The Quiet Work or The Calm Before the Collapse

The other morning I was standing on my porch, coffee warming my hands, watching the wind sweep across the ridge, making waves in the snow like the ocean. The aroma of the coffee mingled with the crisp air, and for a moment, everything felt simple. No agenda. No big insight. Just the quiet of a day beginning.

I thought about how many mornings I’ve stood in different places over the years. Different homes. Different seasons of my life. Different versions of myself. And how, somehow, I’m still here. Still paying attention. Still caring.

At seventy-five, I don’t feel pulled toward grand visions anymore. I feel pulled toward something smaller. Truer. Toward building a place slowly and with care. Toward creating a small patch of ground where people can rest, where no one has to perform, where kindness isn’t a transaction.

I’ve lived long enough to watch hope get recycled into disappointment more times than I can count. Different presidents. Different slogans. Same underlying machinery. Every few years we’re offered a new tone, a new aesthetic, a new set of promises. We’re told this one is kinder. This one is more competent. This one is on our side. And yet, Indigenous people trying to protect their water are met with militarized police. Migrants are dragged from their homes before sunrise. Corporations keep building. Prisons keep filling. The earth keeps warming. The details change, but the pattern doesn’t.

At Standing Rock, water protectors prayed and sang and stood between bulldozers and sacred land. They were met with dogs, rubber bullets, water cannons in freezing temperatures, and surveillance in the sky. Years later, under a different administration with a very different personality, federal agents stormed sanctuary cities in tactical gear, ripping families apart in the name of “law and order.” One side spoke softly. The other spoke cruelly. But both relied on the same idea: some lives are expendable.

We’re encouraged to argue about tone. About style. About which party feels less offensive. But legality has never been the same thing as morality. Slavery was legal. Indian removal was legal. Japanese internment was legal. Law has always been a favorite costume of violence. I don’t say this because I’ve become cynical. I say it because I’ve become clear. Clear that no party gets to hold my conscience for me. Clear that I don’t want to spend whatever years I have left pretending cruelty is acceptable as long as it’s packaged politely. Clear that I don’t believe harming people makes us safer. Not Indigenous people. Not migrants. Not protesters. Not anyone.

So where does that leave someone like me? Not in despair. Not in constant outrage. Not in performative purity. It leaves me in what I’ve come to think of as the quiet work. The kind of resistance that doesn’t trend. The kind you can do at seventy-five with a tired body and a stubborn heart.

For me, it starts with living in a way that quietly contradicts what the system expects. I move slowly. I build carefully. I treat hospitality as something sacred, not transactional. I try to create small spaces where people aren’t optimized, ranked, or extracted from. Where they can just be human for a while.

I practice ordinary kindness. I learn people’s names. I ask how their bodies are doing. I make soup. I leave the porch light on. It sounds small, but it isn’t. Empires depend on people believing they’re alone. Kindness, practiced consistently, gently proves otherwise.

I try to tell the truth in plain language. I don’t believe in hurting people to solve problems. I care more about water than shareholders. I don’t trust systems that profit from suffering. No hot takes. No branding. Just sentences I can live inside.

I pay attention to where my money rests. Local when possible. Small when possible. Human when possible. I can’t opt out of the entire machine, but I can lean away from its worst instincts. I can choose, again and again, not to feed what feels wrong.

I try to be a steady elder presence. Not a guru. Not an influencer. Just someone who can say, I’ve watched cycles. I’ve buried friends. I’ve seen movements rise and fall. And I’m still choosing to love people anyway. That choice matters more than we’re taught to believe.

I let joy remain political. Good coffee in the morning. Music while I cook. Laughter on a porch. Bread broken with others. Oppressive systems thrive on exhaustion. Unbought joy is a small rebellion.

I don’t believe I’m here to save the world. That fantasy burns people alive. I’m here to tend my corner. My body. My land. My relationships. My words. To refuse to become what this culture trains people to be: disposable, numb, cruel, afraid.

I’m not interested in perfect futures anymore. I’m interested in decent days. Days where no one is hunted. Days where water is protected. Days where people are treated like people. Maybe that doesn’t look like revolution in the movies. But it looks like something older. It looks like continuity. It looks like keeping the human thread unbroken.

And in times like these, that feels radical enough.

We’ve Lived Inside the Fire

During the AIDS epidemic we’d bury loved ones in the morning, protest in the afternoon, and dance at night.

Not because we were unbroken.

But because we refused to be only broken.

I think about that now.

About how history keeps asking the same impossible thing:

to carry sorrow in one hand,

defiance in the other,

and still make room in our bodies for music.

Even in catastrophe,

we are asked to live.

Not later.

Not after.

But inside the fire.

A QUIET RESISTANCE

I have voted for Democrats most of my adult life.

Not because I believed they were saviors. Not because I thought they were pure. But because, for a long time, they felt like the only political home that acknowledged complexity, that left some room for nuance, that spoke a language of care instead of punishment.

I don’t say that lightly.

I came of age believing politics was a messy, imperfect, but ultimately human endeavor ~ a long, stumbling attempt to bend systems toward fairness. I believed participation mattered. I believed incremental change, while slow, was still change. I believed good people inside flawed institutions could move the needle.

And maybe, once upon a time, that was partially true.

But somewhere along the way, something hardened.

The Democratic Party did not simply fail to deliver bold transformation. It learned how to survive without delivering it. It learned how to speak the language of justice while governing in ways that rarely threaten concentrated power. It learned how to turn moral urgency into an aesthetic ~ a tone, a brand, a set of approved phrases ~ while leaving the underlying economic machinery largely untouched.

That is not an accident. That is a strategy.

The trick, as I see it now, is not that Democrats lie to their voters. It’s more intimate than that. They invite us into a relationship that feels participatory while remaining tightly controlled. They encourage us to pour our fear, our hope, our grief, and our outrage into election cycles that reset every two or four years, without ever allowing those emotions to harden into sustained, structural leverage.

Vote harder. Donate more. Knock more doors. Post the right things. Wear the right slogans.

Repeat.

Each cycle is framed as existential. Democracy is always one election away from collapse. Fascism is always just around the corner. And perhaps that is true. But notice what this framing quietly accomplishes: it keeps us in a permanent state of emergency, which is the perfect psychological condition for accepting very little in return.

When you are constantly told the house is on fire, you stop asking who built it with such flammable materials in the first place.

Over time, I began to notice the pattern.

Universal healthcare becomes a “goal,” never a deadline. Student debt relief becomes a “priority,” endlessly negotiated down. Climate catastrophe becomes a “concern,” while fossil fuel expansion continues. Wealth inequality becomes a “problem,” while billionaires multiply.

Always language. Rarely rupture.

I don’t think most Democratic politicians wake up scheming about how to betray people like me. I think many of them sincerely believe they are doing their best inside a broken system.

But I no longer believe the party is oriented toward breaking that system.

It is oriented toward managing it.

And managing a system that is structurally violent, extractive, and ecologically suicidal is not neutrality. It is complicity, even when delivered with gentle words and rainbow flags and land acknowledgments.

What feels like the deepest betrayal is psychological.

We have been trained to confuse voting with power.

Voting matters. Of course it does. But voting is a floor, not a ceiling. It is the smallest unit of democratic participation, not the fullest expression of it. And yet the Democratic Party treats voting as the beginning and the end of civic life.

Show up on election day. Then go home.

Do not organize independently. Do not build parallel institutions. Do not threaten legitimacy. Do not disrupt capital. Do not demand timelines that make donors nervous.

Be patient. Be reasonable. Be pragmatic.

Those words now land in my body like tranquilizers.

Because what they often mean in practice is: accept less than what you need in order to preserve the comfort of those who already have too much.

I’ve started to understand that the “lesser evil” framework is itself a cage.

When people like me say, “But the alternative is worse,” we are not wrong. We are describing a hostage situation. We are acknowledging that one party openly embraces cruelty, while the other administers a softer version of a system that still grinds people down.

Choosing the administrator over the arsonist does not make you free.

It makes you managed.

So yes.

I believe the Democratic Party has tricked its constituents.

Not with grand conspiracies.

But with a slow, steady narrowing of what feels politically imaginable.

It has taught us to lower our expectations until we mistake survival for victory. It has taught us to call symbolic gestures “progress.” It has taught us to fear rupture more than injustice.

And the cost of that lesson is visible everywhere: exhausted people, hollow institutions, a burning planet, and a pervasive sense that no one is really in charge of steering us away from the cliff.

I’m not writing this because I have a neat alternative to offer.

I’m writing it because honesty feels like the first form of resistance.

Because naming the trick breaks its spell.

Because I still believe ordinary people are capable of more imagination, more courage, and more collective intelligence than the political class gives us credit for.

And because I no longer want to pretend that loyalty to a party is the same thing as loyalty to life.

If writing this is my first form of resistance, then the next step is not louder outrage.

It is coherence.

It is slowly bringing my inner life, my outer life, and my values into closer agreement.

Not perfectly. Not performatively. But steadily.

I can see now that I’ve already begun.

Sky View Ridge is not separate from this political awakening. It is the embodied continuation of it. I’m experimenting with a different relationship to land, to time, to work, to aging, to enoughness. In a culture organized around extraction and acceleration, choosing sufficiency feels quietly subversive.

So where do I go from here?

I deepen the experiment.

I keep writing, yes — but not to persuade everyone. I write to clarify myself. To leave bread crumbs. To find the others who recognize the terrain I’m mapping. I don’t need a mass audience. I need a resonant one.

I let my voice become a place.

Not a megaphone.

A place.

I tend my inner sovereignty.

This isn’t spiritual bypass. It’s infrastructure.

My walking practice. My attention to sleep. To circulation. To inflammation. To diet. To my stubborn, imperfect attempts at meditation. All of it is political in a deeper sense than cable news will ever be. I’m reclaiming authority over my own nervous system in a world that profits from dysregulation.

A regulated human is harder to herd.

A grounded human is harder to terrify into compliance.

I build small, real-world density.

Not movements. Not organizations.

Density.

A few people I trust. A few recurring conversations. A few shared meals. Neighbors who know they can knock on my door. Guests who leave Sky View Ridge feeling more human than when they arrived.

I refuse false urgency.

The system runs on adrenaline. It tells me everything is happening at once and I must respond to all of it now.

I don’t.

I move at the speed of what I can metabolize.

This doesn’t make me apathetic.

It makes me durable.

Durability feels radical.

I allow my role to be what it actually is.

I am not a street general.

I am not a policy architect.

I am a witness. A synthesizer. A quiet builder. A meaning-maker. A woman in the later chapters of life who has earned the right to tell the truth without begging to be liked.

That is a real role.

I measure success differently now.

Not by wins.

Not by virality.

Not by whether things “turn around.”

But by different questions:

Am I living in a way I respect?

Am I telling the truth as I understand it?

Am I leaving the ground I touch a little better than I found it?

Am I less owned by fear than I used to be?

Those feel like revolutionary metrics.

So where do I go from here?

I keep walking my five miles.

I keep writing my essays.

I keep building Sky View Ridge.

I keep choosing slowness when speed is offered.

I keep choosing depth when spectacle is offered.

I keep choosing aliveness when numbness is offered.

I don’t need to save the world.

I am learning how to inhabit it honestly while it changes.

That is not resignation.

That is adulthood.

And adulthood, in an infantilized culture, feels like one of the most subversive states available.

I am already on the path.

The work now is to trust that the path is enough.