This Miraculous Moment

Joy flowed like holy water over New York and Chicago today -- this is how we sustain it

It’s late Thursday afternoon in New York City as I write this, about four hours after the Knicks parade and ceremony at City Hall wrapped. I watched from home, crying with pride and joy, switching to coverage of the opening of the Obama Center toward the end, after my beloved team got their keys to the city. Now I’m sitting al fresco at a café in the West Village, watching my fellow New Yorkers stroll by, still adorned in orange and blue, flaunting their swag, proud and not yet tired of the euphoria we’ve been swimming in for weeks.

Just moments ago, a group of four college students walked by arm-in-arm singing Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind, and as I turned to look at them, we screamed GO KNICKS at each other in unison, flashing peace symbols. And here I am, weeping once again. We are outside in New York, every race, class, and creed, every age, every gender, all together, loving each other, loving our city, and loving the energy we’ve co-created — just pure, unadulterated, expansive, freely expressed joy.

This joy is rampant, palpable, and unignorable. You hear it out your window. You see it when you leave your building. You feel it again, standing in line at the bodega as the person before you pays for their bagel. You see it on every face on the train. You catch a glimpse of it as the early morning runner or dog walker does their thing. You can’t not see it, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I don’t want it to end. Nobody planned this on purpose, but some generous god must’ve gotten involved the way the Knicks clinched game five last Saturday, ensuring they’d be proudly paraded down the Canyon of Heroes today, the same day that the Obama Center ceremony was scheduled to take place. You could call it a joy conflict — it was hard to decide what to feel more emotional about today. But you know what I’ve discovered? Joy is a resource that gives freely when you reach for it, and its overflowing cup wants to quench our thirst.

My mother texted me this morning, simply: Are you crying? and I responded: The Knicks parade? She wrote back: No, the Obama library.

This is just to give you a taste of what New Yorkers and their families, even the ones who’ve retired and left, are experiencing right now. (At least the liberal ones, which is to say, most of us.)

In another magical city, all the living presidents were together under exceptionally sunny skies, except for the one who launched a war to distract from the Epstein files, then feebly lost that war, ceding the victor all its spoils last night as he signed a treaty at Versailles, wholly ignorant of the historical import of his failures, and unaware of how every world leader was laughing at him. Imagine being that functionally illiterate. Imagine your team – your Secretary of State, a former senator, not being able to dissuade you from making yourself into a ridiculous laughingstock because there is nothing in your life that means more to you than being surrounded by gold pillars. We watched that man descend the escalator to announce his first fascist campaign almost eleven years ago to this day.

This is the contrast. A speech by Michele Obama so moving, so down-to-earth, so gorgeously riveting and real and loving toward her husband, the man who was not a perfect president but in light of the last decade surely feels like one. Without uttering his name, she read Donald Trump to crystalline filth, with unflappable elegance. Then Barack followed, reminding us why we loved him, showing us again why that night in November of 2008 was one of the most miraculous American moments of our lifetimes.

It’s not lost on me that this moment in New York City feels closest to that night in 2008, and the cold day in January 2009 when we inaugurated Barack Obama. I’m fairly far to the 44^th President’s left. Still, my anti-imperialist core understands that we must have democracy in America if we are to remake the world in the vision of the revolutionaries I admire. Upon our 250^th birthday, after the current inhabitant of the White House has done his very best to grift off the intentional destruction of that democracy for the sake of the Heritage Foundation and right-wing billionaires, I am starting to believe that all is not lost. For the first time in a long time, I feel like we’re about to have another moment like those early Obama moments, the start of a series of moments, where we fix everything the fascists have broken.

Mayor Mamdani reminded us today that we have rarely experienced such effulgence in our city in the last few decades. He said, “So often when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to by a moment of tragedy or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy.”

This moment reminds us that there is a way out of the dark crucible we entered in 2015 and have lived in for the last ten years. It was a cruel waystation, a place where we witnessed the worst of humanity’s impulses, a callback to the Nazi era, a reminder that the white supremacists clinging to the last of their power will do anything to return us to the Jim Crow South. No matter how much they’ve broken during his first and second terms, we’re not done. It’s our joy that they cannot kill, and as long as we have possession of our ability to feel communion with others, to sing and dance and weep together, to shout KNICKS IN FIVE and link arms and smile goofily at strangers, we will defeat them.

I wrote this in my June forecast as a kind of wishcasting, and today made me feel like it’s happening:

Let’s see if dancing under the stars, joy in our bodies, in the spirit of love and liberation, can send us through a sliding door into a new world that we build together, brick by brick. We can’t go back to the past, but perhaps we can create a future that truly includes everyone, putting fascism into the dustbin of history, then lighting that dustbin on fire, and sending it to fuck off into the sea.

Tomorrow, Chiron leaves Aries for the first time since 2018, and although it will return in September, this feels very much like the deepest cleansing, the fire of Aries finally burning us clean, an end to the healing crisis, and a start of a deep and sustainable collective healing.

The Solstice is just a few days away, that hinge of the year when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the light stays with us for as long as it can, reminding us that we can create that which sustains us, and that the engine of that creation is joy.