Step Function: 2025

And a side of Bach.

In the last leg of a long travel day, I asked my husband how he might summarize 2025. His answer was: “step function.” I didn’t know the term and, if I’m being honest, I still don’t fully understand the mathematical explanation - even after reading the Wikipedia article. But I do grasp that it means a kind of jump.

That jump - that “state change” idea - makes all the sense in the world to me.

Today, as I write, it is 61 degrees Fahrenheit in Logan, Utah, on December 23rd, 2025. My weather app tells me we are 31 degrees above the “average daily high.” I enjoy trail running, and my favorite trail is not only accessible but mud-free and carpeted with leaves. Deluxe. Until I let in the fact that I should be using my cross-country skis right now.

A few weeks ago, I walked outside in the morning. Birds were singing, the light snow we’d had was melting in the sun, and the smell- that earthy/soil smell - was of spring. As I stood there, senses open and mind quiet, it was spring. And then, when my thinking mind came forward, it jarred me with the reminder that the calendar said it wasn’t. Meanwhile, my yarrow is preparing to flower.

As our planet’s life-support systems weaken and shift while our societal systems continue to devour what remains, other accelerants are equally impossible to ignore: the dismantling and corruption of institutions, systems of governance, and old world orders; expanding war and conflict; media and AI accelerating their integration into our lives; and the relentless onslaught to “harvest” not only resources (or maybe, as Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests, we should lose the “re” and just call them sources), but our very attention. Our increasingly fractured, perpetually stimulated attention… repurposed for consumption.

So… yes. Step function 2025. In every way.

I began the year in outrage and grief, tracking the news cycle in all its daily affronts - a task both dizzying and numbing at the same time. Too much, too fast. Monitoring the current administration’s fire sale of American democracy, civil rights, and foreign policy has become a full-time job in and of itself - with no return beyond living in toxic anxiety.

But here’s the thing: 2025 also held another shift. A reclamation.
Of story, first and foremost.

Indigenous stories, shared by author Darren Parry in Tending the Sacred, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity brought forward ways of knowing and understanding grounded in relationship with the whole living world - human and more-than-human. These stories and perspectives effectively broke the spell of modernity’s towering, unquestioned myths:

– the myth of “progress” through endless economic growth and technology;
– the blind acceptance of separability itself as a given - in other words, the notion that humans are outside the laws of nature and need not function synergistically as part of a greater whole;
– the heroism of our continuing quest to vanquish all limits through tech, expansion, exploitation as valiant, imperative, and proof of our supreme intellect (“Innovation!”)

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine showed me how old this “new” story actually is. One of his points: the displacement and uprooting of people creates a cultural desert. Place-based and relational knowledge is cut, and materialism and service to capitalism rush into the void. Along with that: a severing of belonging and care.

Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins stays with me always as I build out my responses to these ever-present questions.
What of this often cruel system should we let die?
What do we carry forward?
And how do we prepare the soil for something new to take root as the old world dies?

As 2025 closes, those active questions are joined by a few more:

How do we move toward dissolving our inherited isolation - from each other, and from the more-than-human world? How do we foster deeper connection with the whole web of life in our spheres?
How do we live in ways that honor the mystery, the wonder, the bounty, and the beauty of this place we call home?
How does a musician’s work fit inside and strengthen all of this?

Is it possible that these efforts of heart and mind can ripple outward and create more resilience in the face of the rapid unraveling all around us?

I have to believe that they can.
Maybe that will be the step function of 2026?

One of the most sustaining parts of this year for me has been the self-assembly of this little community around these essays. Writing has always been a way for me to move from feeling to thinking to processing. I’d never shared much of it beyond letters to family and friends before 2025, but this year was different. And though I refuse to campaign for readers, it’s felt important to reach further with this daily intellectual and emotional wrangling and see what happens. So this space, buoyed by your presence, reflections, and reach-outs….has been a refuge.

Thank you.

Thank you for taking the time to read with an open mind, witness, comment, and gather around the fire (or a substack….) to sit together in the tangled present.

As a holiday gift to all of you, I humbly offer a rendering of Bach’s Gavotte en Rondeau from his Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006. It’s an imperfect but heartfelt offering recorded on an iPad in my study…..where I practice most mornings.

I love a rondo form. The rondo bit is simply the return of the refrain. Like in a pop song or a church hymn, it’s an anchoring to the main premise from which all the imaginative episodes depart.

The key of E major is sunny. A gavotte is a dance. This little gem of a movement is cheerful, even as it plays at the edges (all those dissonant sevenths!), always returning to its rondeau theme - but also evolving through its episodic explorations.

This is what I wish for each of us in the new year:
That we may root more deeply in what anchors and nourishes us,
and navigate all life’s twists and turns with imagination and heart even when it’s bumpy.

With gratitude and warm holiday wishes,
Rebecca