Unexpected joy arriving quietly after a long season of uncertainty and transition.
Dear Friend,
Tonight I felt joy.
After another long day of unpacking boxes, I stepped into the quiet of my bedroom and looked out toward the mountains.
The sky was on fire — bands of orange and rose stretching across the horizon above the dark silhouettes of the Jemez Mountains.
There was nothing unsettled about it. It was simply beauty arriving in abundance.
And for a moment I felt something simple and complete.
The mountains outside my bedroom window were created millions of years ago, rising from the earth to form the volcanic ridges of the Jemez Mountains.
Long before our present debates, eruptions scattered ash across this high desert, leaving the pale dust that still lifts into the evening air.
Those mountains stand there — quiet, ancient, unconcerned with the arguments of the moment.
Earlier that day I had been reading the news, trying to make sense of something that felt deeply disorienting.
For the first time in seventy years, the United Nations broke consensus on reaffirming women’s rights.
Thirty-seven nations voted yes.
One voted no.
The United States.
Standing there looking out at those mountains, the dissonance became clear.
The mountains did not ask who was in power. The sky did not debate the worth of human dignity.
It simply gave us another evening of light.
Governments come and go.
Policies come and go.
Administrations come and go.
But the land…
the light…
the act of paying attention…
those endure.
Perhaps this is why artists have always been drawn to places like this.
When the world feels uncertain, paying attention becomes a form of steadiness.
Even when the human world feels fractured, the land and the light remind us what is still whole.
Paying attention to it is its own quiet form of resistance.
It is also a reminder of responsibility.
The mountains may endure without us.
The human world does not.
The dignity of women and girls, the protection of the vulnerable, and the preservation of this fragile world depend on what we choose to defend.
Standing there beneath a sky overflowing with light, I felt something steady return.
Before Not certainty.
But the quiet understanding that the work of protecting what is precious still belongs to us.
At the edge of light,
~ Melanie