Sneaker Waves

Here come dangers! What comes next?

Hello friends ~

Counterintuitively, the fall and winter are when I go to the Oregon Coast. I like being inside when the rain is lashing the windows and the waves are battering the shores. I also like racing outside when the skies briefly dry and trying to feel all the ocean feelings at once, sometimes right up in the ocean.

For this newsletter, I’m sharing photos by my brother, Zak Margolis, who was at the coast with me and friends this past weekend. Thanks for sharing your photos, Zak!

Doesn’t it look like Manu is sweeping the spume?

Our ocean is called the Pacific because it’s relatively calm. When you see the big waves slowly roll in from a high vantage point—say the top of Neahkanie Mountain or the Cape Meares lighthouse—it does seem steady and calm. But I’ve always considered the ocean to be one of the most powerful and fearsome things I encounter in my life. Look how it’s turned me and Jordan into goo.

This past Saturday, as we walked the beach during a lucky blue-skied afternoon, my friend Lizi, who has a 5-year-old, asked a group of us how afraid she should be of sneaker waves.

Someone said: never let your child in or near the ocean. Someone else said: teach your child to never turn their back to the ocean, to always face the water while they run and play. Someone else said: there’s no preparing. If we see one coming, it’s probably too late. We accept this risk to spend time on the beach and play in the waves.

Where do you fall in the sneaker wave debate?

Arthur is pondering. I think he’d choose playing in the waves.

Doesn’t everything that’s about to happen in the next few months feel like a series of deadly sneaker waves, even though we know they’re coming. As SNAP is reduced, Medicaid is reduced, more immigrants are deported, those who remain stay away from essential services like health care out of fear, health care itself gets even further out of financial reach, and so much more, the impacts will crash around us in ways I both comprehend and can’t yet grok. We know people will go hungry and go without care. We also know it will diminish businesses and workers. (In Multnomah County alone, businesses will lose some or all of the $29 million a month they receive when shoppers use SNAP.) It may set the stage for further consolidation within various industries. It will certainly widen the wealth gap.

I gave a talk at the University of Portland on Tuesday in which I made the case that in the face of this impending series of blows, we have to commit—or recommit—to cultivating a culture of generosity that doesn’t deplete us but does push our limits. I quoted Lewis Hyde on capitalism when he wrote, “wealth becomes scarce even as it increases.” I’m curious how we can make generosity become abundant within our community even as wealth becomes scarce. This sounds like a riddle or a fable, as impossible as sweeping all the spume. But dang, we’re also trying to survive, and survive together.

Now is a good time to take inventory of what we can each offer—whether than means money, resources, time, or skills—and offer it. It’s also time to accept support if we need it and to learn how to maneuver the systems we have, even as we build new ones.

Now I’ve just started including photos willy nilly. Aren’t those gooseneck barnacles intense!

For this weekend, I was grateful to see that the Farmers Market Fund, which runs Double Up Food Bucks—a program that matches SNAP money with an equivalent extra (usually $20 + $20) to spend at each farmers market—is going to offer $40 to people for $0 or $1 of their SNAP funds. Phew! And applause! This program is close to my heart. Members of my family are on SNAP and I’ve been on it before. For years as a farmers market vendor, I received SNAP tokens as payment, which helped my business. Double Up Food Bucks creates a more economically diverse ecosystem within markets. It also feeds people!

Hey, there we are, atop some rocks!

Also in the talk, I quoted our hometown hero Ursula K. Le Guin from her novel The Dispossessed. I’ve returned to this quote often in my life:

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

It’s hard to imagine freeing myself of these ideas, given their centrality in our lives, but I love the experiment of trying. I’m very attracted to the notion that when we offer generously into a system, for example to feed our communities, we don’t earn something as a result, not in a direct sense. What we’ve earned, if anything, is a more robust, flourishing system—something that isn’t ours at all. Except of course that it is all of ours and will only exist for us when we need it if we contribute when we can.

Speaking of UKLG: Portlanders, have you visited the exhibit about her life and work curated by her son at Oregon Contemporary Museum yet? I’m going this Sunday and am so excited! Copies of A Larger Reality, the book that accompanies the show, arrived last week, and I’m swooning over them. It’s so tender to see her drawings and so fun to read essays, stories, and poems I’ve loved alongside ones I’ve never encountered. What a treasure!

Like my talk, this has been a meandering newsletter. Thanks for sticking with me! In two weeks, I’m going to share information about the Parents Solidarity Fast For Gaza. In the meantime, I’ll send you out with a photo of the lunch I’ve become completely and totally obsessed with: miso soup, two rice balls, and lots of small tastes, only at Soen on Wednesdays (923 SW Oak Street). You may find me and my dad there. I can’t get enough!