Out with Lanterns Looking for America

How Self Care Can Save Us to Fight Another Day for Freedom

Emily Dickinson once famously wrote to a friend, “I’m out with Lanterns looking for myself,” describing how she felt about moving to a new home and searching for her identity again. The sense of loss. The sense of searching for who you are again in unfamiliar territory. That unsettled and uncomfortable feeling losing home can elicit. That’s how I feel watching the America I believe in burning itself to the ground. The America where you could say anything and no one could stop you because it’s your right. An America where you have the freedom to express yourself no matter how wild or alien or unpopular it might be. An America that welcomes the tired the poor the hungry. An America that sometimes gets it wrong (we’ve made many mistakes in war), but that sets out to fundamentally defend democracy and freedoms in the world and has come to the aid of our Allies. We are now waking up to the reality that while we like to think of ourselves as the gun-toting crafty good looking and professorial Indiana Jones; when left without checks and balances, we are an oppressor, a dictator, a selfish dick. The truth is we have always been some version of this, but we’ve managed to overcome our missteps because power was not concentrated in one Branch. And perhaps there’s still hope. The courts are fighting it out. The professorial Indiana Jones may prevail as the hero if we can keep it from going fully sideways.

We know that we are an America with deep-rooted racism and misogyny, but we’ve been trying to correct our wrongs and be a better version of ourselves while some of us have been trying to return to those wrongs. I believe in an America that will keep trying to become better, work harder, will fail sometimes, but will get up and keep improving. It’s what I do and it’s probably the most American part of me. However, we are now an America on a self-destructive rampage— eating itself, poisoning itself, lighting fires, and beating its children. For most of us, we’re waking up each morning, slightly more terrified of our ever-changing self. It’s worse than aging, it’s worse than disease, it’s disfigurement. It’s dementia. It’s losing the parts of yourself that make you identifiably you. Who are we without freedom? Who are we without rights?

A large swatch of America feels lost right now, homeless, or worse, like we’re watching people being led on a slow death march to the cattle cars with no clear path for a detour or emergency brake. Most friends and relatives fall into one of the following camps:

• They do not want to talk about what’s happening because they cannot cope with the anxiety of our fast-declining democracy. (Cue panic attacks and Netflix escapes and news blackouts.)

• Or they do not want to talk about it because they do not know what to do or what to believe. (Cue awkward conversations trying to find what camp someone falls into before changing the topic to kids and workout tights.)

• Or they DO want to talk about it and they are doing everything they can and it’s not doing anything. (Cue calling their representatives daily and sending emails and protesting then collapsing into rage crying.)

• Or they are indifferent or apolitical? (is that even possible right now?) or supportive of what’s happening or aren’t worried about it. It’ll sort itself out, they say. (Cue living their lives exactly as they always have with zero notice of any changes and no interest in discussing a contentious topic.)

Back in the Fall of 2024, I began preparing myself for the daily onslaught of anxiety we’re now experiencing while hoping for the best. I picked out, saved for, and eventually ordered a sauna and hot tub. I live modestly in a tiny 650 sq foot home and sleep in the living room. These purchases were a big splurge. They were both natural-looking, clean feeling. Zen like. Cedar clad with smooth metal straps. They were safe havens. A way to weather this anxiety creating Regime and it’s oppression I believed was coming. And so I set to work building first a space for them to sit. I dug in the rain for days to create a terraced area on my property that slopes toward the Salish Sea. I dug with a pick ax and hauled dirt and dumped dirt and smoothed and shoveled and raked. I dragged railroad ties and drilled holes with an auger bit and secured a retaining wall. I called my friend Austin to deliver me gravel, then sand. I salvaged bricks and hauled them home in my Subaru a couple hundred at a time. (I’d turned brick hauling into a part-time job last summer when I built my first bricked patio down below this new terrace. You can see it all on my Instagram @amywritesandpaints)

I bricked in the space for the sauna and spent all of January assembling it in the rain and snow and sleet. I was cold. I felt powerful and purposeful and sometimes I got frustrated and sat and cried. I was out there in my fly flow ski bibs and pack boots building when the Blackhawk and CRJ crashed. When the DEI attacks began. When the erasures and deportations and DOGE and firings commenced. When the sauna was done, finally after more than a month of building after work and on weekends, I climbed inside and sat in the scent of cedar and looked out through the bubble window at the Sea and the sky and the gray line where our neighboring island sits between sea and sky.

Then the hot tub arrived from Canada–strategically squeaked in just before the tariffs hit. My friend Dennis hauled it from the local distribution warehouse and more friends came to help me roll it up the hill and put it in place. It’s made by a tiny company in British Columbia that rivets and welds a big aluminum tub with a wood-stove right inside the body of it. It took me a couple of days to assemble it, split more wood, and fill it with water, and then I built a fire in it and fed it wood for hours and waited as the water began to heat. The sun was setting and the sky growing blue then black with stars poking through as I climbed inside and sat there in the hot water in the quiet, with the twinkle lights coming on in the big elephant tree above and the waves out in the Sea sloshing against the shore and the starlings in the birdhouses putting themselves to bed. I sat there listening to the fire crackle in the stove as the water steamed and I felt my entire body settle down as I sunk my shoulders beneath the surface. I felt myself able to look at the horrors head-on once again. To not turn away. To keep speaking out. To not stick my head in the sand. To put myself in the way if I have to. I built myself a place to take respite so that I can reset, regroup, and go back out to keep fighting for what matters and for the people who can’t. I felt myself know we are going through something but we will find our way out. We will remake ourselves again. It will be painful, and uncomfortable, and terribly difficult, but we will find our way home.