Touchstone for 2024

Points of light

The past two years I have found touchstones to come back to throughout the year: pedagogy and pragmatism in 2023, beauty and blocks in 2022.

For 2024 my touchstone is going to be, quite simply, points of light.

The water in this video is in New York harbor. The sunlight shimmering on its surface seems to reflect the heartbreaking fragility of humanity, together with the extraordinariness that despite it all people can kindle glimmers of light. Everywhere there are glimmers extinguishing, igniting, simultaneously.

In recent months it’s been hard to square a normal life - a life in which my kids go to bed relatively safe each night - knowing that lives, families, neighborhoods and cultures are being decimated at the same time. For no more reason than the places they are - in Gaza and the West Bank, Israel, Sudan, Ukraine, Russia - together with humanity’s propensity for abuses of power and for slow burn and immediate mass atrocity.

But live and love we must, hewing close to glimmers of light, keeping alert to them while acknowledging their fragility.