Dear Tester,

This is where we would place our release letter, full of poetry.

Like so:

Right now, in this moment when so much feels new and so much is wrong, when intimacy and distance mash together in the double exposure of unwound film, I see it all so clearly. It feels like that day in August, three years ago, when the moon, looking nothing like the moon, slipped in front of the sun and what we knew of the world cracked wide open. It wasn’t that there was more to see, rather that we could see more. All the magic, the terror and transcendence, there all along, unveiled all at once.

Orbits and illness and inequity, clearly knowable in the detached scientific mind, pull us silently, in an astonished moment of disquieting wrongness, over the edge of understanding. A sudden plunge, when we did not expect it; being at the mercy of the sky, a virus, our own hearts.

“In the deeps,” Annie Dillard reminds us, “are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether that buoys the rest, that gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.”

I look at those pictures from three years ago and they’re crazily correct today. The exposure is too much, the contrast too high, the sky navy blue, our hands dipped in silver, the light somehow gross — but the people are right, transfixed and possessed, laid bare — not bathed in light but revealed by the same.

Of all that we’ve learned since we last met here, about balance and power, about space and light and time, none more important than this: all that we need was there all along. The good is a given, not learned.

We tore down what we’d built and have started again, this business like the rest; our families, our systems, our schools. I thought this would be brand new but have found with deep relief, like the glittering moment when the the light came back and colors rushed in, that where we were was where we wanted to be. There is not more than More. If you took away all that I knew about this work and this life, if you snatched them from me in an instant and threatened to not give them back, if you gave me one flashing chance to try one more time, I’d lower the protective glasses from my eyes, tilt my gaze down and start here where we started and stand. This work, this place, these people on this hilltop, this conversation. All that there is is all that we have, just this, just us — me and you.

Maggie