Bee rich

I don’t mean to brag, but it’s come to my attention that I’m rather bee-rich.

My stepbrother was in my yard recently, and he mentioned how in his patio garden, just a few kilometres northeast of me, he’s lucky to see a bee or two. I twittered like a socialite on a yacht: a bee or two? My, how quaint.

At any point in the growing season, my downtown Toronto backyard buzzes with at least a couple dozen bees. They’re tricky to count — they are very busy after all, and not prone to holding still — but it’s practically indecent, my bee wealth, and I’d been taking it for granted. Since then, I’ve been stalking pollinators with my phone, trying to get Google Lens to help me identify them. I’ve long been able to tell my wasps from my bumblebees from my honeybees, but I want to be able to spot a ligated sweat bee, to be sure I have the green-bodied bicoloured agapostemon, the unofficial Toronto bee, in my collection. Now that I know I’m rich, I want to know how many species might be in my bank.

I’ve been gardening in this yard for over a decade, each year cramming more plants into the two beds, and into the margins once the beds are full. Now only an island of lawn remains, and even this I’ve seeded with bee-friendly clover. A few plants have even spilled over to the front, where there were no beds, just an overgrown mat of vaguely lawn-ish weeds. (Please do not report me.) But you don’t expand your bee empire by thinking small.

At first I grew mostly vegetables, but flowers have increasingly stolen my affection and my attention as the years have passed, and now cosmos froth up amongst the tomatoes, dahlias have replaced potatoes as my tuber of choice, and the 30-foot-long side bed produces an endless stream of cut flowers. I’ve introduced more native species too, coneflower and anise hyssop, wild bergamot and serviceberry, liatris and New England aster. It seems my horticultural evolution is pollinator-approved.

Of course the bees aren’t mine, I know, and I haven’t named them or built them fancy pollinator houses, though they often hunker down for the night in the cups of my cosmos blossoms. (It’s as adorable as you may imagine.) They are free-range bees, recirculating freely in the neighbourhood bee economy.

Realizing I’m bee-rich has not only amused me, it has me thinking about land stewardship, and how even one garden can be an ecosystem that supports dozens, if not hundreds, of plant and insect species. Including me, one among many.

Climate change and biodiversity loss won’t be solved by one backyard, or even thousands, but it’s a place where we can be benevolent dictators of our own fiefdom, where we can create little microcosms of regenerative worlds. I can’t cancel the Trans Mountain pipeline or end oil subsidies or expand green energy infrastructure, but in the dark of winter I can push seeds into soil and coddle them under lights hung behind a rail of clothing in my closet. I can let my plants grow a little wild, so there’s more flowering, more diversity, more food and shelter for my insect friends. I can create a little water station for those hardworking pollinators, carefully filled with rocks to perch on. I can let plants go to seed, then fold it into little envelopes for my neighbours. There’s so much wonder and joy in this work — in the smell of damp soil, in the tart gush of a sun-warmed tomato on your tongue, in spying a bumblebee frosted with pollen — which is essential, too, for the bigger fights to come. The garden and all its inhabitants make my own energy more renewable.

Of course not everyone is privileged with a patch of land to tend. Even mine is merely borrowed, and if my landlord chooses, I could be launched back to bee poverty tomorrow. But the city is filled with lawns and neglected parkettes, underserved neighbourhoods for both bees and humans, just waiting for someone to invest time, care, and, yes, a little cash in them. A group in my neighbourhood adopted a little strip of grassy weeds, in fact, and now Garnet Avenue has a burgeoning pollinator habitat (plus a cannabis plant slipped in by a rogue gardener chasing another kind of buzz).

I’ve also been thinking about wealth, and how narrowly we measure it. I’ve made my career in the arts — I’ll never be rich-rich. But why should we overlook other kinds of abundance? In the garden alone, I’ve not only a wealth of bees, but flowers, greens, tomatoes, herbs, and beans, so many beans. This summer I’ve already been through a flush of raspberries, armfuls of lettuce, an absolute glut of mulberries. Much of it I share with my community, both human and non. The mulberry tree, though it casts more shade than I’d care for, is the place to see and be seen for local birds, squirrels, and raccoons for all of July. All of this wealth pretty much demands sharing, as anyone who has ever grown zucchini will tell you.

May I humbly propose this natural wealth as the new Canadian Dream? Let’s create gardens and fields and parks and back alleys where many species can thrive and we can all enjoy the lifestyles of the bee-rich and unfamous. We’ll clean the air and absorb flood waters, be drenched in food and beauty and pollinators. The buzz will become a constant hum; the cicadas will have some competition. Abundance will spill from every yard, every house an apiary, and for once keeping up with the Joneses will help the planet instead of hampering it.

The smallest house on my street

My street is beautiful, lined with hulking century homes and old trees that arc over the road. Most of these dignified old homes are worth $2.5 million or more now, and I only still live here by the grace of rent control and my tolerance for living in a twenty-something’s shabby apartment as a late-thirty-something person.

Earlier this year, a new house went up a short ways north of me. It’s about 3′ x 3′ x 3′: a Little Free Pantry sheltering perishable food.

My general giving philosophy is guided by effective altruism and the desire to do the most good with whatever money I give. It means setting aside the warm fuzzies of giving and being ruthlessly practical. This means most of my giving isn’t hyperlocal, or even domestic, but it also means I’ve likely saved a life or two. Most of my funds (~80%) head overseas to fund decidedly unglamorous mosquito nets. The rest, sentimental creature I am, I spend on causes closer to home.

The Little Pantry posed a challenge, though. My effective altruist training says that this is the least effective form of giving. I even saw a talk by a community food centre leader in Canada who specifically called out these pantries as not the best approach. Food banks and other food centres can often do more with those same funds and reach people more effectively.

The problem is, I’ve become emotionally invested in the pantry. When it is full, I feel buoyed: my street, my community, helping others! When it is empty, I envision someone trekking by these multi-million dollar homes, looking for something to eat, for them, for their children, and being disappointed. Any food there doesn’t more than a day, which is a sign of need, even with all the other food programs out there, and this city has many. People still fall through the cracks. The house itself reminds me of the relentlessness of hunger, of the ongoing demands of a human body.

When the pantry first appeared, I had arguments with myself. The money you give is more important, more effective, I’d say. Ever dollar you spend there could do more elsewhere. Be smart. But every time I walked by and saw it empty, my spirits sagged.

So I started experimenting, buying a couple extra things at the store, placing them in when supplies were running low. And in these terrible times, when good feelings are hard to come by, I felt some satisfaction, even a little happiness. It was a thing I could do in the face of all that’s wrong with the world. I’ve kept this up, as much for me as for anyone else, I’ll admit. Like taking a vitamin, I hope for these little doses of goodness to keep me well.

I still believe in effective altruism, but I think, especially in these terrible times, I needed a reminder that feeling good from doing good can be useful too. That care for others can be useful self-care. That it might prompt us to stretch even more, to be a little bigger.

This isn’t a radical realization, I know, but I share it here as a reminder for anyone who may need it and because I want to encourage all acts of care, for ourselves and others, optimized or not. To give with our brains and our hearts. To give. To give. To give.

Questions in the quiet

At the end of the workday yesterday, my boss called to talk something through. And I was surprised at my relief in hearing his voice. In this time of social distancing, or for some quarantine, we’re relying more heavily on our online tools, and I think also quickly discovering how inadequate they are.

A friend who lives nearby came over later and sat two metres away in my backyard. We talked for 45 minutes before it got too chilly. Was this high risk behaviour? I hope not. But it’s amazing how, only days into the shrinking of our worlds, it felt invigorating, a physical high. She tweeted after about how good it was, and I replied, “Two metres is the new hug.”

I’ve been doing workout classes online, live streams on Instagram, and a friend remarked how these are better than the pre-recorded videos. The sound isn’t great, and there are awkward angles and mistakes, but somehow they’re much more alive, more human. There’s a sense of doing something together instead of alone, a sense of connection, even if it pales compared to physical presence. It’s interesting that many of us spent so long trying to smooth reality out of our online presences, to create a carefully controlled alternate dimension, and now what we crave is the mess we pushed out of the frame.

I live with my partner, and so get regular human contact, and yet still I’m realizing how many voices, how many physical presences, have dropped suddenly from my life. The morning chorus of birdsong suddenly a solo.

The world is so quiet, so still. Few trucks rumbling by, no honking of horns, no laughter from the street. The spring bulbs are pushing out into a sort of museum of humanity—that same careful spaciousness, that same hush. But what are we curating now? What are we trying to preserve? What is worth our attention, our awe, our contemplation?

I think a lot about what we will take from this great disruption when life returns ton normal. I can hope a love of our fuller humanity, of our local networks, our everyday interactions, our freedom to move, our fragile planet. Will we have a new grasp on the essentials of life? And how long before we take them for granted again, before the full chorus of birdsong is just background noise?

It’s impossible to say. For now, I’ve decided cataloguing absence is a kind of appreciation too. Maybe even an inoculation we didn’t know we needed.

New Newsy

Recently I decided to channel my environmental despair into a weekly newsletter that tries to inspire engagement and moderate action in our everyday lives. It’s called Five Minutes for the Planet, and it presents info and action prompts for one topic each week, from water pollution to smartphones. Of course I’m not deluded: the climate crisis will not be averted in five minutes a week. But I did want to find a way to connect with people who are concerned about the future but don’t know where to start. We need more people starting, continuing, picking up where they left off. We need political change and culture change.

I’ll still be writing here, but probably less. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll subscribe and join my band of everyday revolutionaries.

Extraction Mentality

Of all the joys of gardening, the fistfuls of blooms and the tomatoes glistening in the rain, among the most magical, though least Instagrammable, is composting. I love composting. I’m in awe of it. As I turn it, I often pull up big pitchforkfuls to look at more closely, to try to try to glimpse just some of the life teeming inside. Some of it is visible—the red wrigglers squirming, the sowbugs skittering—but so much of the important work is done by microbes and bacteria and fungi, microscopic life I imagine as galaxies held in the palm of my hand.

All of our scraps and peelings, the cores and pits and tough stems, are mixed with leaves I’ve whisked away from people’s curbs, and in the end we have something that nourishes the garden. Something that not only gets rid of trash, but creates life. It’s a beautiful closed-loop system. (Or it would be if I grew all my own food.) I feed it, it feeds me.

So much of modern agriculture is based on extraction, getting all that we can get from our soil, relying on cheap fixes, like nitrogen fertilizer, like pesticides and herbicides, to get more now, with little concern for the future. Outputs matter more than inputs. It’s, like so many things, a one-way street from the earth to us. It’s an extraction mentality.

I’ve just joined my local co-op, the only one left in Toronto, though from a financial point of view, it’s not a clear win. There’s a membership fee, and I contribute two hours’ of labour each month. I won’t do all my shopping there, as my spending would take a considerable leap, and I’m not quite ready for that yet. Which is all to say, financially, it might not be the right choice.

But that’s extraction mentality. And such a small part of the picture. By shopping there, I can support local farmers who treat the earth and their labour well, and in turn, benefit both. I can support local, ethical companies. I can use less packaging. I can contribute my skills and time to my community. I can learn from people who know more and share what I know.

I feel really good about my choice. And not just because they removed the Nestlé products from their shelves, or because they have a new climate change mural, or because they vermicompost their food scraps or offer package-free tofu made in Quebec or bulk rice from Flin-Flon, Manitoba. Somehow all those little reasons, like adjustments in a yoga class, combine into something greater, bring me closer into alignment with who I want to be. But beyond that, beyond how I benefit, it gives me a chance to help close the loop.

A co-op takes its profits back into its staff and community, and the loop becomes a spiral, progressing in a sustainable way. If it were a garden, it would have great soil. It’s a reminder we aren’t nourished just by what we take, but by what we contribute. This sounds obvious, I know, but it’s not how our society is organized in the rush for the bottom price, the bottom line, to get what’s ours. Extraction is everywhere. Our inability to close the carbon loop is now a very real threat to human existence in the long-term.

And maybe this is the zeal of the recent convert, but I’m ready to get my hands dirty. I’m ready to strengthen my local ecosystems one purchase, one conversation, one volunteer shift at a time. I’m ready to invest in what’s good, what’s working, what benefits more people. I’m ready to put in a little more and to wait and watch for what new galaxies reveal themselves.

Plenty

One of my favourite things in my apartment is a floating shelf full of mason jars by my back door.  It holds jars of all shapes and sizes, some new, some very old, each filled with grains or beans or another dried staple. The shelves are like five tiny skylines, and when the golden hour sun shines in through the back window, they all seem to glow.

There is not much that inspires envy in our modest apartment, but that secondhand shelf laden with secondhand jars is frequently admired. I find all the shapes and colours and textures pleasing, but more than that, it’s a literal corner of my life where who I am approaches who I want to be. Looking at it, one might think, “I am a zero-waste person, I am organized, I am self-sufficient,” though those three things happen much more infrequently than I’d like.

These jars of food also give a sense of plenty and abundance, which is something I so longed for growing up in a house where the kitchen was restocked daily, yes, but only with what was strictly necessary for the meals ahead. We ate mostly store-prepared or frozen foods; I’m not sure when I first saw my first dried lentil, but it was certainly as an adult. In my first years on my own, I took pride in my full fridge, my bursting pantry. I could make anything, have anything, I would be spoiled for choice. I wanted my adulthood to be apparent in how much I had.

I still have that instinct: despite trying to live with less, I am a maximalist at heart, and acquisition is one of the driving forces of our capitalist society. And yet over the years I’ve come to realize that the pantry and the fridge don’t always have to bursting. If you have three kinds of vegetables, it’s easy for one to go limp or mouldy. Flours can get infested and go off. Even having three kinds of nuts on your shelf could be asking for trouble: nuts oxidize and can go rancid sooner than you think. Someone I follow took this to the extreme: she had one jar for grains, one for beans, etc, and when that was empty, she’d refill it with something new. That’s a bit austere for me (I was actually shocked when I read it), but the message is good: we don’t need to have everything all the time.

In fact, not having everything not only makes less waste, it makes me a more confident cook, less beholden to a recipe. Why buy broccoli when there’s a garden full of kale? Do I really need ricotta, or will this cottage cheese do? When my partner and I started meal planning, I could buy just what we needed. Now we throw almost nothing out, and less digging is required to find the next ingredient. (As a bonus, those who live with men will find incidences of them “not being able to find something” satisfyingly drop.)

These days, my jar shelf is a little less full, with room to regrow green onions or set some seeds to dry, and I am a little bit closer to those aspirational thoughts: I am a zero-waste person, I am organized, I am self-sufficient. My maturity is signalled not from having accumulated more, but from having the wisdom to hold myself back, to make do.  Plus, with the jars used more often, they don’t gather dust, and they shine that much more in the golden-hour glow.

Resource-full

When the Amazon fires were burning at their fiercest in August, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. (The fires are still burning, but less rampantly, which is what passes for good news these days.) My life still contained some of that precious end of summer happiness, that emotional golden hour, but those fires burned on my mental horizon, sending urgent smoke signals across blue skies.

The realities of the climate crisis make us feel small and powerless, and maybe we are, but I needed to do something. So I organized a small fundraiser, inviting people to my yard to pick their own bouquets and donate to the Rainforest Action Network. Making bouquets has been the great, unexpected joy of this year, and I figured I could turn that light on my despair.

In the two weeks before the event, attendance was rather low, and I feared a flop, but when they day arrived, the weather held and a handful of people turned out. I picked as many flowers as I could and put out a rainbow of blooms. “I don’t know how to arrange flowers,” said one friend. “Me neither,” I said. “Just start.” And her flowers looked wonderful. Everyone’s did. I think it’s safe to say everyone was in a great mood, me especially, happy to share both my flowers and the joy of arranging them for a good cause.

Later, on request, I started making bouquets to order for people who couldn’t make the event. There was enough momentum that in the end I raised $610 by doing something that gave me major joy. It won’t put out the fires, it won’t save the world. But it’ll do a little bit of good.

When we think about resources, especially in an environmental context, we usually focus on what we take. (Too much.) But we also have resources, and many can be shared with a glad heart. These days it’s a question I want to ask everyone. What resources, talents, skills, do you have? And instead of using them for your own gain, as we’re taught, can you use them for the world’s?

For me, this means more flowers next year, and another fundraiser for sure. I’m also currently saving seeds so I can give away some Victory Garden starter packs in spring to people who might want to start growing their own food but don’t have the resources. (I’ll even be including copies of my favourite urban gardening book, which is what really started me down this garden path.) For others it might be using their yoga teacher skills, or their knack for carpentry, or sharing an abundant harvest.

People and communities can be resources too. My dad and his wife travel in well-heeled circles, and they love food and drink and hosting. What if I paired them with an activist chef I know, and we made a fundraiser? How much money and awareness could we raise? I’m taking steps to find out.

In green communities online, there’s often talk of hoarding resources, which sounds dramatic but can happen in innocuous, everyday ways: those clothes you don’t wear, those tiny bottles of hotel shampoo slowly losing their potency, the food you throw out or ignore in the back of your cabinet, the housewares gathering dust, the books you aren’t reading and probably never will. These days, as I go about my business, I’m looking for excess. I’m giving away the rain barrel I can’t use (a good eco-tool that’s been terribly wasted on me), and a lot of my bumper crop of parsley, sage and thyme so that people can use it for Thanksgiving dinner this weekend. Someone on the really lovely Zero Waste Toronto FB group needed a scoby, so I’m giving her a piece of mine. A friend was getting rid of some nice clothes, so I brought them to work, where they all went to new homes. This doesn’t require a full Kondo, and it fact it might be much more sustainable just to take things as they come, since responsible disposal can overwhelm.*

At a conference I attended recently, we watched a video that reminded me that not everyone needs to be a capital-A activist, quitting their jobs and decamping to an NGO. Often you can make the most effective change amongst the spaces and people you know well. We need adaptation and tough conversations everywhere. “What can you touch?” they asked. For me, at least, it makes the whole thing less daunting, and is a good reminder that opportunities for positive global change can be surprisingly local.

So much of what’s happening in the world is heavy, unbearably so. But instead of puddling under the weight of it all, let’s start by looking to our strengths, our community, our abundant resources. It’s an exercise in gratitude and generosity, and we all could probably use more of both. My fundraiser reminded me that there are some things we can give easily and happily with a little creative thinking. Hopefully once we’ve caught our stride, we’ll have the momentum to take on so much more that isn’t, figuratively or literally, sunshine and flowers.

 

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* A note here about responsible rehoming: dumping everything at your local thrift store is not helpful, nor is chucking a bunch of stuff on the curb (especially right before a rain—a pet peeve I see all the time). But there are so many other good avenues: local buy nothing groups, Freecycle, Bunz/Palz, local swap meets, friends and colleagues, etc. BlogTO also has a great list of places to donate stuff in Toronto. If you actually want something to stay out of landfill, a little more effort is required, but on the plus side, you often get to meet the people who are happy to have your stuff.

 

 

 

 

A model of consistency

When people ask me what’s new, I sometimes struggle. Because as I’ve probably written before, in the big, small-talkable ways, my life is remarkably consistent: I’m over eight years into my relationship, ten at the same address, eleven at the same company. I’ve had no children, and even my cat is well into his middle age. I don’t buy many new clothes, and pretty much never redecorate. If you visited me after a decade, we might sit on the same couch, and I might even be wearing the same dress.

In this same past decade, the lives of my friends have changed a lot. I’ve attended a couple dozen marriages and welcomed quite a few little ones (who seem to keep their parents’ lives in a constant state of change). My friends have switched jobs, bought homes, a few have even moved to new cities. Meanwhile, I’m unmarried, child-free, and still a renter in the house where once it wasn’t all that surprising for someone to wake up after a late-night bender and find a pizza slice abandoned by the toilet.

While there are many things I’m grateful for in all this, sometimes this sameness bothers me. There is certainly no shortage of external pressure to get these stamps on your passport to adulthood, and comparing myself to my friends sometimes makes me feel like a child in a sea of legs at an adult party. There can also be a certain internal restlessness that bubbles up now and again. Many of these milestones come with a full slate of responsibilities and things to learn, whether it’s sleep strategies for infants, mortgage rules, car models, wedding florists, or types of kitchen cabinetry. Some of these things are important, and others relatively trivial, but all keep you occupied, distract you at the very least. Since I’ve given up most consumer delights, I can’t even buy myself the illusion of change with something shiny and new.

I felt a little bout of this restlessness lately—maybe because September can make a person crave a fresh start. But then today I realized that all of these constants are in fact a very useful kind of constraint. That not being occupied with planning major events or moving house or raising a human has left me with a tremendous amount of time and mental freedom, and perhaps I’ve even used some of it well. Because while my life may not have changed, I can tell you that I have. I’ve spent the last few years learning a lot about environmental issues and racial justice, practising giving more and using less, honing my skills and expanding my interests. I’ve had time to read, and write again, and expand my self-sufficiency with time-consuming pioneer nonsense like making my own soap and growing and canning my own beets. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to live a good, meaningful life while colouring outside the lines, how find true north on my moral compass. And this is not the stuff of a Facebook update, or that prompts a party, but I know that it is not stasis, despite how it may look to a casual observer. I feel more like a river, its course the same but its composition always changing. And while “I’m like a river,” is more a stoner wisdom than cocktail party chit-chat, it’s been comforting to realize that my consistency hasn’t hampered my growth, but likely allowed it, that a same-same life can be a secret path to change.

The rebels we need

I haven’t been writing much lately, but I’ve been thinking a lot. It’s the kind of thinking, though, that resists tidy little posts, my thoughts not a piece of yarn that unwinds neatly with a tug, but more like an elastic-band ball, ideas encircling and overlapping. A recurring theme is the systems and conventions that we can challenge or rebuild for the benefit of all. I’ve been thinking a lot about individualism too, about the great fallacy of it, and the ways in which it diminishes our lives and leads us to fail one another and our planet.

You may have heard about the Fortune 500 bigwigs of corporate advocacy group Business Roundtable releasing a statement that acknowledged that profits to shareholders can no longer be a corporation’s exclusive focus. Suddenly the well-being of employees, communities, and the environment are worthy of discussion at the boardroom table. They’ve realized, I guess, that there are no shareholder profits if the 99% comes for their heads, if the world is a fiery hellscape. They’ve realized that they’ve stripped the nutrients from the soil for too long, which is metaphorical in most cases, but also literal in some.

It’s easy to raise my eyebrows at these out-of-touch elites, but I’ve been trying to question individualism in my own life too. In the Western capitalist model, we’re taught to put ourselves first, or, at the very least, put our family units first. And while we’re biologically engineered to favour our kin, and to a certain point it’s useful, at what point are we hoarding resources as surely as a Fortune 500 fat cat? I was really roused by Adam Roberts’s piece in Vox (wonderfully rendered as a graphic column by Alex Citrin), which asks, how much money is too much? When does wealth become immoral? What does morality look like in a capitalist system? What obligation do we have to make society more secure for everyone?

So I’ve been trying to find ways to upend certain capitalist and individualist actions and assumptions in my own life. For instance, I discovered a friend has $2000 of charitable contribution matching at her work. Since I’ve committed to donating 10% of my income, I have a chunk of money to give, and could easily give some of it to her. I could double some of my impact! And of course this money, invested in the right programs, can have a positive ripple effect beyond the food or contraception or mosquito nets it buys. The drawback is that I lose that charitable tax credit — about $500 if I gave her $1500 — which I’ll admit, made me nervous, setting off scripts about “my” money and what I might “deserve.” But I’m learning to shut those down. Because life ain’t fair, and while I am frugal and financially responsible, it’s ludicrously deluded not to factor privilege and plain dumb luck into my own financial situation. Let’s face it, those factors count for much more than 10%.

If I give the money to my friend, I can give twice as much money to organizations I believe in, and also I can give some money to her as a tax credit. Her family had a run of terrible luck a while ago, and I love her dearly. If I’m for expanding models of family and kinship, why wouldn’t it be a good thing for her to benefit? Also, I don’t desperately need that money. If invested, it might give me more security down the road, but if I’m honest, in the decades to come, I should inherit some money too. In the meantime, I could save someone’s life. There are people looking out for me, who am I looking out for?

On a smaller scale, a friend of a friend recently gifted me her old patio furniture. It’s a huge upgrade from the rundown street findings currently in my yard, and means new stuff without consuming new resources — a great treat. I offered to pay her for them, but she declined, and my friend suggested I make a donation to Amazon protection instead. Another win and a net positive for the system. I needed to get the furniture to my house, though. I could have rented some sort of truck, but a friend’s husband has a pickup truck, and I was able to enlist his help in relocating my new patio set. My first thought was to buy him a nice bottle of something, but then I realized I had something more valuable to offer: my babysitting services. My friend happily agreed, and it reminded me that this is something I should offer more often. No money needed to change hands, nothing new needed to be purchased, and we generated some social capital and rainforest protection.

For now, we’re largely stuck with capitalism, but individualism can be undermined more easily. These small acts of resistance give us power, and we can be the rebels we need. We don’t have to wait for the Business Roundtable to start looking above the bottom line to make this world better. Yes, we need to vote, write letters, protest, and publicly advocate for systemic change, but the system lives in us too, in our homes and hearts, and there a brave new world is entirely possible.

Beach bodies

There are two ways to handle a city summer: escape it—heading to malls, museums, movie theatres, or any other place with polar A/C—or embrace it, grabbing your suit and sunscreen a making for a city pool or beach. Despite being a person who loves summer, I’ve tried both of these strategies in recent heat waves, but this past weekend I spent my afternoons at the beach and my local pool.

And while there were a few takeaways from my time stretched on a towel, what struck me both days was how nice it was to be immersed in a sea of bodies on display. Young bodies, old ones, fat ones, thin ones, and everything in between. Tattoos, stretch marks, tan lines, body hair, scars, and secret constellations of freckles are no longer hidden. Makeup washes away, and hair waves and frizzes. While I’m sure people have considered, to varying degrees, how they look that day, and of course stigma really doesn’t disappear, there is something about the sheer volume of people that still feels democratizing to me. Here are our bodies, and they are, finally, deliciously cool.

I was a lifeguard through all my teen years and a bit beyond, and I don’t remember thinking much about this catalogue of bodies. Maybe I was too young, or maybe I was used to it, or maybe it’s gotten harder to catch a real glimpse of another person’s cellulite. We’ve long had to contend with the airbrushed, photoshopped professional bodies of models, and the well-lit, trainer-honed physiques of actors, but social media is a relatively new player in the scene. Our feeds give us glimpses of what would appear to be more authentic, except, of course, they’re not: one carefully edited photo elides all the trashcan-bound takes. No wonder one study found higher social media use correlates with increased risk of eating and body image disorders.

Sitting, taking it all in, I was reminded of the plus-size pool party scene in Shrill, all those bodies lounging, swimming, floating—savouring all the warm weather pleasures. I watched the show with a curvy friend, who noted that what was especially revolutionary was how the camera lingered on these bodies in motion as the actors swam. This isn’t something to hide, those shots declared, let’s pause to take it in. In Shrill the book, West writes about how she had to teach herself to love bigger bodies, because society certainly didn’t teach us to love them—in fact, it does the opposite. (Hard to dismantle the patriarchy if you’re hungry and beaten down.) So she recalibrated her feeds, sought out photos of big bodies and studied them to broaden what she thought of as beautiful.

And that’s one thing (besides a break from the oppressive heat) the public pool or beach has to offer: a sort of joyful reminder of what bodies actually look like. I sat there feeling like one of the Fab 5, wanting to reach out and tell women especially that they were beautiful. Because I am sure all of them have frowned at the mirror, pinched or prodded their flesh, possibly under fluorescent lights of a changeroom when buying the very bathing suit they’re wearing. They’ve probably moaned to friends about how their boobs are sagging, or they need to lose five, ten, twenty pounds. We’re so unforgiving, so self-conscious, but these are our containers for being, the only way we can access the world. And as much as I wanted to compliment these women, the point is actually setting all that assessing aside, leaving it in the lockers with our street clothes. Because at the pool we get to indulge in the glory of physicality: it’s the grandpa doing a flip on the diving board, the goggled kids frogging underwater and gasping as they surface, the legs swaying in pool handstands, the babies splashing with delight. We are weighed down with so much judgment and expectation, but the public pool is a glimpse of a world where, with practice, every body can be buoyant, every body can be free.