This is a cake someone made.
Not perfect. A little lopsided. Candles stuck in wherever they fit.

People were there. Someone lit the candles. Someone else probably worried they’d drip.
Someone laughed. Someone made a wish they didn’t say out loud.

This is what we mean by democracy.

Not a statement. Not a slogan.
A practice that happens when people stay at the table — especially when things feel uncertain, awkward, or unfinished.

You don’t need the right words to begin.
You don’t need to agree.
You don’t need to be calm, persuasive, or correct.

You just need to stay human with one another.

A conversation can start with a question, a story, a worry, or a pause.
It can start badly and still be worth continuing.

A cup of sugar, between neighbors, is not a metaphor for sweetness.
It’s a way of saying: we’re still here, and we’re still talking.

A premise beneath this work

Freedom is the core human capacity — not progress, not survival.

Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, authors of
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, describe three freedoms humans have historically practiced:

— the freedom to move away
— the freedom to disobey
— the freedom to reshape social relations

For most of human history, people were not shaped only by systems.
They actively shaped and unshaped them.

This is not romanticism.
It is documented history.

And it unsettles the idea that nothing can change.

Which is another way of saying:
The capacities we need are not gone.
They are waiting for use.