We are so very excited to share this year’s issue of Resilience with you. It is a rare but special space we collectively create in the pages of this magazine. One where science, practice, emotion, spirituality, and activism are all given equal precedence. A container where our diverse community can express their woes and wins on this journey of shifting deep systemic inequities and healing our planet. An expansiveness where we can weave water, land, and people together to imagine a more unified world into reality.

The work we do in the Quivira community is difficult–we have lofty goals that are not easy to attain. We strive to usher in an era where humans return to their long-lost harmony with nature; an era where our economic resilience does not come at the cost of the planet’s ecological resilience, but, rather, enhances it. We are dreamers and idealists: writers, artists, scientists, and community organizers who not only imagine a different way of existing in this world, but follow through and put this new order into practice. For much of the time, such work is uncomfortable and trying, and pushing up against the old systems in place is a painful, often existential, and emotionally exhausting undertaking.

In the pages of this 43rd edition of Resilience, you will find the voices of community members who are living this reality through vulnerability, stark honesty, and self-evaluation. By sharing their passions and pains, they offer us intimate access to their relationships with the land. Through their messages and gifts, we are reminded of what is important in this life and what we stand to lose. As an ecological researcher, I find sanctuary in the pages of this issue of Resilience. After years of quantifying and objectifying biodiversity loss as numbers, figures, and facts, I feel sudden rushes of repressed sorrow and anger as I read this issue’s stories and pour over its artwork.

Creating a space for the expression of emotionality around our climate and biodiversity crises is so incredibly important–our selected storytellers in Resilience embody this space. Their narratives and imagery welcome you into their intimate experiences with nature; emploring us to join them in revering nature’s simplicity, unhurriedness, and evolved intentionality. They remind us that restoring the land means healing our relationship with it: slowing down, grounding ourselves, and fostering the interconnectedness of family, food, plants, water, and soil.