Some mornings begin with catastrophe. The rest just pretend not to. I’m not talking about catching a glimpse of my face in the mirror—though that can prove deeply dispiriting. It’s the news, refracted through the funhouse mirror of social media—the daily apocalypse feed, that rolling stock ticker of despair. War, political violence, decaying democracy, ecological collapse. Doom at the planetary scale. Doom in the comment section. Crisis piled on crisis, all the way down.
Some days it feels like the world’s not resting on turtles anymore—it’s resting on algorithms, all squabbling for our adrenal glands. Every notification is another small alarm, engineered for outrage. We are both the arsonist and the fire brigade, running in circles with buckets of outrage.
And yet—this isn’t new. Every age has believed itself to be the last. A thousand years ago, Europeans waited for the skies to open at the stroke of the first millennium. In the 14th century, the Black Death convinced half a continent that God had finally had enough. Mid-20th-century schoolchildren ducked under their desks to protect themselves from nuclear annihilation. The sense of teetering on the brink is, historically speaking, the human condition. The difference now is bandwidth. The apocalypse won’t be televised on the six o’clock news, it’s being livestreamed by legions of TikTokers.
What are we supposed to do with this endless churn of crises? I don’t mean in the self-help sense—there’s no bullet-point list for surviving the century. I mean: how does one attempt to find meaning inside the chaotic and often cruel human maelstrom we’ve created and continue to perpetuate? The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’” It’s a sentence that’s haunted me for years, because the “why” has become so slippery. When everything feels impermanent, when the ground keeps shifting under our feet, the task isn’t to fix the world—it’s to keep finding reasons to care about it rather than retreat.
Maybe that’s why we keep at this odd business—sending writers and photographers out into the community to bear witness, to find the acts of meaning that still make sense when almost nothing else does. This month’s issue isn’t offering solutions so much as persistence—the slow, stubborn grace of people who refuse to give up.
Take Linda Mary Montano, the subject of Peter Aaron’s profile “The Saint of Saugerties.” Montano has spent six decades turning endurance into art, prayer into performance, and suffering into something radiant. She once lived for seven years inside a system of self-imposed ritual constraint, color-coding her days and listening to tones aligned with her chakras. She tied herself to another artist for a year with an eight-foot rope. She’s fasted, prayed, sung, danced in a chicken suit, and turned grief itself—her husband’s murder—into an offering.
At 83, she calls endurance artists “outsiders who are privileged to go into nasty, uncomfortable, dangerous, unspeakable, frightening places and bring back the goodies.” That’s not a bad working definition for what it means to be alive in 2025. Montano’s faith has shapeshifted—from Catholicism to Buddhism and back again—but the throughline is clear: to heal through art. Her life is an argument that patience and persistence aren’t passive virtues—they’re radical resistance to nihilism.
Olaf Breuning, our cover artist this month, prescribes a different but complementary cure: humor. “If I could bottle the medicine to cure human beings,” he says, “it would be humor. It brings people together; it doesn’t divide them.”
Breuning’s Bigfoot family on the cover—strolling through the Shawangunks like a hirsute Beatles tribute band—suggests a version of existence that’s both absurd and aspirational: at peace, unplugged, unsupervised. His art bridges tragedy and laughter, the ridiculous and the profound. Breuning’s right, of course—life is tragic: None of us get out alive, and we lose everyone we love along the way. But humor, that cosmic pressure valve, allows us to keep breathing.
Which brings us to Steven Yoder’s “The Battle for the Ashokan Corridor,” a story almost entirely without levity. What should have been a measured debate over rail and trail options in Ulster County has devolved into rancor, sabotage, and mutual distrust—an unnervingly local microcosm of our national disunion. Over a 1.7-mile stretch of disused train track, neighbors have hurled insults, death threats, and lawsuits, mirroring a society where disagreement feels dangerous and every hill is the one to die—or kill—on.
Keisha Hoerrner of the Woodstock Land Conservancy, who received one of those threats, wonders how we can “build back any sense of unity or shared values or common principles when you literally cannot communicate with one another.” It’s a fair question. The answer, I suspect, has something to do with the opposite of threat: invitation.
Which is where Beacon Bonfire comes in—a festival that, in its radical inclusivity—its “yestival” ethos—creates space where the default mode is yes (page 67). If the Ashokan Corridor fault line shows how easily shared space can fracture, Beacon Bonfire shows how it can cohere: hundreds of artists, dancers, musicians, and pyromaniacs convening around the idea that community itself is an art form. There’s something almost liturgical about the Bonfire’s closing ceremony, when drummers and fire dancers gather at Veterans Place and the whole community crowds around them—neighbors, artists, children, elders—faces lit by flame as smoke and rhythm rise into the November dark.
It’s not denial of crisis—it’s a response to it. A communal act of imagination that says: We still belong to one another.
Together, these stories feel like coordinates on a map out of despair. Montano offers graceful persistence: The discipline to keep making meaning even when life itself becomes an endurance test. Breuning offers levity: The reminder that laughter isn’t frivolous, it’s sacred. The Ashokan story warns us of division: How easily passion curdles into hatred when we forget our shared humanity. And Beacon Bonfire gives us community as a radical art form: the possibility that creation itself can be redemptive.
Each of these responses—ritual, laughter, dialogue, art—testifies to something deeply unfashionable but utterly essential: hope. Not naïve optimism, but the stubborn act of showing up even when it might not ultimately make a difference.
We live in a time when every problem feels existential: climate, democracy, truth itself. The temptation is to retreat—to disengage, to numb out, [insert your favorite option here]. But disengagement is just another form of surrender. The antidote, if there is one, lies in the small acts of repair happening all around us.
Maybe the world is crisis all the way down. But maybe it’s also compassion all the way up—if we choose to look for it.
This article appears in November 2025.
