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First, the boulder smacking into the surface of the water and sinking in slow motion, landing with a muffled thud on the floor of the ocean. When the sand settles, the boulder is still there.

This is one way I recognize grief.

I felt it land the morning after the election. Heavy, immoveable. But its weight felt to me to be a palpable grounding. Grounded in the here and now. Grounded in what is. The fluttery anxious activity of the pre-election year, the anticipatory grief of all the what ifs (that I still feel), were more painful to me than being knocked down by what is.

I’d take the what is over the what if.

It’s familiar to me: the thud of understanding we get when someone is gone. When they are really really really not coming back.

Death is a gravity problem. Something that is immoveable and out of our control. Not something we can solve around.

But what we do in the face of death, the way we choose to grieve, and love, and connect, the way we build community and solidarity in grief — there’s so much movement in that grieving, so much air.

The morning after, I felt a familiar craving for connection and creativity. We felt it in the grief of the early pandemic, when we made ReachYou. I felt it in the years of making and writing after my sister died.

And I am so curious what we’ll do with this gravity problem, all the ways we will choose to access a super-charged creativity, choose to access joy and resistance and connection, choose what we do in response.

That’s how I’d rewrite the what if, I’m curious about the what we do in response to what is.

welcome, grief (in your ears), recordings of these posts, now exists! Thanks for your patience as the first set stormed your inbox, from now on I’ll aim to have the audio versions come out with the text ones. On Spotify and Apple Podcasts.