I don’t know how to do this

But I’m going to do it anyway

Photo taken by me on a(n unusually warm) run the other day. This was at the start of the pedestrian path on the Champlain Bridge. It was indeed open, though the path was not clear.

I don’t know how to change the global industrial complex so that it works in service of life. It seems an unfathomably daunting task to tee up for a given Tuesday afternoon.

But I’m going to do it anyway.

Otherwise, any corner I might paint myself into leads to the same place: a stark realization that the current system isn’t serving. The corner where I work my life away at a comfortable job, the corner where I step into some off-grid homespun heaven, the corner where I keep believing the sustainable business initiatives aren’t co-opted by the very things they pretend to change, the corner where I become an artist or housewife or waitress. So I perceive those corners, lean backwards into those walls, and dissolve my way outside of them, into a vast and unwalled world.

I’m going to do it anyway, even though I don’t really know what I mean by leaning through walls.

What I do know — what I believe we know — deep in our bones, our collective memories, our tourist brochures, our church…