For a while, in my 20s, I lived with housemates, and we did puzzles. Big, thousand piece puzzles on our kitchen table in Dorchester, MA. I can’t recall any of the pictures, just that we’d leave them up for days or weeks. Sometimes we’d hang out and work on the puzzle together. But we’d leave it up and housemates would stroll by, see where a piece fit, and add it in.

I haven’t done much in the way of puzzles since my 20s, but now that I’m a mom, I’ve been hoping my kid would like puzzles. Up until now, she hasn’t been a big fan, but since the shelter-in-place lockdown, she’s gotten into it. We recently did a puzzle of an underwater scene with dolphins. Going through the process again reminded me how puzzles work as an unfolding process of understanding something. I realized how it’s similar to wrapping our minds around something like the coronavirus pandemic, or even the climate crisis.

At first it’s all a jumble. Nothing fits together. And it feels overwhelming. But my kid and I started with the edge pieces. It’s so concrete. Search through all the pieces. Find the ones with an edge side. Keep the corner pieces separate. Put those together first. After we had assembled the frame, we focused on a color. The bright white of the sun rays in the water was the one distinguishing color we could pick out most easily. Soon, we realized that some of the white was on the skin of the dolphins. Those white and blue pieces were the first ones we worked with. It took a long time, but finally, we got most of the top of the puzzle done.

The election has been like that bright white flash. This obvious way where people in this country can come together to impact the future of climate policy: elect someone who supports the Green New Deal. And so many of us have worked tirelessly to support local and national candidates who will push for the GND, most notably Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders at the presidential campaign level. At first, Sanders seemed unstoppable. The moderates were fragmenting. But then the Democratic Party establishment consolidated behind Biden. Warren suspended her campaign. And Sanders is falling further behind Biden. Some have been calling for Sanders to drop out. It is still possible for Bernie to win the nomination and he just won the primary for citizens living outside the US. But it’s a much narrower path moving forward, and the Democratic establishment is certainly tipping the scales in Biden’s favor. So now what?

We had gone as far as we could with the bright white and blue pieces. The bottom of the puzzle had tons of brightly colored intricate coral and fish and sea creatures. It was too busy and full. I couldn’t sort it.

The Sanders campaign is far from over. But what happens if Biden is the nominee? The path to the Green New Deal isn’t as clear in those circumstances. Biden is better than Tr*mp. But I’m not inspired to work for him the way I would for Sanders or Warren. Harder to tell these colors apart. Is that coral? Rocks? Fish? Pollution?

But again, I focused on the two colors that jumped out at me. The bright golden fish and the magenta coral. I began building them both up.

We need to keep building our movement to put pressure on the future president and congress. On local elected officials. It’s no longer a big picture with a simple design, like a presidential election. It’s got multiple staging areas, multiple color schemes, multiple scales from local to international.

And by the time I had built the magenta reef, I realized that I needed to build the black and white reef near the top. I began to be able to distinguish between the different colors, textures, patterns, creatures.

Naomi Klein came to Oakland last year to talk about her book ON FIRE: THE BURNING CASE FOR THE GREEN NEW DEAL. She said that it was going to be important for us to follow any possible path we could see out of climate disaster. Sometimes, the path is wide, bright, and obvious, like a progressive or leftist president. But sometimes, it seems as if we’re trying to scale an unassailable wall, with no way around, under or through. Sometimes the path is steeper and more treacherous than we would have imagined possible. But we need to keep trying. But as we get closer, we can see that there is always a fissure, a crevice, a foothold.

By the end of the puzzle, I could easily distinguish between the white coral in the upper reef, and on different parts of the lower reef. I stopped mixing up the various yellow striped fish, and the locations of the different pieces seemed so obvious.

Three weeks ago, the path to the Green New Deal seemed so clear and obvious. And possible. But monied interests in the Democratic Party are scrambling to force Biden through, and then COVID-19 descended on us. Today, everything is in upheaval. As primaries get postponed and voting procedures are being revised for the pandemic, the path forward is even more unprecedented. On the one hand, extractive capitalism is attempting to consolidate power. But on the other hand, the flaws in our economic system have never been more evident.

It’s a bitter irony that we in the climate movement have been saying that everything would need to change. And now it has, but not in any of the ways we’d hoped. And with brutal consequences for many—including the power and money grabs of the ultra-rich at the expense of many lives. People literally dying, and more peoples’ lives are being ripped apart economically. Women are at higher risk for domestic violence in lockdowns. Prison inmates and workers are all at high risk and anti-immigrant attacks are as strong as ever. ICE is not sheltering in any place.

But if there’s one truth that remains: we can’t un-know what we’ve learned already through this pandemic. We can’t un-see how connected everyone’s health is, or how ideas like Medicare for All and paid sick leave or Universal Basic Income would have saved lives. We can’t un-hear the rising rhetoric of racism and scapegoating that threatens violence against Asian folks. We can’t forget the ghost flights and disaster capitalists bailing out the very industries that need to be allowed to fail in order to save our planet. Our hearts are heavy but our eyes are open.

During the lockdown, I’ll be in my house, sheltering in place, reading, writing, cooking, and doing puzzles with my family. I predict that we will emerge from this a grief-stricken and shaken people, but we will have a greater clarity than ever before in my lifetime. The brutality of extractive capitalism in our nation has been laid bare. And when we come out from sheltering in our houses, the Green New Deal will still be there: the obvious solution, the big idea, the brilliant intersectional response.