☁️ The In-Between: Where We Remember the Light

The other day, as we were walking home, I pointed out the clouds to my daughter. Strato-cumulus, I said, and over there, Cumulonimbus - such a great name to say out loud. She laughed and told me I should become a meteorologist because I was so excited to name the clouds.

And I laughed too, because it felt good to be that kind of nerd again, the kind who still marvels that clouds are nothing but air and water vapor gathered together, molecules clinging to one another, becoming something visible, something soft and towering.

It reminded me how much I miss teaching, the joy of discovery, and the feeling of wonder shared in a room full of people grasping for their understanding of the world. That day the sky became a classroom again, and I felt like both teacher and a child.

Yet, under this same sky, people are being abducted from the streets that belong to them and us. Beneath this same sun, lives are deliberately cut short, breaths are taken, and joy is denied.

I ask myself often:

What does it mean to exist in the in-between— to stay long enough to see each other’s light and to remind each other that we still have light? What does it mean to compost everything we have carried— the rage, the grief, the righteous indignation— and make space for the soft green shoots that come afterwards?

Because the body needs room to breathe.

Even rage needs somewhere to rest.

A few weeks ago, I reread Saeed Jones’s essay Diane Keaton, Miss Major, D’Angelo… Who Gets to Live a "Long" Life in America? It has stayed with me, hovering at the edge of my breath. He writes that at seventy nine, Diane Keaton felt “too young to die,” while Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the same age, felt like a miracle for having lived that long.

It struck me like a chord I already knew—how systems keep some lives brief while allowing others to unfold with ease, how breath itself is political. Jones writes, “America is keeping me brief.” I keep hearing that line, turning it over and over in my head. It reminds me that to expand—to take up space in every way possible—is a radical act of liberation.

When was the last time you heard your full voice, beloved?

Your full-body laugh? Your full-body sob, the kind that shakes something loose, that lets the grief finally spill?

Expansion is freedom.

Breath is resistance.

Joy is reclamation.

And still, I know that for many, even this feels out of reach.

I often think about the moss growing through the cracks in the pavement of the churchyard near our building. At least a few times a year, the groundskeeper of the church bends down with a scraper in hand to remove the moss from these cracks in the pavement. To him, the moss is a nuisance; yet to the trees (our ancestors, isn’t everything?), the moss is a welcome friend. I often reflect on this: how life insists on pushing through even the smallest fractures. Something can be considered a weed in one context and a healer in another. Belonging is always both—a breaking and a return. As I walk past the moss in the pavement, I wonder: what does it mean to still notice this tiny ecosystem, to still marvel at the universe within a single species of moss, when the world is burning?

Maybe noticing is part of the work.

Maybe beauty is a form of resistance, too.

And then there are the lingering questions that arise when the light changes about what it means to stay in the in-between long enough to witness one another, to hold the ache and the laughter in the same breath. What does it mean to soften—not as a form of surrender, but as a strategy for survival? To allow the compost of our anger to nourish the soil for our tenderness.

As I write this, the sun is shining, and my daughter and I are both wearing my father’s sweaters from the 1990s—big, baggy, and well-loved. There is pain in my history with my parents, yet in this moment, these sweaters feel heavy with warmth and love. Perhaps this is what it means to belong:

To keep noticing the cracks and the clouds,

To keep breathing, even when the air is heavy,

To remember that light keeps returning.

We belong to each other, still. To the sky, to the soil, to the moss, to our ancestors. To the work, and to the rest that follows it.

With love,

Uma