YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE—A Community Journal of 2020
2020 was a year like none other. Viral pandemic with no cure in sight. Economic hardship. Embedded racism not budging. Climate crisis undeterred. Democracy threatened.
As the world closed down, people in Benicia, California, started writing about these strange and frightening times. Poets and writers of prose from nearby and far away, folks who had never before written for publication, contributed their poems and essays to a column in a hometown newspaper. Yearning To Breathe Free is the collection of those columns from April through Election Day 2020.
These sometimes raw, in-the-moment reactions and reflections provide a day-by-day accounting, a journal. Now we can look back to those early days of the pandemic and acknowledge what we went through and what we’re still going through. The losses mourned, the celebrations put on hold, the wariness and well-founded fear that linger.
Acknowledging what we went through, we can tell the stories of how we’ve overcome and of what still needs to be overcome. Of how isolated voices can come together to sustain a community. Of hope that reaches beyond the return to “normal” and breathes compassion, justice, peace, and wellbeing into the future of this planet and its inhabitants.