Hi friends. It’s been a tough couple weeks for the state of this union. If you’re like me, you might be oscillating between rage and despair so quickly that you don’t even know where to find yourself.

When the latest in a series of harrowing SCOTUS decisions came down on Friday, I was supposed to be getting ready for a book signing. All afternoon I couldn’t help but think, “what’s the point?” But when I finally pulled on my clothes and went down to Center City, it was a delight to find an all-deaf group waiting for me to talk about books and how to tell our stories. It was a moment to take a breath. It reminded me of the importance of community, of how telling stories about marginalized characters is still necessary work. Because our liberation is intertwined. And because, through everything, we need beauty to remain human.

Normally, I use this newsletter to link something from the literary world back to the Deaf world, and certainly the strength of my community in the face of oppression has created much beautiful art. But lately I’ve mostly been thinking about Vedran Smajlović, a Bosnian cellist of the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra. During the siege on Sarajevo, Smajlović took his cello into blown out buildings and to funerals to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. After a particularly brutal mortar attack on a breadline, he played the adagio in the marketplace rubble for 22 days to mark the death of each of the 22 people killed in line.

If bringing harm to one another is us at our worst, art is the best part of what makes us human, a lifeline back to our humanity.

Sometimes the beauty is the protest. Or at least, it’s our meeting place. On Friday, the location of that book event happened to be within walking distance to the protest burgeoning outside City Hall. We can do both. We must.