As some of you already know, most of the time I write about love. Because of that, I spent a lot of time this summer staring at a blank screen, waiting for the right words to spill from my fingers. They never did. There was not much to either sew or harvest. Imagine if we had actually kept track of the ways we’d spoiled our earth and its residents.
I have also said that I cannot pretend to have the authority or the wherewithal to distill discomfort the way some of my more well-versed counterparts do. And even for them, I doubt that perfect phrasing is entirely possible for this period of profound change. In a lot of ways, I lack not the capacity to feel, but the right to complain. On days we can’t push the needle, it leaves us little room to do anything aside from feeling this change.
And so, from this place of perpetual feeling, we are all seeking to flee. It’s been months of unrest now. It’s at the point where we’re not reaching for a cure so much as we are just desperate for a break. More and more often, I catch myself curled into my partner’s shoulder, not because it’s a solution, but because it’s a tactile way to concede. I can let down my guard for a moment, my eyes close, and for a quiet moment I am free. When they open, nothing’s really different, but I can briefly breathe.
In thinking about the ways I find peace, I realized that perhaps resting briefly in those kinds of moments might help us survive this. I recently read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and one of her final pages contained the following concept. Every living thing on this planet has a gift to give, when it comes to both taking care of and being a citizen of this earth. She notes that all beings must use their gifts to both tend to the earth and to its residents in their own unique way. According to Kimmerer, as human beings, our assigned gift is language. It can be a weapon, but it can also be a salve. What our words can destroy, they can also repair. Our words are at once our gift and our responsibility. We must use them with purpose and care.
So perhaps that’s how we have to move forward. Perhaps there is a place for love right now, after all. We cannot exist in this hurt eternally; we all need a canary in this coal mine that is crumbling as we speak. On winged words, we can be carried somewhere we have never been. To an island of quiet, through stories of love and kindness, two things upon which our darkness cannot feed.
Every issue will contain one of those stories. I am not sure if this is a gift, or just mostly a niche way to procrastinate everything else on my plate. You can be the judge. At the very least, I hope they remind you that in the grey of our days, a flicker of yellow is all that much brighter.