Begin Again: Return & Resilience

My grandparents used to show up unannounced at the door of my second-grade class (and third, and fourth, I think) to take me out of class mid-morning (the class my grandfather had just walked me to, by the way—they were masters of the art of throwing you off the scent of a surprise). However unannounced their presence, their presence came with an announcement: school was over for me that day, forty-five minutes after it started. They left the rest to a wink and anyone’s guess, even my teacher’s. They did this many times, leaving just enough distance between the surprise spring-out for me to forget about it. Then one day again, there they were. I learned to smile a big bright grin at the sight.

I never knew where we were headed in the ’90s-era slick Buick Grand Riviera they’d borrowed for the day from my granddaddy’s best friend. And looking back, I’m confident they weren’t interested in being sure about it either. What I remember is laughter, and windy rivers in the air of vanishing cigarette smoke. I remember Motown melodies as smooth as the engine coasting the Bay Bridge. And I remember stopping sometimes at beaches, sometimes parks full of trees, sometimes fantastical shops selling a million things I’d never heard of in Baltimore. I remember wherever we wound up was always clear on the other side of the state, and felt like an entirely other world.

I don’t know about you, but I know this is exactly where I heard myself utter that classic phrase of youthful impatience. It sprang out of me like I’d known it before birth, like it were whispered to me in the womb by the generations of children on road trips gone before. “Are we there yet?” I thought I’d invented in a shout.

But of course no. We weren’t there yet. For there was no there. Not the first time. Not the fourteenth. Not ever. Arriving was never the point. We journeyed hours, time after time, to other worlds, only to find ourselves by evening right back at home. And after a time of loving the recollection, days passed letting memories fade, as soon as the right time, granddaddy took my hand with a glimmer in his eye, while grandma fueled up the car to start the journey over again.

We always came home to the same driveway. But the ride stuck—the smoke in our sleeves, the bass line still pulsing under the skin, the bridge humming a note you could feel more than hear. The question lingered too: are we there yet?

It is our favorite illusion, destination. We want to be done. We want to have grown rather than grow. The diploma matters more than the learning, the finished plan more than the living through of it. You can feel that pull here in Minneapolis. When will the construction cones finally vanish? When will justice be settled, whole and clean, after George Floyd, after another headline? When will the grief end after Annunciation—two children stolen, so many more wounded, families carrying the ache through parks and vigils and sanctuaries? When will the campaign wrap, the strategy conclude, the meeting at last give us resolution?

But the Buick knew better. Life resists neat arrivals. Community does too. We circle, and circle again. The groove repeats, the smoke coils out the window and returns, the ride takes us to a new world only to bring us home again, changed. It is disorienting sometimes, this never-being-done. Hard to notice what has grown while we’re still pressed to grow.

Wisdom is to live in the cycle. To pause without stopping, like the earth pausing each autumn to let go what it no longer needs. To see the hope in the space left behind. To practice patience and widen love every time the season turns.

And you can feel that too in this city. Murals blooming on brick. Gathering’s Café serving wild rice, bison, fry bread—a daily communion of Indigenous survival. Neighbors walking, dancing, reclaiming the streets at Open Streets West Broadway. Lanterns and bicycles lighting the Greenway Glow. Monarchs rising at Nokomis. The Lynx joining song and sport to the fight against gender violence. Minneapolis breathes this rhythm: grief and resilience in the same car, smoke and song mingling as the road stretches forward.

This is our September ride. Jars of water in hand, we bring what the summer pressed into us—joy, labor, grief, delight—and pour them into one bowl. Not as an arrival, but as a beginning. Communion. Resilience. Return.So when the question rises in us—are we there yet?—we can answer it with a kind of knowing smile. No. We aren’t. And still we are here. Together. The road opening again. Home, and always on the way.