Week 23
On departures and returns
This newsletter is my part of an ongoing conversation among colleagues who’ve had a rough week. I share two or three pieces of the puzzle that feel the most important, hazard a guess about what to expect next, and offer at least one useful thing to do.
MEETING THE MOMENT: 2025-06-27
I spent this week out in the field - USC’s Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island, to be specific. Last week, I wrote about how excited I feel about Storymakers, the program that we host on the island, but what I had forgotten is just how much pulling into the dock feels like coming home. Marine research stations shaped me: some of my most important summers were spent diving and dissecting fish in Bermuda, Jamaica, Belize, and Mexico. If the memories weren’t so vivid, it would be hard to believe that I got to live that life for a little while.
This week has felt similar in that way. I had a chance to leave my day-to-day reality for a brief while, and it was an incredible luxury. It was also exhausting! Our program is tightly choreographed and in constant moving. Storymakers is intellectual and emotional; it is strategic and creative; it is all the best things. It made me desperately wish that the reality I return home to was more like the reality we built together.
It made me think of you.
All week, I wondered what I would say here, and if I would send the newsletter at all. This was Week 23. I was far away, so I need you to talk to me about it.
What’s happening now
I have not even begun to process what I’ve seen of Supreme Court news, and until I do, it lives as just one part of a miasma of pain and indignity. I hated reading about how NSF is being kicked out of its own headquarters. There are so many facets of the outrage, but I keep thinking about the staff who moved to Northern Virginia earlier this year, on short notice, when return-to-work orders were issued in January. I think about how little notice or input staff had about a move that is due to take place ‘“as quickly as possible.” They deserve better - so much better. So do the NOAA scientists who were fired, rehired, and left holding bills for health care coverage they never received? I don’t know what to say, except as I have been saying - I think our solutions must be found in collective action. So I am glad to see good news for the University of California faculty and staff who have filed the first class action lawsuit against the government agencies wreaking havoc on research grants. Judge Rita Lin has now given provisional class certification to all University of California faculty whose grants have been terminated for their focus on equity and diversity or who never received a specific explanation. The mechanics of class action suits and how they interplay with the latest Supreme Court decisions is something I’ll be working to understand next week.
What’s next & what to do
I can’t tell you what you need right now, but I know what I need to do: take a breath, take a break, and find my peace with the re-entry. We have so much work ahead of us, but we have such incredible company.
I am reminded of what Clarissa Pinkole Estes writes in Letters to a Young Activist in Troubled Times:
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires ... causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
We can. We must. So be it.
Liz