Finding Faith in Humanity with Victoria Hutchins

"Almost everyone is a stranger until you zoom in or pan out."

Greetings, Fellow Miracles-in-Progress,

This week on the podcast, Rainn’s joined by poet and social media phenom Victoria Hutchins!

It’s no wonder Victoria’s found a substantial following online. Her debut, Make Believe: Poems for Hoping Again, is full of glimmers—sharp, quiet, necessary ones. The kind that cut through the noise not with volume, but with clarity. The kind that remind us why poetry matters.

She doesn’t deny that we’re living through a time of crisis. But she puts it in perspective:

the view from the bottom
of the hill we’re dying on

They say we’re killing the Earth, but it’s us we’ll kill in the end.
Earth watched the dinosaurs come and go without breaking a
sweat. She took an asteroid to the face and kept her chin up.
She was here when we came and she’ll be here when we’re gone.

Once our lease runs out and we’re finished warming
and bombing ourselves to death,
Earth will tie up her hair and get to work.

Balsam trees will burst through empty highways
while ivy hurries to hide billboards.
Gale-force winds will uproot building foundations.
Skyscrapers will slump and then fall,
and the dirt underneath will sigh with relief.

Earth will click her tongue while she works.
Those humans didn’t stay very long,
but they sure did make a mess.

It’s easy to feel small in the face of collapse. But Hutchins doesn’t leave us there. She zooms in—or maybe down—into the roots. Into the strange truth that even in isolation, we belong to one another. Even when our lives never touch, we’re all growing from the same soil of oneness.

pando aspen grove

You’re living your life, and I’m living mine.
I’ve never been to the places you frequent.
You’ve never met the people I love.
We’re two parallel lines with our own
daily routines and aches and pains.

Let’s say we beat the odds and cross paths—
our towels are spread out on the same beach,
my car is next to yours on the highway,
your table is next to mine at the diner—
still, we’re nothing to each other.

Almost everyone is a stranger until you zoom in or pan out.
At the beach, we might keep a polite distance in the water
but if you ask the birds, we’re two side-­by-­side dots.
On the highway, we’d stay in our lanes—­but if we crashed,
your insides would look just like mine on the autopsy table.
At the diner, maybe we wouldn’t make eye contact, and would
leave with no idea we’re both from Enola, Pennsylvania:
alone spelled backwards.

Recently someone told me about a forest in Utah
where all the trees share a single set of roots.
The trunks in the East will never touch the ones in the West,
and the leaves in the front are oblivious to the ones in the back
and yet—­at the source, the forest is all one tree.

This kind of vision doesn’t demand grand gestures. It asks only that we look more closely—at the way a mother lets her child bury her in sand, or how a stranger makes space for your car at the beach. It’s a way of seeing that quietly, powerfully reframes the idea of faith.

lost and found

When I lose my faith in humanity, I go to the beach. Any shitty
beach will do. Today, a sun-licked couple headed to their car
hastens to a trot when they see me scanning for spots. Past the
dunes, a mother lets her son bury her in the mealy sand,
smiling like she loves shells in her nooks and crannies. A family
pulls wet Coronas from a Styrofoam cooler, music wafting from
their speaker, softening the silence between people who know
everything and nothing about each other.

On the shore, a leathery man rubs a metal detector over the
low tide line. When I ask him if he is looking for anything in
particular, he shakes his head.

Even when it beeps, it’s usually trash.
But once, I found a 14-karat bracelet, so I keep the faith.

I walk away, wheels turning. There’s an idea: A faith
you don’t have to find. A faith you can just keep.

In the end, what lifts these poems isn’t just their honesty. It’s their sense of wonder. It’s a cliché to say life is the greatest miracle. But then a poem reminds you: clichés only exist because they’re so often true—and so rarely felt. And it’s the task of poetry to help us feel it again for the first time.

miracles

They don’t make them like they used to.
Well, except at Newport Beach, where the water
glows in the dark. And murmurations, the way
thousands of starlings move as one, like a wave.
Oh, and have you ever been to Eternal Flame Falls?
There’s a nook in the waterfall with a little flame
that never goes out.

Of course, everything has an explanation these days.
Bioluminescent algae, natural gas seeps, all that.
And I read that sometimes the wind actually does
blow out the flame, and hikers relight it.

So, if miracle isn’t the word you’d use to describe
thousands of human hands moving as one—
like a beating heart—to guard a flame
that has nothing to offer them, then
what would you call it?

As the late, great poet Andrea Gibson said: “Awe is the greatest medicine of all.”

The world can feel like a mess—but even in the mess, something glimmers.

May the great mystery find you when you least expect it,
The Soul Boom Team

Victoria Hutchins is a TikTok and Instagram poet and yoga teacher with a social media community of over 1.5 million followers. Prior to her current career, Victoria was an attorney at one of the largest law firms in the world and then at a publicly traded tech company. She holds a bachelor of arts from Columbia University and a juris doctorate from Vanderbilt University. Victoria is always seeking beauty, hope, and truth in the mess of life. Her work is an invitation for readers to join her in the search.