In 2018, I wrote a piece for ensemble (premiered by Alarm Will Sound) called The Thicket. This work was a reflection on the tangled web of the human mind and the bushwacking that’s necessary as we learn how to find others in the “thicket” of experience and personality that exists within and between us. The proposed product of this project is a new work initiated as a companion piece to The Thicket, which I will compose for the Bergamot Quartet + percussionist Terry Sweeney. The working title is In the Brink, and while The Thicket is primarily from the perspective of an individual, In the Brink uses the same environmental metaphor to address communication between large entities of people, particularly in light of the intolerance and lack of consideration for marginalized populations that permeates the current sociopolitical climate of the United States of America and its government. The nature-images sonically depicted in The Thicket will correspond with current human-accelerated natural disaster: fire, flood, damage to ecosystems.