"So, here we are again, shoveling coal into the tender, or, in my son's case, pantomiming the motion in the ruins. He loves trains and doesn't care about trains anymore, ersatz wind in his toddler hair, real wind on his big-kid face as he flies through the pandemic-emptied lot. Here I am beside him, discovering, for the millionth time, the verity of joy, and how it throbs with impermanence, responsibility, and sorrow. The cord has been cut, most surely. But if I can imagine raising him, and continuing to raise myself, as those who might work on behalf of the surround–the common beneath and beyond–the already and forthcoming–if we can love all the misery and freedom of living and, as best we can, not mind dying–then my heart feels less broken, more emboldened. It feels shaped right. Morton says he wants "to awaken us from the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth (the real Earth) depends on it." For so long, I didn't know what he meant. I do now."
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
