Smuggling Grace

It’s the one year anniversary of this story, so I thought I’d share it again — Ha!

I was finishing up my daily walk as the sun was setting, and I snapped some beautiful photos with deep purple in the sky. Ahhh… So nice.

And I saw a bat. Ooh, cool!

Then another. Then more. Then lots.

And I ended up running out of the woods (and laughing at myself running) because too many bats were flying near me. It was a funny scene. I screamed once. I chuckled. But mostly, my heart was racing.

They kept swooping down near me for bugs. Don’t do that!

Once I got out of the woods, I also laughed imagining the scenario that I’ve been this cautious about COVID only to get rabies.

“Renee was the most disciplined person we knew about not getting COVID, but sadly, she got rabies, refused water, and died.”

Thankfully, I hightailed it out of there.

–Renee Roederer

There’s a plant in the Sahara Desert that can regenerate itself long after it has died. As much as 100 years later.

I recently watched this video in total amazement.

And it makes me wonder what could still be possible —
what could still take shape among us too —
we who are still living,
we who can choose, and
we who can become utterly surprised
when the unthinkable and the seemingly impossible presents itself.

Check out the amazing skill of the painted turtle.

Life is absurdly resilient sometimes.

“Starlings’ murmuration consists of a flock moving in synch with one another, engaging in clear, consistent communication and exhibiting collective leadership and deep, deep trust. Every individual bird focuses attention on their seven closest neighbors and thus manage a large flock cohesiveness and synchronicity (at times upwards of over a million birds).”

-Sierra Pickett

“My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration, the way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, dance collectively through the air — to avoid predators, and, it also seems, to pass time in the most beautiful way possible. When fish move in this way, they are shoaling. When bees and other insects move in this way, they are swarming. I love all the words for this activity.

“Here’s how it works in a murmuration/shoal/swarm: each creature is tuned in to its neighbors, the creatures right around it in the formation. This might be the birds on either side, or the six fish in each direction. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them — too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed, and proximity based on the information of other creatures’ bodies.

There is a deep trust in this: to lift because the birds around you are lifting, to live based on your collective real-time adaptations. In this way thousands of birds or fish or bees can move together, each empowered with the basic rules and a vision to live. Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.”

-adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, page 71.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn,
Dissociation,
Depression,
Anxiety,
Numbness,
Overwhelm,
People-Pleasing,
Overwork,
Somatization,
Hypervigilance,
Avoidance,
Insomnia,
Inability to get out of bed,
Difficulty being with others,
Difficulty being alone,

Post-Traumatic Reactions —
They all deserve care. 

–Renee Roederer

If you’re feeling stressed in any way, I just want you to know about this thing that happens. I want you to imagine it and smile.

I have a friend who lives on a farm where they raise sheep. And every night before sunset, all of this year’s lambs, who are now functionally tweens, get together in a little tweeny bopper gang and run around the farm en masse. It’s a thing they do.

As they near dusk, they just get the urge to be with their peers and exert their energy in a collective romp around all the grounds of the farm. A little gang. Of tweeny bopper sheep. Running around together. In the joy of adolescence.

I just want you to know about these tweeny bopper sheep.
I want you to know that this happens every day.

—Renee Roederer

Bees bumble from flower to flower, using the navigation of bright colors to bring them to life-giving nectar. They collect it and covert it to honey to care for their young, and by extension, the whole hive.

But they have no idea about something else. . .

They have no idea they are pollinating the world’s food supply.

It helps me to remember that. The lives of bees are already so intricate and complex even in what they do intend, but beyond that, their work yields more life and complexity than they know.

Maybe this can remind us:

Individually, and especially collectively, our best intentions, our best connections, our best work, our best loves, and our best visions may yield more life and complexity than we know too.

– Renee Roederer

Here’s a mind-blowing fact: There are more living organisms found in a single teaspoon of soil than there are people on the earth.

More than 7 billion living organisms. In just one spoon-full.

That’s incredible. 

And like us, every organism in the soil is supported by the sun, a burning sphere of hot gas, fusing its energy 93 million miles away from us. This means our lives are sustained by an

enormous, far-away source of heat and light

and

tiny, nearby creatures, so numerous that we could barely begin to count them.

There are always more forces sustaining us than we can easily see. 

So how much more? 

In the earth? In the Spirit? In the dreams? In the relationships?

– Renee Roederer

Did you know that every time we take a step, we have about 300 miles of mycelium stretching below the surface?

Mycelium are the highly connective, thread-like strands of fungi that do so much to transform our world. They help plants communicate and spread nutrients. They transform the ecosystem.

Here’s a great Ted Talk by mushroom expert, Paul Stamets: “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World.” Enjoy!