Finding Refuge

Red-headed Woodpecker. Photo by Trey Gosz

Dear Friends, Seekers, Imaginers,

I recently had a dream in which a terrorizing male voice ordered me to pack a suitcase and be at a train station at daybreak. I woke with a pounding heart, as if the dream reality had morphed into day reality. For several seconds, the Gestapo had paid a visit.

I did not ask for this dream. None of us asks for our nightmares, and yet our unconscious minds are intent on alerting us to the unspoken terrors within. I did not want to be terrified in my sleep, but given the current state of our country, and the ancestral trauma in my lineage, my dream is not a surprise.

Those who interpret dreams as prophecy might take this one as a warning, but I view it as a portrait of a psyche in distress and at the mercy of vicious forces beyond her control. It's my dream, but it’s also a collective dream that many others may be having with variation in the details. The dream makes palpable the threat of exile or worse, the destruction of one’s sense of safety, of belonging, and of home. For many in this country, this is not a dream; it’s a bitter truth.

Refuge. Refugee. Each day, these words take on greater heft and personal meaning. Born here, I feel like a refugee in my own country. This is an internal condition, an affliction of heart and soul. I am not being deported to Rwanda, but the values that I hold dear and try to live by are being undermined by my government. I wonder if I still belong.

For the past year, in preparation for my newest book, Wild Freedom: The Princess Who Found Her Name/On Fairy Tales, Imagination, and the Creative Mind (launching in March 2026), I’ve been thinking and writing about the psychological and archetypal implications of fairy tales. The depiction of good and evil in fairy tales is not subtle: the benevolent wise fish versus the evil troll. Tricksters like Rumpelstiltskin or the Devil himself are easily identified and outwitted by a crafty heroine/hero.

Fairy tales can take us in so many directions. (See, for instance, “Using Fairy Tales to Find Hidden Parts of Yourself” or “How Snow White and Her Cruel Stepmother Help Us Cope with Evil.”) Fairy tales were originally teaching stories that alerted their listeners to dangers they might encounter in life: malicious greed, narcissism, predation. They were also instruction manuals on how to recognize and deal with evil. Pretend to obey the witch, then push her into the oven.

How do we understand evil today? How do you think about evil? Does it exist? Should we view evil in the context of a troubled mind or mental illness, or in religious terms as the absence of good? Privatio boni.

After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus responded to a question about the militant Algerian independence movement. He said, “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” His stance was in support of Algerian independence from France but against political violence. Camus valued the individual above abstract ideology. The value of a single life is at the core of the Talmudic teaching, “Whoever saves a single life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

It seems almost archaic to speak of evil in postmodern times, and yet cruelty, resentment, and revenge are poisoning public spaces, and many are endangered and suffering. In fairy tales, the hero/heroine is tasked with restoring harmony to the land and, by extension, to themselves. The hero is an outcast, a wanderer, a refugee who develops character through cleverness, kindness, and courage. Refuge, the tales suggest, is to be found in the self and the actions we take to preserve our integrity.

So where do I find refuge in a daily life rife with incoming news so increasingly chaotic and brimming with tragedies? Here’s my list in no special order: family, friendship, hikes in new places, my Merlin bird-identifying app, Maisie the dog, cloud watching, summer nights, ice-cold showers, hummingbirds. Laughter, wherever I can find it. Libraries and books. My writing, my writing, my writing. (If you are looking for inspiration to start writing, please check out the new writing prompt on my website.)

I’d love to hear your list. You can reach me by replying to this email or at dale@dalemkushner.com.

If you’d like to dive deeper into the experience of refuge from various perspectives, here are some books, fiction and nonfiction, for your interest.

Ellis Island and Other Stories by Mark Helprin

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

At Home in the World: Sounds and Symmetries of Belonging by John Hill

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden by Stanley Kunitz

Otherwise by Jane Kenyon

As always, with care and gratitude for your presence in my life,

Dale

P.S. I believe in meaningful coincidences and synchronicities. The day I wrote this newsletter, I attended a talk given by an immigration lawyer from the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison, where a small group of dedicated volunteers and pro bono immigration lawyers provide legal representation to those facing deportation and immigration issues.

As I write about the importance of refuge in our lives, I feel obligated to share the brutal reality of people who are urgently seeking sanctuary and a better life in this country. Masked and hooded ICE agents are here in Wisconsin, including Madison, pulling people from their jobs and homes, and even outside the courtrooms where their fate is being legally decided.

It’s crucial for each of us to still feel the shock of these aggressive and malevolent acts. We are not characters in a dystopian novel. We are not fantasy characters in a horror series, running from aliens, and this is not a movie. This is our country, our lives. We are more than onlookers; we participate in writing the story.