CARROT QUINN

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My online course on thru-hiking the PCT starts Saturday!

January 2, 2020 / carrot quinn

So if you’re still thinking about signing up- here’s your chance! 🌝

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← Another sample video from my PCT Thru-Hiking Course
Mutual Aid →

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Is it just me or do the sensual pleasures of embodiment hit different rn
Mutual aid, part three. I/we/none of us know what we are doing right now. We do the best we can, a small thing, but is it enough. Has anything that any well meaning person ever done ever been enough. I don't know. ✨ Shopping for families in need in the Keeling neighborhood means going to the grocery store, which I imagine to be one of the highest exposure places. We have gloves now, we're trying to figure out how to get (homemade) masks. We leave our deliveries on doorsteps. We don't touch doorbells. Is it enough? I don't know. At the grocery store yesterday there were limits on how much each person could buy. We talked to the manager to get special permission, since we were shopping for many families. The manager seemed shell shocked, manic, exhausted. We filled up two carts. I tried not to think too hard about all the recirculated air. A neighbor donated a box of lemons. A local farm sold us winter squash at a very low price. We packed fifteen boxes to deliver to families that had called the Keeling hotline requesting groceries. ✨ The starbucks at the mall announced on the Tucson mutual aid facebook group that they were giving away all their ready to eat items, starting at 8 a.m. (Second slide) I picked up a dozen bags of cold pressed juice, breakfast sandwiches and prosciutto trays and took them directly to a trailer park in Keeling. I gave them to a couple of families with a bunch of kids and a wild daschund that wouldn't stop nipping at my heels. I didnt go inside the houses. I didn't touch anything. ✨ This is a wild time, it's not a boring time. It's a strange, kaleidoscoping, shape shifting time, we're being carried along in a flash flood and none of us know what the land will look like when the water recedes again. Every moment is Schrödinger's cat, a different reality splitting off, a braid in the river and here we are in the main channel, still being carried along. Next to us, bobbing in the water, is everything we've ever known to be true. All of our attachments, the ephemeral systems we believed into existence. It's a very hard time but it is not a boring time. ✨ Gofundme link in profile for Keeling mutual aid 🖤
@muffyjdavis and I hiked in the Catalinas and there were flowers; likely this area will close soon/has already become unsafe due to popularity and that was a heavy thing to hold; there is so much to grieve right now, literally every living human is grieving- but the flowers are not grieving and that makes me feel (blissfully, stupidly) like everything will be ok, even while every nerve in my body is sounding the alarm. ✨ It's wild to try and hold these two ideas at once, that things are both not ok and that someday they will be ok again- "It's a long trail," as they say in long distance hiking, i.e. don't go too hard right out the gate or you'll injure yourself and your hike will be over. And yet, I can't stop reading the news, I can hardly sleep. I also need to find a place to live- my housing (the backyard where I was parking my van) is over (I was supposed to be headed to Alaska rn but I'm not going this summer afterall) and looking for housing is really hard right now- there are wild amounts of uncertainty in ever sector of American life. So I am essentially homeless for the time being and I keep worrying about what if I get sick? ✨ Anyway. These flowers in the Catalinas are stoked about the sunshine and the wet spring we're having here and the ponderosas are entirely unbothered. Swipe thru to see Muffy peeing on a campfire we found that hadn't been put out properly. 📍Tohono O'odham and Yaqui lands
Living in a van in my friend's backyard/not having my own indoors space in these times in kinda terrifying but it DOES mean that I can leave the city for the land of saguaros on a whim and co-regulate with the desert globemallow so there is that
Mutual aid, part 2: Humans are communal animals. Together, we survive. Alone, we do not. We need each other on a deep, intrinsic level. It's actually really beautiful. Especially when everything feels like it's unravelling. We literally need to step it up and build community and learn to care for each other or modern civilization will fall apart. ✨ My cute neighbors and I have only flyered a quarter of the neighborhood, and yet the Keeling Neighborhood Mutual Aid Grocery Deliveries Hotline has been ringing off the hook. As of today, we've dropped off 20 grocery deliveries. We've taken food to disabled folks, homebound folks, families with small children. The need in this neighborhood is vast, and it's only going to grow larger in the coming weeks. Between us, we can make so many connections, and brainstorm so many solutions. And being this busy is honestly the only thing that quells the panic that I feel. ✨ The link to the gofundme for this project is in my profile- now with added financial transparency! I wouldn't donate to a fundraiser I didn't trust, and I don't expect you to either. Click the links in the gofundme for a spreadsheet of our expenses and a folder with photos of all our receipts. ✨ You can do this in your community too! Check the "mutual aid" highlight in my profile for tons of templates 🤓
Mutual Aid. I live in a working class neighborhood. I started thinking about a possible future lockdown- what would happen if parents were unable to work, if elderly folks and sick folks were homebound. How would people eat and get the supplies they needed. I thought- what if I organized with some of my neighbors and, in the coming weeks, delivered food and supplies to people who were in need. How large of an area would we reasonably be able to cover? Probably pretty small. My neighborhood, Keeling, is .6 square miles. According to the internet, several thousand people live here. ✨ I convinced some neighbors to join me in this endeavor and created a signal group for us. I made a flier. On the flier I put a google voice number that I linked to my phone. A friend helped translate the flier into Spanish. I created a google doc form to send to the people who contact me. I went to the store and bought some non-perishables to start with. I set up a gofundme to pay for future supplies. I printed 200 copies of the flier. Today, @muffyjdavis and I handed out 150 of them, and hardly scratched the surface of the neighborhood. While flyering, we met two more neighbors who want to get involved. ✨ From everything I’ve read, a lockdown is the only way to slow the spread of COVID-19 and prevent it from overwhelming our medical systems. So if we want to avoid many thousands of extra preventable deaths due to people being unable to access treatment, we’ll have to do a lockdown. And if we do a lockdown, folks are going to need help. ✨ Small neighborhood networks create decentralized mutual aid that is efficient and manageable. We all live in a lot of different neighborhoods. Between us, there is a lot of organizing that we can do. I’m using my social media platform to raise funds, but you don’t need a social media platform to fundraise, especially if you’re white- white folks have access to more familial and community wealth than anyone. Let's tap our networks and put the word out. ✨ Similar mutual aid efforts are happening in other parts of the country- I copied what these folks are doing and you can too. Links to these and the gofundme are in profile and highlights.

u can also find me on my public facebook page

u can also find me on my public facebook page

Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart: the book

recent posts

  • Mutual Aid March 14, 2020
  • My online course on thru-hiking the PCT starts Saturday! January 2, 2020
  • Another sample video from my PCT Thru-Hiking Course December 29, 2019
  • My course on thru-hiking the PCT is almost here- here’s the syllabus! December 24, 2019
  • L2H day 9: road walk December 15, 2019

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