Anywho, What Is America?
"The land that never has been yet—"
When news broke of Biden dropping out of the campaign, I was at a cabin in Jefferson, CO, with my wife and our best friends. The familiar pangs of "breaking news" always radiate in nonlinear time throughout my body. At the drop of a story, I am thrown into the turbulent sensation of virality, a shattering in my lungs like a thousand porcelain dishes smashing on a recursive loop. Before I can comprehend the literal facts of a story, and therefore theorize its potential impact, I have to address my physical and emotional sensations upon hearing the story. So, after the four of us stood beneath the vaulted log ceilings in brief disbelief at the news, I found myself alone on the deck, overlooking a monumental mountain valley.
Outside, the vibration of hummingbird wings engulfed me. Their tiny forms darted across the timber beams, stopping at the red feeder to tongue sugar water, unperturbed by my gentle tears below them. I could feel myself projecting with terrified certainty things about America's future, scenarios I won't put into writing. While I faltered, the mountain stood still. The hummingbirds flickered. A storm cloud hazily crawled from the horizon and I thought about Langston Hughes.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.*1
Writing it now, regulated, from the devotional space of my desk, and with the incomparable help of a little reflecting time, something about this moment strikes me as funny. In the absurd sense. Because the question I cinematically asked myself, gazing towards the mountain valley, had been, "What Is America?"(A ridiculously large and multifarious question.) And like any good poet who speaks to the dead, Langston Hughes answered, "the land that never has been yet—And yet must be—" As I considered with great seriousness what it all meant—the news, the poem, this moment, the mountains, our democracy—a hummingbird skimmed so close to my head I ducked. My wife, who had been standing beside me for I don’t know how long, with her own interiority experiencing the same moment, put a morsel of a Honeycrisp apple on the brim of my hat and said, "Stay still. Let's see if the hummingbirds come." And we waited there, sweetness on the rim of our field, for something miraculous.