There are gatherings that feel like endings.
And then there are gatherings that feel like standing high above tree line in the Colorado Rockies — where the air is thin, the sky is unreasonably blue, and you suddenly understand how small you are and how connected you have always been.
I attended a celebration of life this week that did not feel like goodbye. It felt like standing on a mountain ridge, looking back at the valleys one woman had crossed — and realizing she had left cairns along the way so others would never lose the path.
Women filled the room.
College friends who once hiked their futures with reckless optimism.
Colleagues who shared the long switchbacks of work and ambition.
Neighbors who weathered ordinary Tuesdays together.
A mother steadying herself in the thin air of grief.
Children running at the edges of the room, unaware that they were inheriting something ancient and durable. Locals.
Friends who flew in from across the country.
A community that rose like a ridgeline — distinct peaks, but connected underneath by the same stone.
I kept thinking of Peter Block and his belief that belonging is the structure that holds transformation. In Community: The Structure of Belonging, he reminds us that community is built not by mandate, but by invitation.
What I witnessed was an invitation lived out over the course of decades.
Not flashy.
Not performative.
But patient — like snowmelt carving a canyon.
Creative community is not decoration.
It is geology.
It forms slowly.
Under pressure.
Across seasons.
This woman — one of Mikelle’s first roommates — understood that.
Years ago, as young women moved in and out of Mikelle’s world, I found myself stepping into a quiet role. A surrogate mother, yes. But more than that — a trail marker.
Watching.
Encouraging.
Believing in their stead when they doubted their footing.
Mikelle, in her own steady way, does the same. She reminds people that they can have a good life. She questions limits the way a river questions rock — persistently, without apology.
And now I see these same women grown — carrying meals, organizing care, holding one another through a critical life journey. They have become the next ridge in the mountain range.
Their children will grow up together.
They will tell stories of this time.
They will not even realize that the stability they feel was engineered by love.
In Colorado, we understand something about endurance.
The mountains do not shout their strength. They simply remain. Through fire. Through the storm. Through political seasons and economic drought.
In uncertain times, we often look toward institutions for stability.
But the most enduring infrastructure I saw this week was not institutional.
It was relational.
It was built in kitchens.
On porches.
In late-night phone calls.
Across years of choosing to show up.
You cannot defund granite.
You cannot legislate away snowpack.
And you cannot erase the kind of community that has been weathered into the landscape of people’s lives.
Her spirit lives on not in sentiment, but in structure.
She built something that stands.
And perhaps the question for each of us — especially those of us building inclusive, disability-centered communities in this changing season — is this:
Are we laying stone?
Or are we only pitching tents?
Creative community is not a temporary shelter.
It is mountain work. It takes time. It takes patience.
It takes women willing to gather others and say, “You belong here.”
And long after we are gone, someone will stand on that ridge and feel steadied by what we built — even if they never know our names.