Could This Be The Answer?
When life is a house turned on its head.
“If we don’t want to live in a world of trauma,
we must become those who walk away from Omelas.”1
This is long, but worth the read- I recorded it as a time saving option for you to listen to instead.
Two weeks before the war broke out, I was in the UK, and had a cab driver tell me,
“It’s good you left America when you did. America is going to join forces with Israel and bomb Iran.”
I responded, “You’re speaking with the confidence of someone in the know. Where is your information coming from?”
He said, “Before I came to the UK and could only get work as a taxi driver, I was an engineer in special forces in Iran. Like you, I am a refugee.”
He didn’t charge me for the ride, although I offered. It was just from one end of the street to the other. He took pity on me when he noticed I’d shopped for groceries as if I had an American SUV to pile them into instead of two middle-aged arms more used to holding love than bundles of household sundries.
The entire exchange felt the way intuitive guidance pierces: out of nowhere and exactly what we need.
I stepped out of the car thanking him for his kindness, sharing a prayer for world peace, and asking myself, “Am I a refugee?”
Refugee: A person who was forced to leave their country
in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
While I can philosophically compare the way it felt to the way it actually was in America for me personally, to “escaping” any of the aforementioned, I am not factually a refugee, nor am I seeking asylum, per say, and I don’t want to insult the traumatic experience of those who actually are by comparing myself to them with hyperbole.
While I do love my country, it feels like a one-sided relationship that takes more than it gives. I can no longer afford to live there within my means. Therefore, I do consider myself an immigrant in search of an improved quality of life, one in which I’ve found in the past to be abroad.
I knew it was going to be hard and did it anyway.
Prescient visions came to me months before our departure date that this would be a journey worth embarking upon but that it would not start off easy. One was that my daughter and I would become ill (which is to be expected all things considered) and the other included my husband staying behind. When I told him of my visions, he assured me that he wanted to be with us every step of the way and that he could nearly guarantee it because we could not afford otherwise.
I responded, “I’ve come to trust my visions. Something unexpected is going to happen that keeps you here when we have to leave. I will feel torn between staying to help you and going to help our daughter. Please just promise me you won’t injure yourself or become too ill just to avoid leaving when we do. If you are not ready to leave, simply say so and stay.”
Where is home?
My husband and my daughter do not feel the same about America; she has never considered it her home and he always has. There is inherent ambivalence in the water of decisions he must drink. I have compassion for him, but empathy for my daughter; one is care, the other experiential. We cannot separate ourselves from ourselves.
First we stayed in America to be near family but being near didn’t mean being closer. Giving up everything we had built in other places to be closer geographically to family did not mean connecting anymore than we had when we lived thousands of miles apart and only really conversed a few times a year to wish one another a Happy Birthday. We love our families but we are not close to them in the sense of spending holidays together or being included in weddings, funerals or other such traditional events that one imagines when they think of “family,” so why stay close in proximity to that which always feels far away no matter the distance?
Then my husband wanted to stay in America as long as his mother was still alive, even though he rarely saw her. They did speak nearly every day especially the last three years of her life after her husband (his father) died. However, once our daughter was 18, she did not have to wait for her father to decide where he wanted to live before she made the choice about where she planned to go: abroad.
She didn’t want to leave us, in fact, she said she could not take this wonderful opportunity if I did not accompany her. Traveling with health challenges is simply too hard on one’s own- no one who is disabled should have to manage by themselves, but of course, too many do. She knows her psychological strengths as well as her physical limitations. There will likely come a time when she ventures out on her own, even with her challenges; this however, was not that time.
Who do we owe our loyalty to?
Before I gave birth to our daughter, my husband and I agreed that if there were complications during labor, and there were, that he was to stay with the baby and not me. As a child, I was an unwanted and unprotected. I was scheduled to be placed for adoption until the day I was born and my mother saw my skin color was lighter than she expected and decided to keep me. As an adult, I became an advocate for foster children. I have formed strong opinions about the responsibility of bringing a child into this world. If you’re not going to protect and provide for your children, until they can do so for themselves, don’t have them.
The family rule has always been to tend first to who is most vulnerable and in greatest need. Nevertheless, I let my husband know that under no uncertain terms would I allow my daughter to miss the chance to have her short film produced in association with Aardman so that he could remain in America until he was able to leave. After all, if he stayed behind, he would have his family of origin. If I accompanied our daughter, she would have hers.
My husband and I have lived apart before and if necessary we will do so again, it’s called maturity. One doesn’t stay committed to a relationship for nearly 40 years by expecting their partner to be someone they are not or do something they are not ready or able to do. In this family, there is freedom for each to be who they are and unconditional love and support no matter their choice. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and we can always find a way to work it out.
And so it goes…
I left idyllic 65 degree, angelic lit, morning beach walks along the California coast—for Bristol, England, and 28 days of angular rain in the shape of heartburn and clouds that look like melting metal.
I’m here to support my daughter in following her dreams and find a way to live a simple life more fully within my financial means. I’m doing so while living with head-in-a-vice stress levels because we’ve been unable to rent through the red tape of residency and relegated to living in airbnbs which are far more expensive than renting alone. Secure housing is a fairytale we want to believe so we keep repeating it.
Why does this feel familiar?
The first week here brought me back to the last winter I spent in New York City in 2002/2003, when I made a similar yet, opposite choice as my daughter. My one woman show, To Breed or Not To Breed, had won first place as best screenplay in the International Independent Film Festival which granted me a performance at Madison Square Garden, new agents and a chance to pursue mounting a production of my show on Broadway.
It was record breaking cold and snow. Every life chore felt measurably harder than it should be. I could no longer afford to live bi-coastal in the pursuit of a career as a performing artist. I was trying to decide whether to stay in NYC permanently or move back to LA. I’m a New Yorker at heart, but a California born comfort junkie and my husband was in Los Angeles. As two busy, self-employed artists, we were fine living apart for months at a time but we didn’t want to do so indefinitely. Since I had stayed in LA for a decade for him, he left the choice to me as to whether we both moved to NYC.
As I walked home from the corner store for two bags of groceries, I dodged wind force, darted rain bullets like Neo in The Matrix. My umbrella inverted for the last time before I momentarily, publicly lost my religion in frustration. I unleashed some choice, unsavory words that no one could hear over the howling weathered breath that is NYC in the winter. I knighted, in rage, a trash can in Tribeca with that Godforsaken cheap excuse of an umbrella. My eye lashes were forming icicles. My grocery bags whipped against my legs like some Anthony Robbins cultish, self-flagellation practice I never signed up for.
Side question: are people still walking barefoot across fiery coals in his “retreats” to prove mind over matter? Ahhh, the power of marketing a gimmick rarely fails to capture an audience.
I returned back to my 6th floor walk-up, dropped my bags, and collapsed on the stainless steel autopsy table of a cold floor. My decision was made. After struggling to survive the elements in NYC, the choice to move back to the temperate climate of California’s “mortgage weather” (as my friend Deb puts it), became easy.
I needed easier at that stage in life- but those 20 years between 2004 and 2024 were anything but easy. I gave up my career and became my grandmother’s sole caregiver. I had a baby at an “advanced maternal age” who had one health challenge after the next. We fled a stalker who had kidnapped one girl and was threatening to kidnap our girl. We went into a victim protection program, changed our names, and gave up our identity and all those associated with it. We were in hiding for 12 years because stalker laws in California are nearly nonexistent. I was given a devastating medical diagnosis and told I only had 5 years to live. We faced a gut-wrenching betrayal by someone we loved and as a result lost our home and lived in an RV. I spent a third of my life in hospitals for medical management pushing through pain levels so high that my peers were ending their lives over. I hustled every step of the way managing a 9-5 for a major health insurance company (missing my daughter’s milestones), while going back to school at night, and working odd jobs on the weekends (flipping antique furniture, palm reading, reiki practitioner, cooking, caregiving, bartering) - anything to give my daughter all the education, experiences, and tools she needed to break generational trauma and poverty so that when opportunity strikes she would be ready, and she is! During it all, I wrote volumes of books and poetry about all I learned on the way to achieve freedom- to live without fear.
Nevertheless, simply surviving one incredible hardship after another does not a life make and yet, too much comfort can kill us.
Surviving the survival
I watched my husband become a recluse during the pandemic, ordering groceries online, and rarely venturing out to engage with the real world. His intentions were good: to stay alive and protect our immunocompromised daughter from the terror of Covid, but there are negative consequences in going to extremes.
During his four years of self-imposed quarantine, his posture changed, became more hunched over. Everything within him began to slow down. I recognized this pattern in my papa at near the same age 60s, just a few years before he passed away. Something had to change. I was not going to let my husband fall into accelerated aging from stress as my papa had.
In 2024, with our first reprieve in decades from nonstop calamity, we embraced a magnificent opportunity to go to Europe as a family, to support our daughter’s dreams as well as our own. Instead of being congratulated and encouraged by a family member we were excited to share this news with, we were chastised for the choices we were making from someone so Hollywood soft-palmed privileged they would never have survived the life my calloused hands have carried us through. This tainted every lovely thing that followed. My resilience is a fierce roar that echos through my DNA. Each heartbreak became another brick in a wall we learned to rebuild as a bridge to journey onward. Never look at a closed door so long you miss the rows of elevators opening to you.
Magic happened and it happened fast.
I’ve made my bed out of faith in community. I listened to inspired intuition, acted on it, and it paid off. We were accepted into five artist-in-residency programs as an artist collective and traveled to five countries: France, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, and England. We worked on The Unity Project, research to follow in Finland’s successful Housing First footsteps to end homelessness. We were launching our daughter into adulthood as a stop-motion filmmaker while looking for a more affordable place to eventually retire to.
Climbing out of our comfort zones, we were learning new languages, managing without a car, walking everywhere or taking trains and living in community again. Groceries we purchased daily, fresh; not in bulk from Costco with preservatives to keep them “alive” on shelves. The food nourished us.
Our food and housing in France were included at the residency and we ate what they served us. In addition to consuming an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables (just as we did in America), my husband and I partook in everything we were taught was “bad:” clotted cream, butter, brie cheeses, flaky pastries, thick yogurt, amazing eggs with rich creamy pumpkin orange yolks, and all the things doctors told us not to eat if we wanted to keep our cholesterol low. Yet, we were all healthier than we had been in ages, maybe ever (despite getting sick a few times across each country).
In fact, upon our return to America from France, after eating all that fat, my cholesterol was actually lower (and I wasn’t walking more than I do in the states). The difference? The quality of the food and the mental break from a 24/7 news cycle of an endless stream of things to be fearful of and devastated by. Stress plays a larger role in our medical lab results than we are taught to consider.
While in Europe, it was as if my husband was bitten by the Benjamin Button bug. He began to age backwards. His spine straightened. He lost weight. There was a pep in his step I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. His spirit was alive again. His inspiration was bubbling. He was no longer living with constant worry. The dreamer within had awakened and his creative expression was expressing.
Upon our return to America: Impaled by the spike of reality
We were firmly priced out of our California Dream and the incessant news cycle of trauma became the heartbeat of the American Nightmare.
We could have stayed living where we were in a match box home, on a street with no sidewalks, near extended family we rarely saw, with constant wild fire evacuation alerts, flash flood warnings whenever it rained, tsunami warnings posted everywhere we frequented, threats of terrifying pending earthquakes and a cost of living expanding beyond our living wage, but what fun would that be?!2 Our life would only become more fearful, insular and limited the longer we stayed, despite that ever desirable “mortgage weather.”
We spent all of 2025 trying to find a way to get back to Europe. First a house in France appeared, and then bureaucracy made it disappear. One dashed hope after another was weakening us back into the prison of comfort, of living small, isolated, and sitting hunched over computers with dazed eyes from too many hours in front of screens. Every week was a routine of ordering and putting away the things that someone else delivered to us. Our home was beginning to look more like a hoarders nest of a prepper survivalist’s stockroom and less as we designed it to be: an inviting welcoming mat for loved ones to gather around to play music, laugh & converse together, and share good eats.
It was time to sing!
Do you remember what it feels like to sing with a group of people: around a campfire? In a choir? With loved ones at the holidays? It’s healing! Singing creates a vibration in our bodies that heals us from the inside out. Music brings people together and has the power to wash us clean of sticky worries- flypaper that traps dreams, and feeds fears with stolen joy. I will not allow it. I will sing myself and those around me into halls of happiness. This, the ancestors have taught me. Our voices carry and reverberate through our cells.
We must sing, we must persevere!
After our opportunity to start life anew in France fell through, we were waiting to see if our daughter would be accepted into Aardman Academy in Bristol, England. It took nearly nine months from her application until her acceptance. From there, everything began to steamroll into motion. Life happened, which is to say death happened- the unexpected- that which can rarely be planned and yet we all know is certain.
In January, my husband’s beloved mother passed away, and as we mourned and grieved the loss, we also had to continue to move forward for our daughter who had to be in England by February 1, 2026.
Then my husband broke his finger, needed minor surgery on his face for a preexisting condition, and time to heal. He could no longer help us pack up the house so that we wouldn’t be paying rent on two places at once. My amazing chosen family (dear friends) drove 14 hours round trip to come and help me finish all that I could on my own. My husband had to stay behind to tie up loose ends whilst my daughter and I forged onward.
This meant that the rent we had budgeted for in Europe, that we could have afforded if all things went according to plan, was now in effect tripled- leaving us in a perpetual state of housing insecurity.
The antidote Aldous Huxley left us, to combat the dystopia he predicted.
My daughter and I have pronounced psychic abilities, including telepathic experiences in our sleep. In our dreams, the ghosts of George Orwell, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley, have visited us both. These men laugh at my attempts to encourage others to read their works as a warning of what’s to come if they do not. Finally, one of them offered something better, a solution!
It’s just a string of words that became my “chrome yellow” brick road, and when I share them, perhaps they will be yours as well. These are not words from his most famous dystopian novel, Brave New World; nor from his utopian novel, Island, but rather a lesser known, precursor to the two from 1921, a satirical novel called, Crome Yellow. They were somewhat “throw away lines” intended as a hedonistic insult but they caught my attention as a potential antidote to the growing dystopian haze we are all becoming accustomed to as “normal.”
In my dream, Aldous whispered, “Be Eros darling, it’s your only hope at happiness.” Repeating to me in my restless sleep on a tattered silk pillowcase from home and a Breathe Right Strip across my nose, “The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.”
“Aldous, I replied,
Nature introduces us to the plant that is the antidote
before exposing us to the snake with the venomous bite.”
I took Eros, in this sense, to be less about romance or eroticism and more philosophical and psychological, simply meaning: love, positive life force, joy of living, joi de vivre. This I embrace with all my being as the spirit of Awen, as taught to me by my daughter, Gracie Justice.
Awen, from Welsh Mythology, is the inspired human, the muse, the magic that turns creative thought into creative expression. It’s the mid-life poet, the mature musician, and the young stop-motion filmmaker who fill your head and heart with so much hope you can’t help desire to become a benefactor to their success, as gratitude for the inspiration they provide in igniting your own light within.
It’s the belief expressed in this passage from my book, Freedom, “At any given moment, there is positive and negative coexisting in life. Therefore, our point of view is based on where we place our focus and attention—literally, where we point our view. Being grateful for the good we have is not a denial of the tragedy and despair that exists in life. It’s a choice as to which reality we choose to linger on the most. Gratitude for what we have often has a way of providing answers for how to address the suffering that may surround us at any given moment. It’s not a matter of one or the other—gratitude or suffering—it’s the integration of both. Gratitude is the salve to suffering.”
We are all now living in Omelas.
I can choose to read the news once a day to stay informed and also choose not to continue to expose myself to it all day in endless social media scrolls reinforcing fear and rage. Being informed is realizing there is a propaganda machine in the media that is intended to anger, sadden and weaken us. There is a system in place that wants us to overconsume negativity until we reach:
1. A state of reactive rage that often burns out before it accomplishes any sustainable results.
2. A state of absolute demoralization and sadness so deep we completely check out.
3. A state of surrender from being weakened to the point of hopelessness and inaction.
There is a middle way that is more effective.
Yes, there is a war going on and many people are suffering in various ways all over the world. Can we do something about it? If yes, great, we take action. If no, then where can we place our energies to make the biggest difference in securing our freedoms while helping to ease the suffering of others?
I can’t feed every hungry person in the world, but I can share a part of a meal each day with a hungry stranger.
I can’t fix the problems of the planet, but I can help my neighbor, my friends, and my loved ones a little each day in any way I can.
I can’t end suffering, but I can change my focus from what is hurting to what is helping.
I do not have to turn a blind eye to change the way I see.
The world is full of more hope and goodness (or at least just as much) as it is despair and tragedy, but if all we look at is what’s wrong in the world we stop seeing what’s right. As has been said by others before me, that which we focus on grows, it becomes our whole purview. We play a major role in how we see the world by what we choose to see.
As Bob Dylan wrote, “The answer my friends is blowin’ in the wind.” Which is to say that it’s both obvious and all around us and yet also, seemingly elusive.
“Ignorance is bliss” is often an arrow slung at those who see the bad but focus on the good – as if only focusing on the bad will somehow make life better.
Sometimes, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” is true, as in whilst we were in Europe in 2024, reading the news only once a day, we were informed but not inundated. The news was doing what it’s suppose to do: keep us informed, not what it’s become: a sort of addictive, numbing mind control of terror. When we stopped ingesting it more than 20 mins a day, it was no longer traumatizing us. We were not in a blissful state of ignorance, after all, we were doing research on the homeless populations of each country and offering mutual aid wherever we were. If we are to control the controllables, “It’s not what we know that matters, but what we practice.”3
In the film, Life is Beautiful, the main character navigates the horrors of a concentration camp with playfulness, love, and imagination; never for one second forgetting that his life is on the line. We must remember the power we have over where we place our focus- not to ignore atrocities we might be able to prevent, but to continue to create goodness so that atrocity is not all that we see.
Eros & Awen
It is in that spirit of Eros and Awen that I am present for the sun that’s peeked out twice since I’ve been in Bristol, the warmth on my skin, the free art given to us by Banksy (and other equally talented, but lesser known artists) as murals across England,
the charm of the house boats on the River Avon,
the delight of the Bristol Light Festival,
overgrown fields of wild daffodils that grace the gravitas of the bricks and mortar placed hundreds of years ago,
the vibrancy of a thriving artist community, breathing and dancing with talent wherever we go, the joy in my daughter’s heart, the creative works that await and this is why we do hard things.
Simple isn’t always easy and full isn’t always busy.
There are natural consequences to the choices we have made to follow our dreams. Nomads are homeless. They give up the security of one place for the freedom to experience others. Every choice has its risks and rewards. There will come a time when this lifestyle may not be possible due to health challenges, finances, or the instability of the world. We are searching for our forever home, where we can spend joyous times with chosen family and friends, where we can live within our means, where we can be of service to those around us and express ourselves creatively and freely.
We are the ones who walk away from Omelas.
To get to this place, you can read more about our journey in these short posts published in notes February 2026:
Had an Airbnb attempted break-in and fire alarms go off, not once but twice
still facing housing insecurity
My ask of you
I don’t want a hand out, I want a hand up. I’ve been wrting on the internet since it was possible in the early 1990s. I do not use AI only HI (human intelligence). If you have a mainstream publisher, please make a formal introduction on my behalf. I’d like to receive a lucrative publishing deal with film rights to my fast-paced memoir so that I can pay my way through my own works.
If other authors can profit from my writing, why can’t I?
Thank you for your support. I truly appreciate it, and you.
After I witnessed an unknown poet have her work usurped, I was given the legal advice to place the following © date and statement on all my work: This concept/theory/poem is original to Sage Justice. If you use it, please give credit and link to original work. Thank you. www.SageWords.org © October 29, 2025.
Sage Justice is an award-winning poet, author, critically acclaimed performing artist, and intensely sincere, bold humanitarian activist.
Freedom is available where all great audiobooks are offered. Thank you for your support. Book promo by Gracie Justice, music by Geoff Grace, courtesy of Ferver Records.
From COURAGE, by Sage Justice. Omelas is a reference to Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, Those who walk away from Omelas
Punchline provided by Gracie Justice
The first line in the book FREEDOM, by Sage Justice
Brilliant writing, Sage. So glad you recorded it.
Thanks for the recording -- your voice is lovely, Sage. Wish I were there to help with your groceries.
That is so messed up that your mom only wanted you for your lighter skin color. I imagine that she didn't value you for what's inside of you, and I can identify.
Love that you're sharing your travels here and interspersing them with wisdom. So true that every choice has its risks and rewards.