After 5 days in Puerto Vallarta with the best community a girl could ask for, I hopped on a flight to Portland (at my husband’s encouragement) to visit my sister instead of heading straight home.
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“Thank you Jameson,” we say in unison.

No visit to Portland is complete without also spending 3 hours in Powell’s. Powell’s is the world’s largest new & used independent bookstore, and is actually dubbed “Powell’s City of Books”.

It’s absolutely enormous and ridiculously fantastic, with over 68,000 square feet of bookshelves and taking up an entire city block. I can’t imagine anything more beautiful.

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So yesterday at Powell's, in light of *everything* happening in the world, we started searching for Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.

Sold out. Which, seemed wild in a place that has an in-store & online stock of over 4 million books, but also felt like a decent sign.

If you’re not familiar with the title, it’s a novel written in 1993 that actually takes place in the year 2024.

Some freaky on-the-nose happenings in the book include the election of a conservative president vowing to “make america great again” (no, I’m not kidding), fires in LA, the rise of an oligarchy, widespread violence, etc etc etc.

I’m both terrified to read it, and unable to keep myself away.

I did find something else though, an artistic, mini coffee-table style book of her essay "A Few Rules for Predicting the Future." And damn if it didn't hit like a kick to the gut.

Instead of butchering the essay with a summary of my own, here’s a short excerpt:
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​ “So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk.

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The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’

“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

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How fitting is that for today?

It's exactly what Dr. King showed us, that change doesn't come from one person with THE answer. It comes from thousands of people, each being AN answer. Each doing their part. Each choosing to be part of the solution.

It comes from communities coming together to say "actually, we're not going to stand by and let this happen to us."

So while I’m teetering on the edge of wanting to crawl in a hole and becoming Ruth Langmore,

I’m choosing to focus on what I can do.

I can be ONE of the answers. I can use my voice to amplify what matters. I can help build and be a part of communities that lift people up instead of pushing them down.

As Butler says, "the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope."

That's what I’m doing here. Looking ahead. Discerning possibilities. Being one of the thousands of answers.

​​Last night, after our Powell's adventure, my sister and I curled up to watch Fellowship of the Ring. (My first time, bless.)

There's this gut-punch of a scene where Frodo, completely overwhelmed by being chosen to carry this evil-ass ring to Mordor, tells Gandalf, "I wish none of this had happened."

And Gandalf, in all his wizardly wisdom, says "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Damn.

I immediately looked at Madelyn and said “That’s what I’ll have to tell myself every day.”

Between Gandalf, Octavia Butler, and Dr. King, I'm hearing one clear message.

We can wish it was different. We can doomscroll until our eyes bleed and we’ve chewed our cuticles off. Or we can be one of the thousands of answers.

I know where I stand.

Building my banned book personal library,
Olivia

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P.S. The world feels heavy right now. Unfollow accounts that harm your peace. Ignore conversations designed to bait you. Speak up, find a community, and refuse to lose your hope. Maybe it’s the underdog-loving American in me, but I think refusing to give up hope is the most productive, contagious way to bring about the change we wish to see.

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