for the birds

Hi, we’re back and feeling lucky with yet another guest puzzle from a friend! This one’s from our longtime crossword community bud vidhya aravind (akatookey) and holy shit, we’re amped. Here’s what tookey has to say about it:

Hi friends!

This puzzle was originally a gift for a partner who is an avid birder and has been reclued for you <3. One of our earliest dates was driving two hours to see a whooping crane in Michigan well out of its normal habitat. At the time, the population was at 600, up from less than 100 in the seventies, and now it's all the way up to 800! Birds are so pretty and cool.

Being able to make this puzzle for them was a small, gentle reminder for me of the ways that we continue to be able to demonstrate care for one another. How I show up has not changed since the election and will not change any time soon. Here in Ypsi, that looks like participating in mutual aid projects, deepening connection with my community, continuing to learn and grow together, and pushing myself to show up in braver ways when I can. These are all things that I’ve gotten much better at since 2016, and having talked to comrades across the country, I know I’m far from unique in that respect. I know every awful administration has only gained power in their mission to cause harm over time, but we’ve gotten stronger too. Grounding myself in understanding our capabilities and in community work has really helped me avoid the panic that I’m otherwise predisposed to feel right now as a trans woman of color.

Mariame Kaba likes to say “hope is a discipline,” and true to form, the more projects I see and help out in, the more hopeful I get. Hope isn’t something we get for free or find in elected officials. Hope is something we create when we recognize our own power to collectively shape our world. It starts as small as finding inspiration to collaborate on things and meeting people to collaborate with, and all of us can do it. I might not be able to say that we’ll all make it. However I know that our power to love and fight has not been diminished in the slightest, and that we all would have been loving and fighting all the same regardless of who got elected.

Please reach out if you are feeling unsure or like you have no direction at this moment. Together we can build something better <3.

Thank you Boobypuppy and Zinna for the massive help testing!!

Thanks for allowing us the honor of sharing this work on your behalf, tookey, and we can’t wait to solve it on stream. <3 Enjoy! Fullscreen solve | .ipuz