The forces in our lives are constantly colliding—sometimes in ways that work out well and sometimes in ways that don’t. This interview series is an exploration of what it can look like to work with the collisions, rather than against them. By digging into how humans and nature interact– from our relationships with other humans, to those with our non-human neighbors, to our relationship with ourselves to our relationship with the landbase–we can uncover how to best step fully into our role in the story of the world.
The Ordinary Collisions Interview Series is back after a bit of a hiatus, and I’m pleased to share today’s guest is Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. I first read Lydia’s work in an issue of Geez Magazine—specifically a poem called “The Courage to Quit”, words that found me a few years ago during a time of burnout and disenchantment with how life was going. The lines You are your ancestors’ dreams | echoing hopes through your bones | nudging you to trust helped me navigate that time, and I’m so glad to have connected with her again recently thanks in part to our shared connection of publishing with Broadleaf Books.
So, folks, meet Lydia. As a writer, editor, activist, and mother, she’s the director of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center and the editor of The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World. Lydia's writing has appeared in Sojourners, Geez Magazine, and various Catholic Worker papers, and she is a contributor to multiple books. She lives with her partner and two boys in Bangor, Pennsylvania.
Heidi: Lydia, thanks for being here with us today. It’s such a joy to connect with you more in depth! To start, I always ask the same question: What are two forces that are colliding in your life right now (or that have in the not too distant past)?
Lydia: As I pause to ponder this, I realize I am finally emerging on the other side of one of the biggest collisions in my life. The collision that arose a couple years ago was the clash between my deep commitment to place and my vocation yearnings.
I had lived in Detroit almost my whole life. And in a culture that moves so quickly, I have spent a lot of my years thinking about how important it is to put down deep roots. To love a place. To know your neighbors. To struggle with the hard and ordinary. To watch trees grow. To be able to notice the changing ecosystem of a place. My dad often talked about Detroit as his “place based vocation.” His vocational call was to that city through decades of struggle.
And we had created a beautiful life in southwest Detroit. My partner, two boys, and I lived in southwest Detroit on the street where I grew up. We had chickens and bees and fruit trees. We loved our neighbors and held epic block parties. We started a farmers market to redistribute the abundance we each grew from eggs to honey to homemade queso to tomatoes. We built local economies and practiced mutual aid. We held one another in moments of traumatic violence and celebrated marriages and births. I love that little stretch of dirt. And I loved knowing that my toddlers put the same dirt in their mouths that I had a few decades ago. My roots are deep on that sacred land and I can feel it through my whole body.
“What time is it on the clock of the world?”
And then appeared a job opening for director at Kirkridge Retreat Center in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. It was a place I had fallen in love with as a child where my parents went on retreat. It had a long history of nonviolent resistance, queer theology, and radical hospitality. I lay awake at night with dreams effortlessly pouring of my being. Grace Boggs, an ancestor of Detroit, often asked “What time is it on the clock of the world?” I can feel what a powerful moment this is and while I don’t know how things will unfold, I knew we would need space for movement organizing, places for deep rest to be washed over by beauty, and places of imagination when it comes to climate resiliency. I yearned to be even closer to land- to feel the phases of the moon in my body, to pray each day in the forests, and to keep my hands in the dirt.
This was a collision of total soul and body. And after deep discernment as a family, we left Detroit and moved to Kirkridge.
I yearned to be even closer to land- to feel the phases of the moon in my body, to pray each day in the forests, and to keep my hands in the dirt.
Heidi: Oh, I feel that collision, even from just reading it! Discerning a deep call like that can be such a challenge, though it sounds like that deep yearning helped lead the way. How are you navigating the conditions this collision is creating? How does the dissonance created impact your choices?
Lydia: I tried to walk through this collision with a lot of gentleness, vulnerability, and transparency. I knew that this collision would not only affect me and my family, but also a wide community of beloveds. My partner, Erinn, and I tried to bring community into the discernment process. And when the decision was made, we walked as slowly and intentionally as we could leaving room for shared grief and celebration.
Ultimately, the decision to move to Kirkridge felt like an unstoppable force. It required so much grief and anxiety, yet we couldn’t help but move forward. We let ourselves be carried by this force.
Heidi: Being in a situation that required a lot of grief reminds me of this passage in Collisions of Earth and Sky: “If the world were a house, there would be rooms for gratitude and joy and celebration, but there would also be a room that can only be filled with grief. The house will feel empty until the grief is acknowledged, and the door into hope will be stuck.” You allowed that grief and the door to hope and possibility opened up. What a gift to yourself, despite the hard parts that come with allowing grief the space it needs.
What has this collision taught you about yourself? The world?
Lydia: I, perhaps naively, had no idea how this collision would ultimately erupt. For the first year of this transition, I found myself surrounded in conflict everywhere I turned. I had never experienced anything like it. Looking back, I think it was part of the consequences of letting this collision into our lives. It felt like a cosmic shift.
I learned a lot about trusting myself. I learned to honor the goodness of both pulls in my life. Choosing to leave was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and yet it has brought me more to life. And I want to be alive in this world!
As I look at our world right now, I ache with grief. It feels like our whole planet is experiencing one collision after another. It can feel like too much to bear. Yet, what I have learned is that sometimes it is in those collisions that you stumble upon some of the very best fertile compost. Is it possible to dare to hope that amidst these collisions knew ways could grow and we could all come more to life?
Heidi: An early copy of your forthcoming book, a book that explore that aching, just landed on my doorstep the other day! Can you tell us about a collision you explore in this new work?
Lydia: In This Sweet Earth: Walking with our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse, I am struck by the constant collision of despair and hope that live in my body all the time. Through every page, I am dancing with the anxiety I hold for my children growing up in this time. And yet every time I sat down to write about my kids and the eco-systems that hold us I could not help coming out with hope on the other end.
Perhaps these words from the book name the collision I feel best. “Where are we headed? One possibility is that we get this right. We let our imaginations carry us and our love of this world drive us. And we shift… We transition death-dealing profit systems to life-giving generous systems. We learn to live in new ways and it’s marvelous. Another possibility is that we don’t get it right. Weather gets more volatile. Politics get more deadly. Systems crumble. And we face into the worst.
I don’t know. I can oscillate between both and a million possibilities in the middle.
What I do know is that either way doesn’t change how I want to live. I want to fight like hell and grow tomatoes. I want to worship with the praying mantis and learn how to build composting toilets. I want to play with my kids and sing in the wind. I want to honor the dead and feed the birds. Either way doesn’t change that there can be joy and laughter, awe and wonder, love and community. Either way sharpens my gaze on what matters and what just doesn’t. Either way I want to live humanly and invite our kids into deeper knowing of what it means to be alive on this sweet earth. That is not a bad life and one for which, as a parent, I can give thanks.”
Heidi: Beautiful. I want the same.
What else would you like to share about your current projects?
Lydia: I would love to connect with folks who are also holding these same collisions. You can find This Sweet Earth and ways to get in touch on my website. And we would always love to have you come to Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center. Check out our list of programs and there is always space for personal retreats.
Thank you Heidi. So grateful for this time together.
Have a collision you’d like to explore in this space? Send me an email at heidi@heidibarr.com.