Back home after many time zones and airports and hotel rooms.

Business travel accords many privileges and it is also not, as a rule, fun.

In every country, conversations about climate change and protests and Zohran Mamdani.

So many people are looking for a reason to believe.

Sometimes it is important to keep going if only because it annoys the people who want to stop you from existing.

Attribution

Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken—
A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there—

Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,
But they do not understand poetry—

Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by
Wind, or water music—
Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft—

Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth
Between sunrise and sunset—

— from Speaking Tree by Joy Harjo