Sidebar: When the Curtains Rip Open
There's audio for this. 👀
When I write this1, I’m in Denver International Airport waiting for a delayed flight. About thirty high school student-athletes are milling around the boarding area. I’m staring through the giant bay window to the world outside where the magicians of Baggage Delivery and Transportation are at it again.
There are—I just re-counted—26 vehicles parked in a rough V shape one floor down from me. Some of them will peel off the closer we get to boarding time: the handlers have emptied them of cargo and they’re headed back to the terminal to pick up bags and more. Other buggies and carts will take their place, refilling these planes with snacks and suctioning out the waste of the day.
As the late afternoon sunlight softens into sunset, I’m mostly tuning out the hum of other travelers and listening to a playlist featuring the late D’Angelo, who became an ancestor all too soon this week. I’m stretching out my legs away from my seat and flexing my ankles and calves before we all cram into the plane. Perhaps it’s the fatigue of travel; perhaps the tug of grief; perhaps a tepid stew of both. My legs ache. Heart aches a little too.
I spent yesterday strolling up and around the foothills of Boulder, CO. For the last 11 years, I’ve visited this area with close friends every fall. We’ve built up something of a routine around our few days in town; from logistics to clean-up it’s become a fine art. We’re excellent at hanging out.
The 5,400-ft elevation in Boulder makes my chest feel alive. Clear skies are a ridiculous burnished Pantone-quality blue. Even though we never know whether the mountains will deliver snowfall, flooding, or late summer sun, packing for Boulder means packing for three seasons, so we’re always prepared. Inside, my friends and I make and buy and eat delicious food together. We catch up on the year, problem-solve work and life, trade books and pens and podcasts. Our time together is a treasure to me.
This week, we decided that 2025 would be our last visit to these mountains, at least for the next little while. I know we’ll find other places to gather. We’ll set other times and ways to remind ourselves how to cut through the chaos of our age, how to turn spiritual insight into practical wisdom, how to confront foolishness and resolve conflicts, how to feel deeply, to laugh from our bellies, share snacks without reserve, and wrestle with the call to treat everyone we meet with sacred care even when we don’t particularly feel like it.
This morning, as we closed our gathering, I wrote a few lines in my notebook. As we rode to the airport, I read those words to my friends, and they told me to circulate them. So that’s what’s happening here.
I’ve been keeping a solid writing schedule since June, with 40,000 words booked to the Building a Moral Economy project and more to come this fall as I settle back in. I’ve also been working through what I think God, the cosmos, and Murphy (he of Murphy’s Law) have dropped into the lap of this generation of Americans. I’m going to publish it in the next month.
The short version is that the United States crossed a dysfunctional threshold this year.2 Despite the turmoil, maybe even because of the turmoil, there’s is no better time to draft out a healthier social vision than the one working itself through the headlines, the job market, the grocery store prices, and the protest lines. This is when we practice declaring with our attention, time, and money that what’s broken is not the end of our story.
My best guess is that turning this around is a 60-80 year job. I think it’ll take at least that long to knit a new vision for this culture and make it lived reality. It won’t be something that those of us who are alive now will touch. It’s something we’re going to need to lay down for the generations to follow us: the little ones will touch it, if we start now.
Well, that’s all very noble, right? It also sucks a big one.
I don’t love the idea of several decades of destabilization, and I can think of so many other things I’d rather do. So whoever keeps producing Unprecedented Times™ can meet me outside.
But this moment is like blinking into the light when the curtains have been ripped open. What I’m not going to do is close the curtains again.
The first step is recognition. Apocalypse is just an unveiling. And the point is not to flinch in the face of that unveiled reality but to choose what we do next.
Apocalypse
There's a point at the end of summer when fall announces herself. It's the leaf on the ground with the curled yellow edge. Chilled air through the window from 6-8 a.m. The shadow behind the lamppost: now a little grayer, now a little shorter. Change is afoot. And there's no way to hold it back. Wear your short pants if you want to. Feel the goosebumps climb the back of your calves. Deny it with no coat. Let the cold bite into your lungs. But fall is here, and winter is coming. Tend fires. Roast vegetables. Gather strength. I'm becoming a little wiser about my own seasons. Pulling in with the darkening of the light. Sending roots down into the hardening ground. Trusting that—like the caterpillar on the cusp of destruction— I'll see my own imaginal cells unfold on the other side of winter, an unrecognizable form but perfectly me, and primed for migration to the world of enough we and so many others are planting.
But first, rest, and as I say, tend fires. Roast vegetables. Gather strength.
Winter’s coming, and no one will be able to hold back spring.
Until next time,
Keisha
Wrote it then; recorded it later.
Let me know if you liked having an AV option. I’ll get better at the editing.
Understatement! And not everyone’s ok. If someone you know was ok a couple of months ago, check in with them again.