Mar 10, 2025 10 min read

Dandelions

I've been thinking a lot lately about resilience and strength and care lately. Let me start with something I posted to Bluesky a couple of weeks back:

Hey. I just wanted to tell you: if you're feeling anxious or afraid, that is okay. It's okay to be afraid when things are out of control. It's okay to feel your feelings. In fact, you must feel them in order to let them pass through you. It probably feels like this feeling in your body will last forever. It won't last forever. You will smile again. You will laugh again. It might not be today. But, then again, it might be.

But it's normal to feel that this feeling will be forever. It's okay to have that thought. Events are moving very rapidly right now. We don't know what's going to happen. That is very scary. It is okay to be scared. The unknowability of the future is one of the scariest things there is.

But this time will not last forever.

In fact, the future has always been unknown. We have never been able to say for sure what will happen tomorrow, next week, next year. It is a comfort to feel we know what our story will be, but that was always just a story.

Acknowledging that the future has always been unknown is difficult and scary. Acknowledging how little control we have over our lives is difficult and scary. But you can do this. I believe in you. Maybe you can't do it today. Maybe not tomorrow. But you will. I believe in you.

And the thing is? Even if we are not in control of our lives, and even if the future is unknown and scary, we are not walking into the future alone. You are not alone. You are a part of a great web of humanity. You are connected to other people, to other life, and to the earth. None of us can do this alone. None of us has to do it alone. We get through it together. Maybe that is with our loved ones or our friends. Maybe it is with our community. Maybe it is with strangers on the internet. I don't know what it looks like for you. But none of us is truly as alone as we feel.

The people who are behind the events that are scaring you are trying to make you afraid. They are trying to make you feel isolated and helpless. They are trying to make you feel trapped and alone. But you are not alone. And you are not helpless. There is real power in connection. There is real sustenance in love. If we can respond to this fear, this attack, by turning toward our love and reaching for each other instead of retreating into solitude, it makes us stronger. It makes us more powerful. Who are the people you love? Who loves you?

Yes, call your representatives. Yes, contribute to your community resources. Yes, march and rally. But remember, too, that resilience is not something that comes only from within. It is something that we build together. It is something we support in each other. Strength flows from love. Take care of the people you can take care of. Allow others to take care of you. It looks different for each of us. But these things matter. Interdependence, community, love, these things matter whether it is a neighborhood or an organization or just two people. You are not alone.

And I hope you will remember, too, that letting someone give you their care and their love is a gift to them. Letting someone help you is a gift to them. I hope you will let yourself believe you are worthy of love and care, because you are. And because those who want to love you deserve to do so.

I know you're doing your best. I'm doing my best, too. Take care.

"Resilience is not something that comes only from within. It is something that we build together." That's the thing I've been thinking about almost every day for weeks now.

Especially for those of us who have had to be emotionally independent for one reason or another, whether due to neglect or abuse or whatever, we can have this idea that we have to do things on our own. That the ultimate responsibility for our own wellbeing lies in ourselves. And there is a truth to that. We are responsible for our own emotions. We are responsible for our own choices. We are responsible for our own behaviors. Acknowledging this truth and integrating it into my life has been the single greatest adjustment I've made in terms of being able to do good in this world, to be compassionate and kind—in short, to be the kind of person I want to be.

But the other thing that has been so important for me to learn and integrate is how much easier it is to be strong, to be resilient, to live according to my values, when I am supported.

Consider a particularly resilient little plant: the dandelion. Dandelions will grow anywhere they can find a tiny little space. They will grow through cracks in concrete. They will grow in shallow clay soil. They will grow with little moisture, in heat, in shade. They're hardy and will survive in pretty hostile environments. But there's a difference between surviving and thriving, and dandelions do grow better, bigger, fuller, when they're given good soil, enough water, and sunlight. When they're given what they need.

We do all have the capacity to make choices that align with our values, even when times are difficult. But it is so much easier to make those choices when we are nourished, when we are supported, when we are loved. When we have the resources to be able to turn our minds towards our values instead of our survival.

What feeds you? What makes you feel supported? Who offers that to you? And to whom can you offer the same?

Sun Comes Through

Nourish Yourself

One of the things that helps me is knowing that I can make something delicious. So I thought maybe from time to time I might share a recipe with you. This is my recipe for chicken soup:

Ingredients

One of those hot rotisserie or roasted chickens from the supermarket
1 yellow onion, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped fine
3 celery ribs, chopped fine
2 or 3 more carrots, peeled and cut into big chunks
2 or 3 more celery ribs, cut into big chunks
6 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced or minced
A couple of teaspoons of olive oil
A handful of fresh thyme, maybe 6 or 7 sprigs (you can substitute a tablespoon or two of dried)
A handful of fresh rosemary, maybe 3 or 4 sprigs (you can substitute a tablespoon or two of dried)
Black pepper
Coarse salt
A tablespoon-ish of dried parsley. You can use fresh if you like.
2 or 3 dried bay leaves
2 spoonfuls of white miso
Half a pound of egg noodles

Directions

Take the chicken and remove the breast, thigh, back, and drumstick meat. Cut the meat into chunks and save it for later. You can save the wing meat, too, if you want but I don't usually bother. Reserve the skin and the rest of the carcass to make the broth. If you leave a little meat on the bones, that's fine, it all helps make the broth nice.
Heat up a stock pot or dutch oven. Add a couple of tablespoons (a healthy glug or so, or a few times around the pot through a pour spout) of olive oil and let it spread over the bottom of the pot. Add in the chopped onion, chopped carrots, chopped celery, and the garlic. (Don't add in the big chunks of carrot and celery, those are for later.) Sauté the vegetables until the onions are softened and translucent, maybe five minutes or so? You can brown them if you want, but you don't have to. Follow your heart.
Add a sprinkle of salt. I usually add about as much as I can pinch with three fingers. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. I'll grind some black pepper in as well, about enough that the top of the vegetables get a little sprinkle. What is that, maybe three or four twists of the grinder? I'll throw in any of the dried herbs I'm using at this point as well (except the bay leaves), and let them cook with the vegetables a little to just open them up a bit. Maybe a minute or so.
Add the chicken skin and carcass, and then enough water to cover, usually about 8 cups or so. Bring it up to a boil and then reduce to a simmer.
At this point, I'll add in the bay leaves and any of the fresh herbs I'm using (parsley, rosemary, thyme). Then cover and let it simmer for a couple hours. You can simmer it longer if you want, too. There's not really an upper limit on the simmering. Simmer it all day if you want.
Once you're done simmering the broth, you'll want to strain out the bits. Get another big pot and a strainer, and pour the whole thing through the strainer, catching the broth in the big pot. You can discard the leftover carcass bits and cooked down aromatics and what not. They make good compost, if you're into that.
Now that you have the strained broth, put that back on the heat and bring it back to a simmer. Add in the big chunks of carrot and celery you cut and saved before and let them simmer until they're soft.
Put a few spoonfuls of miso paste (I use white miso but probably any kind will work) into a bowl with a little bit of the broth and mix it up until the miso dissolves. Then pour that back into the pot with the carrots and celery.
While you're doing that, boil some water for the egg noodles. You want to cook the noodles separately otherwise they'll suck up too much of the broth and it won't really feel like soup. Cook the noodles however the package says to cook them.
While the noodles are cooking, you can add the chicken meat into the broth. You just need to warm it up, since it's already cooked. Only takes a few minutes, really.
Then when the noodles are done, drain them and add them into the soup.
You can serve this with bread if you like. I often serve it over rice (yes, noodles and rice, it's what the heart wants sometimes).

This makes probably about six or eight bowls worth of soup. If you're cooking for yourself, you'll have enough leftovers for several days. You can freeze it and save it for later, too.

Sometimes I throw in other ingredients just to mix things up. I've added canned red kidney beans before, to add fiber. I've added a spoonful of chili crisp, and that was great. Sometimes I might add a teeny splash of apple cider vinegar or Chinese black vinegar. You could put other vegetables in if you want. I bet frozen green beans would be nice. Or maybe corn. It's kind of up to you. Play with it. Make it your own.

What I've Been Working On

Keep the Channel Open

It strikes me that there has been a bit of a through line to several of my recent conversations on Keep the Channel Open, that I've been talking with people lately about grief and about aftermath.

With Sarah Gailey in October, we talked about the immediate aftermath of a societal collapse, and how we care for each other through what comes after. With Perry Janes in November, we talked about acknowledging a traumatic childhood episode, honoring the trauma but moving through it and beyond it.

And in my February conversation with Abbie Kiefer, we're talking about the grief of loss, whether that is the loss of a parent to illness or the loss of a home to economic change and urban decay. But we're also talking about how the unknowability of the future also brings the possibility of renewal and rebirth.

I don't think it's a big mystery why these topics would be so much on my mind over the past few months. I hope that you can find something in these conversations that resonates with you, that helps you move into the unknown future, too.

Hey, It's Me

February's episodes of Hey, It's Me were sort of an exercise in contrasts. In episode 15, Rachel gave an update about her situation, and we talked about putting Commonplace on hold. Then in episode 16, we talked a little bit about my new relationship, and how to navigate our friendship when we are in such opposite emotional places.

Mattered to Me

Activist and organizer Kelly Hayes wrote about how our organizing and activism tactics will need to change in this new era, perhaps focusing less on mass marches and more on storytelling, defiance, and reducing harm.
Professor Megan Giddings wrote about the necessity of caring for each other, and how the way we talk about emotional labor can get in the way of that.
Rebecca Solnit wrote about the ways that the habit of blaming the left for the excesses of the right recall the pattern of blaming women for being abused, in her piece "The She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything."
The story that Peter S. Beagle wrote for Sarah Gailey's Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive series about the love of his life—a thirty-five-year relationship with a woman who was never his wife—was devastatingly beautiful.
I loved Devin Kelly's discussion of Matthew Olzmann's poem "Letter Written While Waiting in Line at Comic Con." I also loved the poem itself.

Take care,

-Mike