The ways of change

and some recommendations

Change is usually a slow thing. It picks up the kicked pebbles of a road and washes them down the ditch until the road is packed, guttered dust. We begin to use a word, like “wife,” stumbling and grinning on its newness, until it is just another lovely word in our everyday. Stories change too, bit by bit. A substituted word here. A change of pace there. And sometimes a great rattling flood of a new character. Persistence and belief are key to story-changing.

Little redbud blossoms contrasting with the spring blue sky.

I went to the movie theatre last week for the first time in years. I saw the film “Cabrini.” It’s based on a true story about an Italian missionary, a woman, who goes to New York to open an orphanage. It is at the turn of the 20th century. Women are considered unfit to run anything, and in America, Italian immigrants are considered uneducated, unwanted nuisances at best, filth at worst. In strides Cabrini, jaw set, eyes steady. She climbs into sewers, shouts down a pimp, founds a hospital, and bursts into Italian Parliament. She pushes through weakness, exhaustion, grief.

I am flooded with admiration and gratitude for this woman who made a great leap in the change for women and for immigrants. There are so many women I do not know who pushed through enormous challenges to get us where we are today.

I don’t have a smooth transition here, just that I am holding the nuanced vision of change and the ways it happens. Just that for so long women have met force with force which does move things and is so important, but this unbalanced forcefulness needs gentleness too. Push is balanced by give. Struggle by ease. Speed by slowness. Solitute by connection. Masculine by feminine.

To me, today, in the place where I live, it feels like a real act of change and challenge to be kinder and slower and more feminine. In real, practical ways, like canceling plans when I am bleeding or just feeling too overwhelmed. Or choosing to cook a nourishing meal rather than reading the news. Fighting is important, but so is simply living the life you want. This, too, requires persistence and belief.

Tender shoots of Solomon’s Seal push up around a dead locust tree.

---

Change

Dress for wind, for it will come and blow you off your careful track.

You can resist, wrap your coat tight,
go heavy as stone and press your back
to the insistent force. Chant your promises.
Dig into a lonely strength and grip the grasses
so the ground doesn’t slip away.
“I will always hold on."
"I will not let go.”
Pull in all the loose strands, so the tendrils of current
have no purchase. Become smooth, contained.
Untouchable.

Or— 

You can open your kite wings
and lift, trembling, towards the sky. 
Let the chaotic air tear away your buttons
and whisk you somewhere new. Out of the known. 
Spread your hands and let the world pass through. 
How could I hold onto anything?
The wind throws gutters, trees. 
I thought I knew the difference between
success and failure, safe and not.
I thought I knew the names of things. 
But now, the words vanish into the roar:
a conscious, substantive wind changing the very language on our tongues.
The wind reorders it all. 

When finally the gusts still,
I find the ground still beneath me, 
wet and warming and full of seeds. 
A Greater Promise soaking
the knees of my pants. 
You were never meant to be alone. 

---

It’s been hard to get around to writing recently. The days seem to just fill up all the sudden, and the weeks tick by before I can catch up. But hey, maybe I can change it with a persistent, tiny kick of a pebble and some steady belief.

A cutting from an elderberry bush staked on a newly cleared slope at the Community Garden to grow anew.

Recommendations

Cabrini - you can get a free ticket to the film here.

Her Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramey. This is one of the most relevant, timely memoirs I have ever read. This book is important for anyone who is or knows someone struggling with chronic illness or anyone who works in healthcare. It’s also very well-written. I listened on audiobook (it’s free on Spotify premium).

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas. Just a good ol’ fantasy novel I’m enjoy tearing through right now. A spin on Beauty and the Beast.