and the assisination of JFK. My generation will never forget 9/11. And now, all of us who are left have endured COVID-19.

I’ve always liked birthdays because they’re an excuse for reflection, not just for what’s past but what could be ahead. But this one feels different. For twelve long months I’ve been reminded again and again--both personally and globally--that the future is uncertain, that even the things I thought I could count on turned out to be as flimsy as those green paper streamers. Never before has living in the present felt both so painful and so necessary.

When the pandemic began, we were a seemingly happy family of five with a home in the San Francisco Bay Area and a decent income that allowed us to survive--if not exactly thrive. Today, we’re across the country in Massachusetts patching together freelance work and spending most of our waking hours doing work that doesn’t yet cover our bills. Our pandemic year has been an epic adventure we didn’t go looking for, but one we’ve tried to embrace. We’ve referred to it often as our Pandemic Odyssey, because when we left Oakland, like Odysseus, we had no idea how long we’d be gone, or how alone we would sometimes feel. We’ve been drifting along in this sea of uncertainty so long that we’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to be home. 

Our daughter Grace is a new reader, and lately she’s taken to appropriating stories she’s read and passing them off as her own. Given that I just referred to my own life as a pandemic Odyssey, I guess I can’t really fault her for co-opting a good story.

Her favorite is one she calls “Peaceful Village,” and in Grace’s telling of the story there are two sisters, Aira and Eartha, who are 9 months and 12 month old, but apparently advanced for their age since they can do all of the things that big kids can. Aira and Eartha’s lives bear a strong resemblance to our own; the parents work from home and always seem tired, and aside from a neighbor’s house burning down--which is mentioned not as a key event, but a side note--not much happens in this “peaceful” village. Like the Odyssey, Peaceful Village is an epic tale, which is to say that there are a lot of words. Unlike the Odyssey, not much happens. In the literary community, we would not call Peaceful Village a plot-driven story. Or a character-driven one for that matter. We might call it instead a narrator-driven story, one that is propelled mostly by Grace’s desire to hear herself talk. I guess I can’t really fault her for that one either given my line of work these days. But there’s a deeper point to be found here because stories are the way we humans make sense of our existence. Most of the Odyssey is presented to us through Odysseus’s retelling. Grace’s endless recounting of Peaceful Village has been her way of finding solace in a year of uncertainty. Telling the tale of my own pandemic Odyssey has helped me chart my course one episode at a time.

There is one moment in Peaceful Village where things get interesting. Eartha and her mom are in the woods strolling--literally. Eartha is in a stroller. Remember, she’s only one. She spots something glittering on the forest floor and climbs out of her stroller to get a closer look.

Remember that famous scene in the movie Pulp Fiction, when John Travolta opens the suitcase filled with light? That’s a lot like what happens here. Grace is only six, so it’ll be a while before she sees that movie herself, but the scene in Peaceful Village bears a striking resemblance to the one in Pulp Fiction. We don’t know what Eartha finds on the forest floor, but we do know that it’s treasure. It’s the moment when you think, “hey, something is finally going to happen!” Except . . . it doesn’t. 

“So what does Eartha do with the treasure?” I asked Grace.

“She tells Aira about it.” 

“She just leaves it there in the forest?”

“Of course,” Grace said. “So other people can find it, too.”

I confess that I expected this story to end with the treasure fixing at least some of Aira and Eartha’s problems, but that’s not what happens. The magical infants don’t get rich. We don’t even get to find out what happened to those poor neighbors who lost their house--only that they’re now living in a hotel.

Like the narrative in Peaceful Village, our life in this pandemic year has sometimes felt . . . a little slow. When Grace told me this story the first time, I identified most with the poor neighbors who’d lost their home. While we did not lose our physical house to an actual fire, most of our pre-pandemic life has gone up in flames. Our stint in Massachusetts has been a bit like staying in a hotel; though our needs are being taken care of, we’re not sure when we’ll return or what we’ll find when we do. I’m no infant, but I have often found myself facing challenges that are beyond my experience. 

Podcasts have grown like weeds during the pandemic, especially in those early days when all of us go-getter types believed we were going to increase productivity with all of that “extra time.” On March 17, 2020, I started my podcast Shelter in Place as a creative lifeline to keep me tethered while my kids were home from school. I imagined that someday they would listen to those episodes and get a glimpse of what we experienced when for a little while the world shut down. 

It only took me a few days to realize just how overambitious my daily episodes were, and a few weeks to understand that life would not be going back to normal anytime soon. But by then my family and I were already feeling a bit shipwrecked--and not just once. First there was having our 8, 6, and 3-year-old children suddenly home from school. Then my husband’s hours got cut to 20%. Then he got laid off completely. Then the one trip we’d planned--a reunion with my family in Tennessee for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary--happened without us. Then the borders closed and our ten-year-in-the-making plan to move to Mexico for a sabbatical year disintegrated. If our overly scheduled pre-pandemic life with three kids had felt challenging before, now it was just chaos.

But in the midst of all of that, my daily episodes of Shelter in Place became a tangible way to rewrite a life that--if I was honest--hadn’t been working all that well even before the pandemic. There had been too much chasing after success or money, too much yelling, too much stressing and striving and scurrying. Too little rest, too little conversation, too little investment in the relationships that we said mattered most. We knew we were doing too much, but didn’t know how to stop. 

The podcast became a way to reclaim that phrase: Shelter in Place. It became a metaphorical shelter as I tried to find my existential place in a world where everything from income to our children’s education to our future in California suddenly felt uncertain. In other words, I’d stumbled upon treasure. 

One of those first episodes took inspiration from a story in Politico where a bunch of experts made pandemic predictions. Even though it was published on March 19, 2020, it’s still a worthy read--but it’s also a little painful to see how things have turned out. Political science professor Mark Lawrence Schrad hoped for a new kind of patriotism, one that would unite red and blue with the virus as a common enemy . . . but our short flirtation with that idea only lasted a few weeks, when we made even mask-wearing political. U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols and YIMBY Law president Sonja Trauss both thought we’d return to faith in public health and science, but over 2.5 million global COVID deaths later, misinformation is so rampant that cases are climbing again in Europe, where vaccine hesitancy is widespread. Even in the US more than a quarter of our population is undecided about getting the vaccine.

Of course some of those expert predictions from that Politico story did come to pass. Work-from-home is now an acceptable way to do business in almost every industry. Some families have been surprised to discover that they prefer homeschooling to sending their kids off for the day. Telehealth has become the default setting for preventative care. Productivity porn has at least partially receded into the background and given way to more helpful practices like meditation and gratitude. It’s been a breath of fresh air for our climate, too, with global carbon emissions down 7% in 2020 versus 2019.  In some cities traffic jams are a thing of the past (at least for now). Families and roommates have learned how to spend quality time together. Even in the midst of stark polarization and a whole lot of fear, over 100 million people worldwide have been vaccinated. We’re finally inching toward herd immunity; it seems like perhaps this pandemic will someday end.

Over the course of the past year and 125 episodes, I’ve returned to one central question again and again: do we have the courage to finally name the broken parts of Before, and do the work of personal and community transformation to return not just to normal— but to create a better normal?

That phrase “new normal” has been thrown around a lot this past year. I do know a few people who have thrived in this pandemic; one of my friends took her family to the Carribean, where her daughter can ride horses on the beach and go to a school where everyone is Black like her. For the lucky few introverts with stable remote jobs, this pandemic has been the break from society that they secretly always wished for. But these experiences are the exception, not the rule. There’s a darker underbelly to the new normal, one that hints at defeat and resignation, of acceptance of a dimmed and shrunken existence. For most of us, this pandemic has felt more like purgatory than paradise. For those of us with children home, it’s been a time of understanding just how close to the surface our anger really is. 

Just as the pandemic forced us to confront our personal failures, it also revealed the fractures in our society. From systemic racism to climate change to immigration policy to vaccines, everyone from families to countries seemed to be at war with themselves. It wasn’t that the ship of our society had suddenly sprung a leak — but that all the patches of comfort and distraction had fallen off.

For our family, this came to a head midway through August, when we woke up to a heatwave, smoky skies, and the smell of ash. It wasn’t quite the house in flames of Grace’s story, but it forced our backyard distance learning pod indoors, where our two-bedroom bungalow with no air conditioning became a sweatbox that made learning nearly impossible. We knew from previous years that wildfire season wouldn’t be over until the rains came in October or November. Even with three air purifiers running and all of the windows and doors locked up tight, we couldn’t make it through a day without getting pollution headaches. 

For the first time in sixteen years of living in Oakland, a place we’d loved and decided over and over again was worth the high cost of living, we considered leaving. While the skies outside our window turned brown and then orange, we made lists of pros and cons. 48 hours after we made those lists, our preschool announced that one of the teachers had tested positive for COVID and they would need to shut down. Two days after that some friends told us they were interested in renting our house. My mother-in-law, who had homeschooled all five of her children, said she would be willing to take on our three kids five days a week so we could work if we came to Massachusetts. And just like that, we set sail. 

We packed in a three-day frenzy, taking only what we were certain we’d need. The skies were smoky as we left Oakland in early September. With our kids Zooming into their classes on school-issued laptops, using our phones as hotspots as they squeezed three abreast in the minivan’s middle row, we were all on edge. I knew I should feel relieved to be leaving, but I couldn't help wonder if this was not just a short-term departure, but a farewell to a life that we had loved even with all of its difficulties. Our hoped-for return date was Christmas. But hope was the best we could do.

We made the cross-country move mostly for our kids, and for Gabe especially; when the pandemic began, Gabe was falling behind in every subject and not making friends in his public school. Since October my mother-in-law has been homeschooling the kids, a blessing of epic proportions that I am grateful for every single day. Gabe is now an avid reader. Grace, our first grader, orator of Peaceful Village, is doing third-grade math. Even Mattea, at age four, can find Egypt on the globe. My mother-in-law found a kid version of the Odyssey written by Mary Pope Osborne, who penned the Magic Treehouse series, so even the kids have embraced this journey.

But sometimes life calls for mixing the metaphors. Because while our pandemic year has taken us to new frontiers, including the unexpected gift of my husband and I getting to work together on both the podcast and an apprenticeship program--this year hasn’t just been about adventure. Often, it’s felt more like Grace’s Peaceful Village than Homer’s Odyssey. Just when we think we’re done being shipwrecked, we find ourselves wandering around in the woods, getting lost in a place we thought we knew . . . and then, there’s treasure we didn’t know we were looking for. 

Through the mundane days and the ones with more adventure than we bargained for, what has kept us going is the longing for home. But these days the idea of home conjures up more questions than answers. What makes a place feel like home? What are we willing to sacrifice--or even fight for--to get there? Who will be there when we return? Will we even recognize it when we get there?

Or maybe home isn’t a place at all. Maybe it’s not the old normal or the new normal, but that better normal--that treasure we have yet to find.

The Politico story I read a year ago included a prediction from Columbia psychology professor Peter T. Coleman, who said that he hoped we’d see a decline in polarization because of this pandemic. Thinking back on the BLM protests and election battles of the past year, our country feels more divided than ever. But Peter said that we shouldn’t be so quick to lose hope. He writes, “Enduring relational patterns often become more susceptible to change after some type of major shock destabilizes them.” He cites a study that looked at 850 enduring conflicts throughout the world over a period of nearly 200 years. More than 75% of those conflicts ended soon after “a major destabilizing shock” to society. We have certainly seen that kind of shock to our society with this pandemic, and Peter says that this kind of change doesn’t necessarily happen right away. He writes, “Societal shocks can break different ways, making things better or worse. But given our current levels of tension, this scenario suggests that now is the time to begin to promote more constructive patterns in our cultural and political discourse. The time for change is clearly ripening.”

Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor who directs the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, wrote about this, too. Two days in, he made this pronouncement: “The coronavirus pandemic is going to cause immense pain and suffering. But it will force us to reconsider who we are and what we value, and, in the long run, it could help us rediscover the better version of ourselves.”

This statement feels like a summary of my life this past year. There has been a lot of suffering and pain, a lot of giving up the parts of our former life that we loved. But in that struggle, there’s also been a rediscovery of what life could be. 

In Peaceful Village, the treasure in the forest doesn’t change Aira and Eartha’s situation, but it does change their perspective. Just knowing that it’s there, that they can go glimpse that golden glitter anytime they want, makes life feel different. 

Last month, when storm-driven power outages swept the nation, my friend Teresa told me about a neighbor who had taken it upon herself to serve up free hot meals to anyone who’d lost power. Teresa lives in what she calls a “purple county” just outside Portland; her street is a mishmash of rainbow flags and gun racks. But that act of kindness restored something in her, a faith in humanity that had grown faint in a year of watching the country splinter politically.

That moment in Teresa’s neighborhood reminded me of something I keep coming back to in this long, overtired pandemic: on any given day, buried beneath the endless stream of bad news, there’s an old, stubborn emotion evolving into something that might just be new. I’m not talking about the power of positive thinking or the toxic positivity that shames us into believing that our problems aren’t significant compared to what others are facing, or a Pollyanna paradigm that turns a blind eye to privilege. I’m talking about an evolved version of an ancient idea. It’s optimism’s smarter cousin, reality’s kinder sister. It’s a bit messy and it’s not easy to hold onto, and we may not have known we were searching for it. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s paddling our little raft across the ocean of life, and saying, “we are not equipped to handle this. It’s not something we’ve faced before. But we can do better--we must do better. Let’s figure out how.”

I think what is challenging about that process is that working toward a “better normal” (for family, community, and country) often means pushing away from the shore of safety or comfort. After Nate got laid off, we made the conscious decision to strike out for a better normal by working together on Shelter in Place, instead of returning to the safe harbor of another full-time job. Working with the person you live, sleep, cook, and parent with has exhilarating highs and devastating lows. Sabbaths are a challenge when your entire living room is papered with notes about work. We are trying to build, navigate, crew, and provision this ship, while also sailing it, recovering from whacking each other with oars, and trying not to lose any kids overboard. 

And yet we’ve never felt so certain that we’re on the right course. Our new apprenticeship program has given us the opportunity to train young women who are just beginning to understand what they have to offer the world--and that collaboration has made this ship sail faster. We are taking all of the mistakes and successes of our own voyages, and offering them a well-worn chart of the creative life ahead. 

We work a lot, but the work is mostly a joy. We’re asking the big, hard questions, both in episodes and in relationships. We’re rowing toward an uncertain future of personal and community transformation, when it would be easier to stay at the dock. We haven’t brought any of that treasure home and we certainly haven’t gotten rich, but there’s a glitter in the forest that wasn’t there before, a hope not in the securing of jewels but in the joy of sharing that discovery with others. 

If the winds of fate allow, we’ll return to Oakland in August, but we’ve finally accepted that our return home may not be the end of our journey. We know already that the memory of home, that lovely, difficult place, is just that: a memory. In the time we’ve been away, some of our friends and neighbors have left Oakland for good. The ones who have stayed tell us that the city’s wounds have been laid open by the pandemic; there’s garbage in the streets, homeless encampments are spreading, and crime is up. But in the midst of all of that, there’s still the beauty that was always there--not just in the redwood trails of the Oakland hills or the floral-scented Februarys, but in the communities of people who long ago accepted that life is not easy, but that we can make it better by showing up for each other.

On the days when I feel shipwrecked in this pandemic Odyssey, it helps me to think about Peaceful Village . . . about those mythical infants, Aira and Eartha. About their simple joy in finding treasure, and the joy that was greater still in sharing it with others. In my less cynical moments I can even see myself that way: an infant not to life, but to a life that has not yet been. I can accept without panic that I don’t know how our quest is going to end, and that the choices I’m making ensure that it probably won’t end in a life of comfort. But that treasure is there waiting  if I’m willing to look for it. It gets better each time I invite someone else to see it. 

I want to invite you to look around, not just at what’s been lost, but what can still be found. Ships have been destroyed--but there’s also treasure in the woods, that gift that glows brighter when you share it with others. If a nine- and a 12-month-old can find it, I believe we can, too.

Shelter in Place is listener-supported. If you’d like to take our listener survey, or support the good things happening here, including our new apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters and creative entrepreneurs, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info. 

We hope you’ve enjoyed this blast into the past as we celebrate two years of Shelter in Place. We’ll be continuing this celebration all month long, and at the same time celebrating women’s history month as well.

As part of that celebration, we want to share with you a movement we’ve been asked to be a part of called #ClaimPodParity. The woman behind the movement is Elsie Escobar, a force of nature in podcasting who has done so much to raise up the voices of women podcasters, especially through She Podcasts, the organization that she co-founded with Jess Kupferman. You  might remember that I was a speaker at the She Podcasts Live conference last October, where I got to meet so many inspiring women in the industry, including Elsie and Jess.

#ClaimPodParity is a movement to celebrate the women in this industry, who have made a difference both in the podcasts they are creating and the ways that they are helping other women to thrive in podcasting as well. We’re a part of the movement in both of those ways—through Shelter in Place, a woman-led and women-hosted podcast, and through the Kasama Collective, our non-profit training program for women and non-binary creatives. If you want to join in the movement, just search for #ClaimPodParity on any social media platform and share and retreat what you see there—or better yet, add your own post about the women you love in podcasting, that you think others will love too. We’ll be contributing to this effort all throughout the month of March in an effort to help other women podcasters grow their own shows and to help listeners find them.

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If you’d like to support this work, you can do that for as little as $5 a month at shelterinplacepodcast.org. What you heard in this episode was an edited version of a much longer conversation between Tony and me. As a monthly supporter, you’ll get access to the unedited conversation.

We know that you hear it from everyone, but it really does help us so much if you subscribe to the podcast and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Goodpods, Podchaser, or any podcast app that has ratings and reviews.

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. But first, Before I go, I want to thank all of the people who have contributed to our work here at Shelter in Place in the last two years. 

Jack and Robin Davis

Lyle and Tina Joyce

Saundra Lormand

Judy Vasos

Nik Schaffer

End Credits:

The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Melissa Lent is our project manager, Sarah Edgell is our design director, Nate Davis is our creative director, and as always,  I’m your host and executive producer.

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

OUTTAKE: