#CurrentMix
April 24, 2026. What Else.
April 24, 2026.
Today feels like spring.
Anyone living on the East Coast of the United States will tell you that is not something to be taken for granted this year. The first official day of spring was March 20, but since then, we have experienced more days in the 30-degree and 40-degree temperature ranges than not. Along with bewildering 50-degree fluctuations from one day to the next.
Four days ago, I was wearing a winter coat yet again. Last night, coming back home late from a concert, I was in a T-shirt.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Almost everything else in the world is volatile—political arenas, economies, job markets, tempers, and on and on—so why shouldn’t the atmospheric conditions follow suit, like some cosmic Dickensian weather karma?
The months since I posted my last playlist brought forth a font of ruin, operatic melodramas of biblical proportions. A surge of illegal and unconscionable attacks on U.S. civilians by empowered federal government thugs, with the results ranging from detainment to deportation to murder. A shrieking aria relaying the looming possibility of nuclear disaster, a time capsule of terror FedExed to 2026 at lightspeed from my early 1980s childhood. Then again, the first day of the new year telegraphed that 2026 would probably not spare us: On January 1, our little family faced down the near-death of our beloved dog, the miraculous reprieve coming to us, her humans—she’s alive!—alongside a progressive, terminal diagnosis that her end is nigh. More life and soon death. In one breath. We were given an actual timeline for nigh, but let’s get real. When it comes to keeping those we love close, would an hour glass of any size have been anything less than heartbreaking for us? To the dog, the only change is that her mornings and nights are now a bookended ritual of delight: twice-daily feedings of poached-chicken morsels, the pills that keep her canine heart pumping stuffed in them like magic silver bullets. To us, the same ritual is a protein pocket of anticipated grief: Our time together will be cut short. Lest we forget. Chicken pill pill chicken. Pill chicken chicken pill. Repeat. I don’t think about any of that when I make the incisions into the meat with the point of a knife. But the knowing, my knowingness of that monster in the dark, loss, is still there. Like pills wrapped in chicken.
Living under the dome of such celestial confusion, is it any wonder that on most mornings, like so many people, I don’t know whether to be hopeful or resigned?
Per usual, the answer is likely both, a common duality state I like to describe as “what is this ‘or’ you speak of?”
When the broad scape of life is too brutal and too much beyond my control, I narrow the lens. Each morning, sitting on a wooden bench where once I kissed someone I love dearly, I watch the flowers at The Amazing Garden, the community patch down the block from our apartment, doing their thing. Green shoots and buds poking up from a dry, brown morass of apparent deadness. From the scraggle: First the snowdrops and crocuses. Then the daffodils. The forsythia, which is the seasonal tipping point at which I become hopeful in spite of myself—spring is indeed coming. Hyacinths. Tulips. Lilac and the earnest drift of their scent upon the chilly breeze. As I type these words in late April, the irises are beginning their skyward stretch. The neighborhood trees are bursting with green news. Pink petals carpet the ground beneath our feet.
My friend Ken texted me last night to pass along a Wendell Berry poem that saved his heart this week.
Shall we do without hope? Some days there will be none. But now to the dry and dead woods floor they come again, the first flowers of the year, the assembly of the faithful, the beautiful, wholly given up to being. And in this long season of machines and mechanical will there have been small human acts of compassion, acts of care, work flowerlike in selfless loveliness. Leaving hope to the dark and. to a better day, receive these beauties freely given, and give thanks.
Ken sent me that little jewel as a screenshot. When I read it this morning, I realized that it mirrored the paragraph I was in the midst of writing about the flowers blooming day by day in the community garden. I decided to integrate the poem into this playlist introduction and did a Google search for it so I wouldn’t have to retype it by hand. I ended up going down an internet rabbit hole that began at The Poetry Foundation website entry for Wendell Berry and ended in a remote corner of JSTOR. In that corner I discovered that the poem Ken sent was not a complete poem, but rather one stanza from a fourteen-part poem spanning over 2,300 words, a language sprawl that would have made Walt Whitman smile. Of course: Deeper explorations of hope—on living with its absence, on enduring while still walking through the darkness being a paradoxical form of hope in action, on youth and aging, on time’s own comings and goings beyond words—take more than 85 words, no matter how wise those 85 terms may be.
Is anything more American than the impatience and hubris that reduces an expansive meditation on the apocalyptic state of our world’s past, present, and future to one stanza plucked from its context? In these states of America, we like our cars big as Ahab’s nemesis, but our wisdom still needs to fit on a bumper sticker. In equally practical American fashion, I am linking to the full text of Wendell Berry’s poem, “Sabbaths 2007,” but I am not sharing the full poem here because of my own doubts and disappointments about how few people will read it. That said, my point here is not to bemoan the dying U.S. empire. Or to berate the perennial flaws of our national character, our shortcuts and arrogance and collective amnesia, especially our inability to acknowledge our own centuries-long abuse of power—deserving though all our shortcomings are of everyone’s scorn and weariness. Rather, I wish to observe that the human flaw is not in paying attention to or admiring the 85-word stanza and its insights. It’s in forgetting the existence of a fuller picture than the detailed pointillist inset we have framed. We guess at the patterns of the colored dots before us to try to make meaning from our nearsighted vantage point, when the incantation we need to glimpse the Island of La Grande Jette requires no spell, no magic at all. Just movement—distance.
May the whole expanse that we can never quite see all at once remind us: The worthiest life is lived streaming over and through time’s tidal flow in pursuit, not in arrival, moving from narrowed lenses to sweeping panorama and back again, often with no compass but the stars.
Today there are no stars.
Or rather, the velvet cloak of today’s sky is full of stars. They are just not visible to me, where I am standing.
The days come and go. Mostly the latter. In the mornings, I sip coffee. In the evenings, I brew hibiscus tea to revel its royal gem of color. In between, amidst all the necessities and tasks and lists, the plotting and scheming, the strategizing for saving more and surviving longer, the more more more of the hours, I flip the vinyl record from 1984 over to Side B. While the record plays, I wonder why the English language has no equivalent to the Portguese word cafuné—the tender act of running your fingers through the hair of someone you love.
Yesterday was an inferno. Tomorrow comes the cataclysm.
Today it feels like spring. More life. Pink petals carpet the ground beneath our feet.
What shall the days will bring? Sorrow? Joy? Accidents? Possibility? What else? What else? What else? What else.
What, dear friend, is this “or” you speak of?
What Else*
Created Dec. 2, 2025–Apr. 22, 2026; posted Apr. 24, 2026
* This title is lifted from the lyrics to “Sympathy Magic” by Florence + the Machine, which appears on the mix. The chamber version appears here; the original version from the LP appears on The Ghost is Me, the mix from Dec. 2025, which can now be found in Mix Archives.
