On bridges and other conveyances

This is the holiday letter I didn’t have a chance to write.

This is a meditation on bridges and the serendipity and dislocation they often bring, the (dis)comfort of being neither here nor there.

This is a reflection on solar storms, and the light generated 150 million kilometers away that creates glowing curtains of red and green in the sky above my St. Paul home.

It seems we’re smack in the middle of solar maximum, a climax of flares and eruptions on the sun as part of an 11-year solar cycle. On the sun, things will remain bumpy and messy before they calm down again. On earth, things are also bumpy and messy but at least we’re occasionally treated to a vibrant, painted sky.

I and countless other lucky humans caught a glimpse of the Northern Lights in November and saw the rarest of the rare: dancing, floating pinks that result from only the strongest of solar storms.

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The poet Mark Jarman described the northern lights as “shifting shimmerings:”

The northern lights will break a heart and heal it
In the same motion, raveling and unraveling.

Astrophotographer Rob Lyons calls Northern Lights an illustration of how stars and planets are dynamically linked together, of how we live on a planet “alive with energy, tethered to a star, that shapes our every day.” 1

We often forget that we are tethered to each other, for better or worse. But as we close the book on a year filled with outrage and overwhelm with more likely to come in 2026, I choose to focus on the better, on the ways our connections have sustained us.

I keep coming back to the bridge, the metaphor and reality of it. A bridge is less destination than conduit because it’s only as effective as its capacity to link one thing to another. It connects us to the world beyond our oh-so-limited bubbles.

Bridges can launch us into the future, even if that future is shrouded in fog. They can serve as staging grounds for change, even if we don’t actually notice that change is happening. When a ragtag bunch of St. Paulites gathered on a pedestrian bridge over I-35E in late May armed with a few painted foam-core poster boards and bungee cords, we couldn’t have foreseen that we would return to that same bridge nearly two dozen times before year’s end, sometimes under a sweltering sun, other times losing feeling in our fingers, and that our numbers would grow every week, and our messages would feel both urgent and wholly inadequate but our connections with each other and the response of motorists zooming by would buoy us and and even keep us sane, and how do I know this? Because so many of us kept coming back week after week after week. 2

At its most basic, a bridge is an exchange. On the pedestrian bridge, we gave and we received—our constantly changing messages going out as jolts of energy that ricocheted back up via honks and waves (and sure, the occasional one-finger salute but also the turbo-charged 18-wheeler laying on its horn), filling us with hope in return.

The jolts sometimes came in other ways as well, as when every now and then a runner or group of them would pass by us, and the entire structure would shake and sway and only then would we remember that we weren’t actually on solid ground.

It’s often easier to see the piling up of outrages than recognize the slow accretion of actions that seem small on the surface but add up over time. Based on a (very rough) extrapolation of a minute’s worth of vehicles passing below us at rush hour, some 4,000 drivers on average viewed our message in the span of an hour. Multiply that by 24 actions, and that’s nearly 100,000 pairs of eyeballs in all. Assume every other car has a passenger, and that number jumps past 150,000.

But back to the Northern Lights for a minute. Did you know that the physics behind them—the charged, excited particles releasing colored lights powered by the sun—are the same as for neon signs?

So here’s what I think: Even if our actions feel wholly inadequate in the moment, taken as a whole they can add up to something rather momentous—dozens of messages and words shimmering outward, charging and recharging and giving us the fortitude to carry on, aglow with hope that what is broken can one day be restored.

In a year marked by so much chaos and cruelty, I wish you peace, health, hope and much light.

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Want to find a bridge brigade near you? Check out the Visibility Brigade here.