In mid-March 2020, Jeff Krasno began writing a weekly essay for his growing Commune wellness community. The coronavirus had burst on the scene and was spreading rampantly. The cocktail of pandemic, quarantine and social media induced anxiety and fear for many across the country and the world.
In the hopes of making sense of the madness, Jeff leveraged words as vessels for complicated emotions. He laid bare his soul in a series of stories and reflections dispatched via email to millions scattered across the globe. These weekly missives became a sort of communion, a series of intimate spiritual conversations, during the tumultuous and hyper-politicized year of 2020.
In this compendium of essays, Jeff traverses the bristly socio-political landscape of COVID-19, racial justice, the psychological impacts of social media, the end of shared reality, and of course, the American election. Interspersed are his explorations of fatherhood, grief, death and the emergence of new life. With candor and care, he attempts to step out of the political invective and instead, cultivate awareness of biases and find a middle way. Throughout this book, he invites the reader, and soon-to-be writer, to join him in exploring their own experience of 2020 and these very nuanced topics, with a series of writing exercises and contemplations.