Rooted
Try this on: Explain where you’re from to a stranger not by a politically defined boundary of city or state but by your watershed or migratory path.
KIWI. This acronym arrived in a meeting this week – a gift not from god but from a very funny, very fed-up anthropologist, mother of a trans kid, neighbor, writer, traveler, and so much more. KIWI – Keep Iowa Worth It – is her way of noting people and moments she encounters that are wonderful and kind and worthy of keeping her here.
Because, goddess knows, it’s verrrrrry tempting to get the hell out of here! If you’re not from here, just search “Iowa Legislative session 2024” and behold some of the absurdity that’s taking up way too much emotional space and time, while detracting from dealing with nuts and bolts issues of keeping a state afloat, much less from moving it ahead.
I thought I’d leave. For the longest time, I thought I’d be in northern California by now. Somewhere up above San Francisco, near the ocean and the mountains, in walking distance to my beloved redwoods – the church I worship at – in close proximity to a myriad of Buddhist and arts communities that turn me on.
Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash
The fires of 2020 put a wrench in those plans. Remember the orange sky that hung over the Bay Area for days, apocalyptic and literally sickening. Recall people fleeing from their homes, trying to drive faster than walls of heat and flame. And the firefighters exhausted, depleted, sleeping in the backs of trucks, their faces creased in dried ash. Yeah, that part of the world doesn’t need another human living there. I’ll gently visit now and then, but that is not my place to root.
2020 was, of course, the eye of another storm. And it was that storm that made me decide to stay. During Covid, I never felt alone. I never felt in danger. I was lucky in many ways—from my access to money and a job that allowed me to stay home—but I was also in a place where I have tended to my roots for decades. Deep and healthy roots mean that a plant can withstand storms much better than one that has shallow, malnourished roots. I know people here — lots and lots of people. I’ve given to others. I’ve shown up at school meetings and teacher-parent conferences. I’ve brought food to neighbors and babysat for friends’ kids when they needed a break. I am not putting any of this out there as saintly; to me, it’s what comes with intentionally being part of a community.
Plant roots are tubular conduits for water and nutrient absorption. They also serve an architectural purpose, providing structure and support. They adapt to place, changing depending on the particular soil and climate; the roots of a rose in Iowa look different than those of a rose in Oregon. Plants interact with each other via their roots. They also give back to the soil, providing beneficial fungi and preventing erosion.
A design problem with the modern human is our resistance to rooting ourselves. We often don’t interact with our human neighbors and are often entirely blind to our non-human ones. Try this on: Explain where you’re from to a stranger not by a politically defined boundary of city, county, state, or even of the lands of those who used to live here, but by what watershed you’re part of, the characteristics of your soil, the migratory flight path of the birds.
We aren’t from everywhere, as we like to think in the webbed, digital sense, we are from a place. A place that has its own roots, if we bother to pay attention to them. Our schools teach us how to be from everywhere. They give us few if any skills on how to learn about HERE. To learn the names of the trees and plants. To know about the geological layers beneath your feet. To understand the patterns movement.
As part of a Community of Joyful Resistance Book Club, I just finished re-reading Jenny Odell’s masterclass book on being here now, How to Do Nothing. My favorite chapter is the one about bioregionalism, in which she writes:
“We emerge from moment to moment, just as our relationships do, our communities do, our politics do. Reality is blobby. It refuses to be systematized. Things like the American obsession with individualism, customized filter bubbles, and personal branding—anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching—does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed.”
In our rich conversation about her book we agreed that one can live in the most beautiful place in the world, but if you’re there alone, if your roots are reaching and not finding another plant, then it’s pretty lonely. At this moment, Iowa feels to me like some dirty area saturated with pollutants—which it true is given that we have some of the worst water in the country and ground pumped full of chemicals—and there are “good organisms” trying to clean things up by scrubbing and absorbing and converting the chemicals into fresh soil. I feel very lucky that many of my friends here are the human equivalent of scrub brushes and sponges.
Last fall, I bought an amaryllis bulb that I potted and intended to start as a holiday gift. I watered it and put it in a sunny place. But it did nothing. No signs of growth. As the holidays grew near, I was reading up on what might be its problem and considered root rot as a possibility. When I pulled gently at the part of the bulb sticking out of the soil, it came right out, trailing soggy, translucent roots. Nothing in this plants’ nether region looked alive or worthy of saving, so I put it outside, intending to toss the bulb and move the pot to my shed to re-use in the spring. It sat there for weeks in the cold of December and January before I noticed it again and was certain the stem extending from the bulb had grown. I brought it inside and began to water it very sparingly. Within weeks, the stem shot up and was soon flowering.
I still might leave Iowa—being root bound is a thing, too, and I’m pretty clear that being near my kids is paramount. But if I go somewhere else, the first things I’ll do is to learn the place from the ground up. Walk its waterways. Listen to the birds and get to know their patterns. Meet some farmers. Read the history. Because otherwise, I’ll never root there. I’ll never have a chance of belonging.
Working with FilmScene - A Pleasure!
A lot of my work these days is around storytelling — foraging for stories from those reluctant to tell theirs, facilitating gatherings in which people connect with each other through stories. I just wrapped up four months of working with FilmScene, our local independent movie theater that is celebrating its 10th anniversary. I talked to the guy who runs a late night series of horror and B movies that probably has the most devoted community of the entire theater. I learned what it’s like to go to Cannes and Sundance as a programmer—mainly exhausting! And I interviewed a couple who got married in one of the theaters before watching The Princess Bride with family and friends. They generously gave me the last story.
Read Together
The Community for JOYful Resistance’s next book in our shared read-from-anywhere club is Inciting Joy by Ross Gay. This may sound fluffy, but it’s not. Gay takes on the world’s hard places through the lenses of joy and delight, and coaxes us to go there with him. Each chapter is an “incitement”, and in the one about laughter he writes:
“Remember how they policed our laughter at school? How at football practice? How at church? How at that piece of shit fancy bar playing The Chronic extra loud when we were the only Negroes there? Remember how? Because they know laughter is a contagion, those who laugh are its vectors and one of laughter’s qualities is that it can draw us together by reminding us of the breath we share.
There are two meetings in April — come to both or just one! Here are the details
Volunteer with IC Repair
Want to root in Iowa City? Iowa City Repair, a volunteer-run organization that hosts free mending and fixing events four times a year needs your help! We’re looking for a volunteer coordinator and a social media leader. These jobs rev up the month prior to a repair event and are responsible for making sure our volunteers are in-the-know and ready, and that the public is aware of our event. You do not need to be able to sew or be handy with a screwdriver for these jobs; rather, we need people who are good with Google docs and relatively savvy about using social media.
I can honestly say that IC Repair has been one of the most gratifying community experiences I’ve had. If you’re interested, please email me at jennifernew42@gmail.com.
Watch Community JOY
Speaking of inciting joy, watch two of the Oscar-nominated short documentaries and try not smile widely and feel compelled to get yourself out into the world in a useful way. (See aforementioned human scrub brushes!) The Barber of Little Rock and The Last Repair Shop—both are on YouTube and clock in at under 40-minutes—are about people overcoming obstacles and then paying it forward by showing up for their communities. The fact that one has close fades and the other violins doesn’t hurt!
I still think of Iowa as "home" given that I lived in the state (and mostly Cedar Falls) from about 1st grade through college. At this point, I've lived outside of Iowa longer than I ever lived in the state, and I've lived in Ypsilanti (near Ann Arbor) now for longer than I've lived anywhere else. Which is to say my roots were transplanted a while ago.
But I still go back there at least once a year to see my parents and family, and I gotta say there's no freakin' way I could live there anymore. I don't know exactly what happened, but the "purplish" state I knew way back when has been destroyed by right wing zealots.
Yes to all of this. Iowa is harder than it used to be. KIWI, I love it!