I’ve been thinking a lot about my trip to Minnesota a couple of years ago. I found incredible people who nicknamed me “Alabama” and encouraged me to explore their home with great abandon! There were ice lanterns, moon dogs, howling wolves, frozen lakes, ice fishing (wow), and an incredibly inspiring weekend of both peacefulness AND resilience. I reckon Minnesotans are used to holding the both/and (e.g. -20 temperatures mixed with the heat that radiates in your feet and hands thanks to warmers). I couldn’t quite grasp the feeling of sweating while cross-country skiing across a frozen lake or the unbelievable feeling of jumping in that very lake after sitting in a 200 degree sauna. I learned so much about myself that weekend and will never forget the way Minnesota’s landscape and its people helped me find the courage, resilience, curiosity, and adventure I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. I guess that’s also why my heart breaks for Minnesota — and all of us — at this moment. Then I found The Marginalian in my inbox this morning and this quote by Bertrand Russell helped me find the words. Will we ever learn that we all belong to each other and to this world? It is, indeed, time to become immense.

“It is a time to become immense.

To become immense means to recall how embedded we are in an animate world — a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty. Everything we need is here. We only need to remember the wider embrace of our belonging to woodlands and prairies, marshlands, and neighborhoods, to the old stories and the tender gestures of a friend. To become immense also includes the radical act of welcoming all of who we are into the story. Nothing excluded. We become large through accepting all aspects of our being — weakness and need, loneliness and sorrow, shame and fear — everything seen as essential to our wholeness, our immensity.” – Bertrand Russell

If you are interested in the entire article (trust me, it is worth reading in full), here is the link: https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/01/13/francis-weller-ordinary/

I love you Alisa.