Danika Tomchinsky-Holland
7 min readJul 5, 2022

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There is no semblance of patriotism in this body — only a deep devotion to the living land I inhabit, and a desire to protect the sanctity of life, wide and encompassing, beyond borders. For me, this day is a day to grieve. The core values on which this nation was supposedly built have been so thoroughly twisted and trivialized since its inception that we do not recognize their true meaning. Freedom? Independence? Freedom depends on safety and choice. The safety to be ourselves — to be soft, feeling beings. We can afford to be soft, feeling beings when we are safe.

Independence is a falsehood, because our existence is not possible without the complex networks of life that formed us and supported us and brought us to this moment. So instead I will talk of sovereignty — which rests on the choice to pursue pleasure and to be the sovereign stewards of our own bodies, much in the same way we must be stewards of the land we inhabit — our bodies an extension of this land from which we sprung.

True freedom is not visible or concrete, though its impacts certainly are. I sense it as an internal field we can access when we accept the natural limits of life and the cycle of reciprocity; when we can relax into the vastness of being in a mutually giving interrelationship. Limits are hard and sensuous lessons. There is freedom in limits.

We inherit a great responsibility to walk with care and compassion as we grow into sovereign parts of the whole. When we observe current events, it’s clear we are collectively failing to step up to this responsibility. True freedom does not mean doing whatever you want, the freedom to cause mindless destruction, to condone, or to allow mindless destruction to occur. True freedom sees death, acknowledges death’s power in helping us live our values in order to die honorably, when the time is right. This country does not know freedom.

Freedom without responsibility is not whole. A concept that doesn’t contain the fullness of its paradoxical nature is not fully formed. This is why I do not trust people who do not question their own moral compass; who experience no doubt; who are unwaveringly righteous in their ideologies. I decided, the other day, to listen as best I could with curiosity to a christian, right wing radio show. This was right after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the speakers were very excited about the news and all the good work they are going to do now on the behalf of God. What really impacted me most was feeling how genuinely and fiercely these speakers believe their claims.

It got me in touch with the part of me that deeply desires to trust that I am unequivocally right; that I am on the right side of history; that my deeds are divinely ordained. What a relief it must be to know that you are on God’s side; to not have to deal in the messy, confusing business of navigating right and wrong on your own; to relinquish moral control. It actually seems quite innocent, when I think about the comfort of submitting to this kind of organized belief. What a relief it must be. Who among us doesn’t at times yearn for that kind of certainty? This is the power of our desire to be right, to be good, to feel protected, to belong. It is so powerful that even in the face of so much death and suffering, we can celebrate living in a country where our right to bear arms and to “protect life” (with no regard for the lives destroyed as a consequence) are championed.

I was indoctrinated, too, with a critical mind and an insistence on holding complexity. So I am deeply skeptical of this kind of certainty being a path towards truth. I understand truth as multifaceted, often elusive, unfixed, paradoxical, and ultimately arrived at through direct experience, while simultaneously holding that there must be core truths that are our pillars and guiding principles. It is often found unexpectedly, and through a process more like wondering, meandering, exploring and challenging. Truth is arrived at through recognizing our mistakes and misunderstandings. It takes work to uncover and uphold. I value listening to perspectives that differ from my own as a part of this process. Though sometimes the idiocy I perceive feels impossible to reckon with, and the gap between understandings so vast it feels irreconcilable.

Lately talking to plants and to the wind seems the saner thing to do. My dreams are beginning to feel more real than waking life. It seems as if the central paradox of our time is widening, its extremes increasing in their intensity. It feels like we are experiencing some wild inversion and things are going backwards or turning inside out. The far left meets the far right in a cyclical dance where seemingly polar opposites swap and meld. Post truth rhetoric abounds and falsehoods turn to facts. Lavish displays of wealth, power and privilege coexist alongside environmental disaster, poverty, violence and oppression. Freedom and “pro-life” reign— as in the freedom to kill and to punish the living. My communities are reeling between feeling everything all at once and addiction, numbing and dissociation. Is this a dream? A nightmare?

And yet, amidst the chaos I get these flashes of what feels like sanity. Moments of feeling the most awake and alive I’ve ever felt; like the time is now and the possibilities are infinite. One moment I am caught in the intricacies of mind attempting to understand our collective reckoning, and the next — a pungent whiff of linden flowers floating along the warm breeze engulfs me, and my world is rocked. I am placed right back into my feeling body and a subtle yet undeniable pull to keep purposefully moving towards that — towards joy and connection at all costs, knowing that the cost of losing it is far greater than any catastrophe alone could bring.

The spirit of the earth is speaking loudly these days. It yearns for us as we yearn for it back. This is a story I am willing to believe in because it is one I have also experienced, and seen the impacts of. From my observations, people who listen to the land seem to hold a sense of responsibility and a more nuanced kind of morality where joy is a central principle.

I am devoted to loving and to joy and pleasure because it is saving me; because it allows me to live in the midst of the nightmarish landscapes from which this sacredness seems devoid. This is my God, so in that I am not so different from anyone else who is saved by their beliefs. We need belief, but belief without question is dangerous. I want to surrender, to trust something — and I’m beginning to think maybe it is necessary to — not in order to escape all moral qualms, but to help us face the unknown and turn towards suffering without caving into despair or apathy.

Freedom without responsibility is not whole. Limits are hard and sensuous lessons. There is freedom in limits. I cannot cross into certainty; I surrender to this limit. I have far more questions than answers. And I think being alive right now means living and breathing right at the nexus of the paradox; the almost unbearable tension between extremes; living with the unnameable and unreconcilable, and within that tension, arriving at joyful devotion. I choose it both in spite of, and because of the tension; both as an antidote to and an expression of my grief, and because I must insist on a world in which we are free to experience joy.

Just over a month ago I was driving solo through the deserts of Nevada and Utah. It was the end of May, right after hearing about several shootings during a month where the number of mass shootings in the U.S. was unprecedented. My journal reads:

Driving through dust & sage brush

Big clouds on the horizon expanding outward &

toward me, the rolling landscape approaching, widening,

& dissipating at my edges, lightning fast.

Hurtling forward like this — i find my cry.

I weep for so much collective loss -

a moment of spiritual sanity, finally.

We are so lost that even many of our elders

and our leaders throw their hands up saying “we don’t deserve this world.”

I weep for our loss of purpose, belonging, connection, pleasure.

The loss of eros, and of our story -

The story of the collective in which we play a crucial role.

We have forgotten how we need life, and how life needs us.

“Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
― Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

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Danika Tomchinsky-Holland

Danika is a multidisciplinary artist whose paintings, poetry, prose and song explore and celebrate the body, eroticism, paradox and pleasure.