What we live, as days transform into centuries. What we describe, as we move over the landscape, calling out to dream figures and myths and memories. The future upon us, moving like tides, flooding and then draining back, without explanation or coordination.
We talk in our times of resilience—not because we are the first living world of humankind to face hardship; that has always been so. We talk of resilience, because we are making waves in the geophysical fabric that will make it harder to be human, free, and helpful to one another.
Politics, like baseball, is a game of failure. Most days, the big thing you work for does not happen. It waits, eludes, spins and swirls. Beyond the horizon. Swerving into and out of view like an errant sun. If you only look when pushed to, you may never see it.
Do we have enough of anything that we need? Do we agree on the meaning of the word ‘need’ and where it directs our attention? Is this yet another reason to push overlapping frictions into our surroundings, hoping for a helpful bounce?
In a time of historic abundance, food is becoming scarce or inaccessible for billions of people. Even in the wealthiest societies, the cost of a simple meal has risen many times faster than wages. The very question of what we work for thrums like summer cicadas.
There is nothing picturesque, however, about the effect. Human dignity, imagination itself, is destabilized by these existential hauntings. Each calendar day another shade of orange, fuchsia, lemon. Hope becomes a controversy of the most rooted kind.
Burnt grains, thinning wing feathers, early turning of autumn leaves, the constant crashing of ocean waves, close yet far, touching the edges of time and communicating into our moment an unspoken wisdom. Whatever we bless, we bless by soulful choosing.
Intelligence is clarity, but not to everyone. It comes in pointed surges, sudden reversals, unplanned illuminations, the movement of a cloud against prevailing winds. Memory. Mythology. Constancy. The leaf-litter of tradition and struggle.
Last month, it was reported that the United States—where redress is a boundless and irreducible right, while detailed data and investigative reports buzz in all directions—is undercounting heat-related deaths, because doctors are not seeing the effects of heat as such.
We are living this undercount, this conditional obscurity of life-saving facts and evidence. We are living the distance between threat and impact. We are living in a flood of non-communicable diseases that kill millions, yet can be turned back if we focus and take care, together.
Resilience is… Resilience makes… Resilience weaves… A project of asking and asserting definitions that do not fit every moment, place, or person, but together give us a new kind of puzzle to work through, as we look for the definition of our humanity.
Threads of resilience, including the question of whether it is attainable, sift and sort the details of our experience. We look for another chance at creation, another zone of safety, a way of reasoning joy into being. This we must do, even as time-tested certainties fade.
Salted Designs 