How to Touch Grass

Advice on how to turn off, tune out, and drop in on life in the wake of unspeakable tragedy, from someone who did it once already.

Wendell Berry once said, “you can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it,” and these last few years, that’s kinda been my life’s philosophy.

I spent a shocking 20 years either in or tangential to retail politics — 10 in communications, all the way up to the highest level, and 10 in journalism, sadly chronicling the downfall of civilization that came as a result of those earlier 10 years — and while, now, political brain-rot has become an entire personality for a shocking number of people, I almost feel like I jumped ship right before it got particularly terrible.

I have my reasons; my beliefs changed pretty significantly, for starters. In 2007 if you’d asked me what ideology motivated my life, I’d have told you my political party. Fast forward about 20 years later, and I’ll tell you I’m a Catholic environmentalist and everything is pretty much about maximizing human dignity, Birkenstocks, and Grateful Dead tank tops, and my most opinionated coworkers are all chickens.

I also faced death. Many of you know the story (and if not, it’s pretty much the top clicked item right here on this Substack). I had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured my fallopian tube and I — unknowingly — almost bled to death in a hospital ER waiting room. Things like that change you. I remember waking up one morning not too long after the incident, wondering if anyone would miss me, wondering if I was making the world a better place.

I still don’t know about the former, but the latter was an easy question to answer. I held on six months or so at my job, took a buyout, and went dark. I found out the hard way, last week, though, that even as I tuned out, the world kept going, descending deeper into an abyss that ultimately begat unspeakable violence.

There’s been plenty written on that. I don’t need to pile on with the necessary caveats about not agreeing, and nothing is truly worth killing someone over, you’ve either heard all that or know it intuitively. But I am here to tell you that division is poison, and we all have a responsibility in changing humanity’s direction. Every last one of us, like I did, needs to look in the mirror and decide to change, whether we think any of *gestures broadly at the Dumpster fire* is our fault or not.

The most common solution I’ve seen is “touching grass,” but what does that actually mean? Well, as someone who’s done it, I figured I could provide a little guidance.

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Sky Before Screen

Get off the phone. I realize I’m a hypocrite! I’m writing this to you on a digital screen! I am currently on a laptop. But just…turn it off. Go for a walk in a park, or in your neighborhood. Play with your kids. Go grocery shopping with a paper list. Leave your hovel and look at the trees. Admire the birds. Stand in the mud in your bare feet. Be a 2000s Manic Pixie Dream Girl for a hot second and dance in the rain like an idiot.

Someone suggested No Phone Saturdays as a temporary solution, and it sounds right on the money. Sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, just don’t use it for what it’s not needed for.

Let People on the Internet be Wrong

I have this problem where a family member keeps digging into the well of AI Facebook Boomer slop memes and for a while it made me a one-woman fact checking society, until I realized that people get paid for that sort of thing, and I wasn’t even getting a cut of ad revenue from the Facebook algorithm.

Social media rewards division. It just does. And if a certain platform doesn’t, it's because that platform is used to drive you to one that does, like YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. And the profits don’t fall because people peddling disenfranchisement, dissatisfaction, disruption, and dissent are wrote; in fact, they make more money at the cost of your soul.

Again, I’m a hypocrite — and frankly, that’s one thing I really try not to be — but the first step to dismantling the Rage Industrial Complex is to let people be wrong. Let them be awful. Let them crave the attention they once got freely. The crisis of community has its roots in the corruption of character, to quote Berry again. We solve ourselves to solve the problems bigger than ourselves.

Take Your Shoes Off

I know that this is sort of a woo-woo naturalism thing, but trust that I get my advice from Jimmy Buffett and not Joseph Mercola — touch the dirt. The sand. The grass. Take your shoes off and connect to something. It’s healing in a way you’re not going to expect, and not, because, like, electrical currents are being restored in your brain, or whatever — it’s just remembering that the dirt connects us to everything. We come from dirt. We return to dirt. Dust is the great equalizer of humanity, but also the cosmic connecter. It’s stardust from the dawn of time, and it was here before we got here and it’ll be here when we leave.

If you can’t do it with your feet, do it with your hands. Garden. Dig something up. Play in the sandbox.

Shop for Something in Person

Remind yourself that other people exist, and they’re mostly not all bad. Try not to get into any fights in a parking lot. You can’t tell when you’re in a grocery store who believes what you believe and who doesn’t. You can’t go out for pizza and know what the people at the next table are thinking. And frankly, when we’re out and about in society, we don’t really think about it.

It’s different online. Everything is frequently assessed for its personal or political value. We’re scouring every quote for indications of leaning rightward or leftward. Life just isn’t that way. The more we live our lives online, the more we find ourselves trying to judge people in an unhealthy way — and for most of civilization we just…didn’t do that?

Work With Your Hands

This newsletter is usually about how to cook, but the why is just as important. I’ve previously noted that I feel and express love in handmade food, but there’s more to it than that — working in a way that our ancestors did can put you in a very different frame of mind. And I don’t care if your ancestor worked for the cable company or slaughtered hogs, it’s just an instinctual and animalistic way to connect to life.

We have a ton of free time now. We used to be tired at the end of a long day, eat dinner, and go to sleep before the gas lamp burned out. Now we can stay up all night doomscrolling.

I’m not saying we need to go back to, like, campfires and hardtack, but, like, maybe our mental health was better when we just didn’t have time to care about other people.

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I wear this little necklace with a tiny gold disk that has a constellation on it, and probably about 90% of people think its a zodiac sign, which is silly because I don’t believe in fortune telling from the stars. It’s the Southern Cross, and yes, it’s a reference to the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song.

The Southern Cross, like the Big Dipper, is a guiding constellation, and it’s most frequently used by sailors in the southern hemisphere. I like the idea of being guided by the cross, personally, but if you’re not of that persuasion, you can substitute pretty much any notable constellation for the Southern Cross — except you won’t shoehorn it as well into song lyrics.

Back when I was pregnant with my twins, after eight years of trying to have just one baby, I heard the song every time I got in the car for a prenatal appointment. Every time. Without fail. And if I didn’t hear the Jimmy Buffett cover, I heard the CSN version. It came to become a touchstone of peace in a really difficult and anxious time.

“The spirits are moving, larger voices calling,” had an impact on me. There is more out there than what we endure day to day, and we are both intensely minuscule in the scale of the universe, but our worlds as humans are also incredibly big. There is more out there than just what happens today, and more people whose lives are entwined with ours.

“You will survive being bested.”

Later on, I found the Southern Cross in another song, Buffett’s “Cowboy in the Jungle.” It’s the chorus.

Alone on a midnight passage, I can count the falling stars

And the Southern Cross and the satellites, they remind me of where we are

Spinning around in circles, just living it day to day

24 hours, maybe 60 good years, it’s not too long a stay.

You’ve got to roll with the punches. Play all of your hunches.

Make the best of whatever comes your way.

Forget that blind ambition, and trust your intuition

Plowing straight ahead, come what may.

The world isn’t all bad, no matter what the Internet says. Bees and hummingbirds are still around. Flowers are still blooming. People are still going to school and work, and coming home and seeing their families. Life moves on outside of social media, and we’ll all be a lot better off if we remember that.