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What have you learned to appreciate about your hometown over time?

There's something about being unhoused in a place that you love where I remember just walking the streets at night and feeling like the city belonged to me and only me because you're at your most invisible then.

I'm Rachel Martin and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation.

Each week, my guest chooses questions at random from a deck of cards.

Pick a card one through three.

Questions about the memories, insights, and beliefs that have shaped them.

On the horizon, there is an excitement that I have not yet touched, and I just know that the fastest way to get there is to run to it. My guest this week is writer Hanif Abduroki. In the process of running to it, I will stumble over some excitements that I perhaps also did not know existed to me. I think a lot about appreciation. I teach my kids that treating gratefulness like a daily practice can help

them build meaningful lives. I've actually got sort of an evolution of appreciation in my mind.

The first step is observation, right? Pay attention to the thing. The next step, appreciate the

thing. Then find meaning in it. But the highest form of appreciation is reverence.

Reverence is bigger and deeper than appreciation. It's divine. Reverence reminds us of our small place

in the universe. Holding something or someone with reverence is an act of optimism, I think. It's a way

to acknowledge that there are

miracles in this world that make living not just tolerable, but beautiful. Writer Hanif Abdurakib

is really good at reverence. Maybe it's because he's written about some of the hardest parts of

living. He's been incarcerated. He's lived on the streets. He has lost people, including his mom when he was just 13 years old.

When I talked to him last year, he told me something I'll never forget that he tries to be a good steward to his grief.

Because it lives inside him and it's not going away. And maybe understanding grief helps him understand reverence.

And that's what differentiates him and his work, to me anyway, how we can write about an Aretha Franklin song and make it a prayer,

...