I saw this tweet and it tore through the heart of the moment with its perfect simplicity.

Things are hard right now. We’re presiding over so much loss. Everyone is so sad.

On days when it feels like we have precious little to work with—that we’re just sifting through the remnants of our former lives—I always think of the sculptor Chakaia Booker.

In the early 80s, while living in New York’s East Village, she started collecting tires—burned, melted, blown-out—from around her neighborhood. She found them on the street, at the dump, in abandoned lots. She took objects that no one wanted, objects that were literally garbage, and she made these:

Out of a single material, she is able to render the armored shell as well as the soft hidden place that it protects—the tender and the impervious, both. She sculpts our guts, our wings, the tangle of our desires, always revealing to us the inside outs and the outside ins of things.

One could write a dissertation about the political, environmental, and social nature of her practice, and I do have much more to say about her. But I hope that you will allow me, just for today, to focus on the one facet of her work that is bringing me hope during this time: her ability to make something astonishing out of nothing special at all.

Living through a global pandemic, most of us are steeped in nothing special at all. And it’s easy to tell ourselves that we’ll be able to do something great when all of this is over. But Booker reminds us that we already have everything we need.