We Still Have Blankets

A love Letter From "The Thaw"

Dear 🎵Bridgers🎵 — and yes, even the Flatlanders among us, the Florally Delusional South — I’m talking about you. Those of you south of the Hudson, parading around with your daffodils and cherry blossoms, serenaded to sleep by the peepers like spring is a right and not a rumor.

Here in Singing Bridge, we are suspended between seasons — not quite our famous Fifth Season, M U D, and not yet anything resembling what you people are apparently doing down there with your flowers. We call this liminal purgatory “the thaw” — which is less a weather event and more a philosophical position, hellbent on hope. We have achieved a bold seasonal innovation known as… gray. Not light gray. Not moody gray. Just existential grayscale — like a black-and-white film where the plot is “snow considers becoming water, but decides to circle back and think on it a while.”

And while you are out there frolicking in petals and pollen-induced hallucinations, we are doing something radical: simply stewarding life. Not optimizing it. Not scaling it. Not threatening to end it. Just… continuing. With dignity. And wool socks.

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Yesterday news of the latest toddler tantrum reached even as far north as Singing Bridge, but here’s the thing: while the Epstein class—you know, those who think “accountability” is only for some— brag about wiping out civilization, we in Singing Bridge have a different strategy: WHITE OUT! We white out the roads. You can’t collapse society if you can’t find the driveway. And once the roads are gone, what do we do? Do we panic? Do we form a Great Trust to oppress and steal land from the upside down state of New Hampshire? Do we Gazafy New York, Maine and Massachusetts — our neighbors? Do we rage bait and trauma dump in tweets through it? NO! We put another blanket on it. Literally. Another blanket of snow. Another blanket on the bed. Possibly a third weighted blanket just to emotionally support the first two. Here in Singing Bridge “chilling out” is not a metaphor. It is a survival strategy.

And while we are at it, let’s talk about the billionaire = “bully-anure” class. Yes, I said it—bully-anure. It sounds like manure because, much like manure, it is full of sh!%, and should be spread to help nourish healthy seeds for future generations not stuck in stinky silos now spreading death and disease. Yes this fixation on hording — stuffing great silos, heats up humanity, and becomes genuinely dangerous. Just to be clear: manure, properly handled, is the most democratic of substances: it nourishes what comes next. Manure improperly handled — hoarded, concentrated, weaponized — just poisons the well.

This is the class of people that has stopped paying attention to anything that doesn't have a return on investment, and it shows. Eight + empty houses just to stash away more wealth. Private jets. Bullying and dominating as an attention getting hobby. A suspicious number of NDAs and a deeply suspicious number of podcasts about “winning” (Winning at what — you may ask?). These are the trauma-dumping tantrum people — the human equivalent of a group chat you forgot to mute in 2014, except this one is so insecure they hired a defense contractor.

What do we do in response?

We tend our woodpiles like sacred texts — because they are. Every log in that pile was a tree someone cut, someone split, someone stacked. And the wood doesn’t just heat a house. It heats a story. It heats a relationship with a place that goes back further than any of us and we hope forward too.

We wrap our Winnimere in its spruce cambium — its little bark blanket — and we let Cowboy Trent wrangle the trees and the Kehler family at Jasper Hill make pure cheese bliss from the cows that graze on our manure spread fields — something you simply cannot explain to someone who has not tasted this place.

And here’s the kicker — the thing so shocking, so subversive, it may never trend online: You can have friends. Real ones, who know where you keep the spare key. You can have a strong local community. You can even spark a genuine rural renaissance — wood heat, local food, neighbors who wave like they mean it — without colonizing, exploiting, or, dare I say, Gazafying anyone to get there.

The bully-anure class has never figured this out. They keep looking for the extraction. We keep finding abundance the other way, embarrassingly obvious since humans are simply wired for it. Here is what we have been practicing the whole time: connect. stay. share. nourish. tend. know your neighbor’s names. that's it. that's the whole strategy.

I know. I know. It’s controversial. It’s practically un-influencer to suggest that joy might come from mutual care instead of extraction domination. But here we are, living dangerously. We are getting rid of oil. We are shortening our supply chains — no need for rare earth minerals when you use what is in your back yard. We are heating with local waste wood. We are inviting the town for potlucks and waving at each other like it’s a competitive sport we actually enjoy. And somehow — against every metric the bully-anure class would recognize — we are healthier. More connected. More loved than we can properly account for — gloriously smothered, in the kind of community that cannot be monetized, scaled, or explained to someone who has never had a neighbor show up unannounced with firewood, soup, their latest batch of maple syrup, and of course an opinion about the weather.

Healthier than the algorithmically enraged. Healthier than the fake botoxed humans pretending to be healthy as they run around as jet-based bullies. So while the world’s meanest bullies are bragging about wiping out entire civilizations in outrageous tweets and bragging about how their machines will take over the earth, bombing Beirut (why are we sending our tax dollars to destroy this beloved country, yes I mean Lebanon?), we in Singing Bridge are quietly and quite simply stewarding healthy life.

Under gray skies. On snowy roads. Wrapped in blankets. Laughing like Spring might actually show up… but not holding our breath. We will be here— tending the fire, checking on the neighbors, and contemplating the thaw…like it’s a long-form poem that may or may not have an ending.

Good night my Dear Bridgers. And remember: if civilization collapses, we still have blankets.

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🎵 Musical Pairing: curated by the incomparable Eliza Moore: Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies” (Singing Bridge remix: “Put a Blanket on It”) — Empire of the Sun’s “Alive”, Nanci Griffith’s “Across the Great Divide” — Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Helplessly Hoping.” Queue them up — We definitely need more music bridging us together. 🎵

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P.S. You are warmly invited to add your voice to this or any of these and come riff with us. Blanket photos. Songs for the playlist. Ideas still thawing at the edges. Anything you have been quietly tending that wants a little air — we love processing insights out loud. The Singing Bridge holds more than you might think — and the more weight it carries, the greater the tune!

Here are a few more to add warmth and encourage the thaw!

Cozy Blanket Hugs

Reflection: In thinking more deeply about our conditioning to bully others — watching Israel drop our bombs and Gazafy Lebanon (?!?) — and our “leaders” and financiers build these great mountains of manure — and watching those still programmed by the bullies get sucked into what is looking more and more like a bunch of unresolved “kill or be killed” trauma dumping in what is being packaged as the “Holy War”. I find myself lying awake not from dread so much as a sorrowing awakening.

Perhaps it is just another mid century modern woman swing, but I think many of us are beginning to feel this — those moments in the night, heart racing, not because something has gone wrong—but because something deeper has come clear.

The clarity to see through the conditioning — the longer I spend in the woods — the truth feels as though it gets more vibrant — the spell we have been living under thins. The story we were handed—the one that said compete, accumulate, win at all costs (certainly with no regard for one’s neighbor— “it’s a “dog eat dog” world”) —begins to loosen its grip. And in that awareness, a sense of both grief and relief.

Grief, for the ways we were taught to measure our worth against a system that devours what it claims to value. Grief, for the quiet knowledge that in trying to secure a future for those we love, we were brainwashed and enlisted into patterns that endanger that very future!!

But also relief—profound, cellular relief—because the unease we carry was never a personal failing. It was our aliveness, a deep knowing, refusing to go numb.

Finally it is so clear that this “game” of endless extraction, of success defined by separation and dominance, is not the only way. It is a story—powerful, yes—but not ultimate. And now, by taking a step off the “kill or be killed” gerbil wheel we are seeing through it.

Breaking out of the trance of industrial growth society into the wider, richer truth of belonging. We begin to feel again our place in the web of life—not above it, not apart from it, but within it. And from that remembering, a different kind of power arises.

Not power-over, but power-with.
Not scarcity, but sufficiency.
Not isolation, but interbeing.

The 2am bolt out of bed gives way to something else—a fierce tenderness. A clarity that asks not “How do I win?” but “How do I serve life?” And in that question, a new roadmap quietly emerges.

It may look less like conquest and more like cultivation.
Less like extraction and more like regeneration.
Less like proving, and more like belonging.

We begin to notice that what truly nourishes our children is not the accumulation of wealth, but the presence of a living world, intact relationships, and a community that remembers, feels, and knows how to care.

And here is the quiet, radical truth: stepping out of that old extraction game does not diminish us. It returns us. It restores our agency, our creativity, our capacity to participate in the healing of this world.

So if you too wake in the night, trembling with the realization that the path we were given is not the path that makes sense anymore —know this:

You are not alone.
You are not late.
You are right on time.

Because this awakening, painful as it may be, is also an initiation—into a way of living that is more honest, more connected, and ultimately, more alive than anything the old story could ever offer.