Friends,
The action around here is picking up, let me tell you. I’ve been watching a pair of mourning doves take turns brooding over their eggs, nesting in a south-facing eave of our house. This morning a heavy rain lifted right at sunrise - the sky looked painted by Winslow Homer, and raindrops hung fat on the still-bare branches along my walking path. The maples are budding with their red clusters and even the swaths of lichen are brighter on their bark.
The daffodils I planted on the winter solstice are shooting up through the dirt. Hope, realized! I saw a patch of star moss (fave moss) greening up in the park. Soon it will be plush and sunlit and we’ll be able to lie down in its softness.
In spring it’s easy to find something new and different to shift my perspective, ignite my imagination, change me, even as (especially as) I mark almost 20 years in this place. Looking closely, feeling closely, listening closely - aren’t those the acts that change us, even when we don’t realize change is underway?
Here’s a question: When did you realize that personal change is constant, even when it’s so infinitesimal you hardly notice it happening? It’s hard to put a finger on what’s different, but it’s like, one day, your personal landscape has been rearranged. Maybe you woke up with moral clarity on something you’d been worrying over. Maybe you stepped into some of your own power without even realizing it. Maybe all the years of trying to love yourself without caveats finally coalesced into something like self-acceptance. Destabilizing and exhilarating, this process of becoming.
I’m grateful for the slower unfurling of my time during these two years of pandemic, and the long, frank looks at all that is broken and also beautiful in our world, because the circumstances have brought me closer to myself. The self that’s evolved over the past two years is someone who feels kinda-sorta-mostly equipped to own those changes and act on the feelings, knowing that as I continue to change, so will my life - in ways big and small. There are unknowns built into that sentence, and right now, that excites me.
One thing that’s changing is my approach to friendship. In December I set an intention to lean into platonic love this year and over the winter, I started doing that. Even with good friends, I’ve long been hesitant to ask for what I want in a friendship because of the long-held feeling that things should just flow naturally with friends. But that’s not always true, and moving toward people - taking initiative, offering and asking for time and energy with new friends and old - is the way to keep relationships alive (or to know when to move on from them).
My efforts this winter yielded a very full heart - platonic love leaned back at me. Now it’s spring and life is everywhere and I want to aim this overflowing heart, well - everywhere: at cute strangers in the library, at new friends and old ones, at fellow dog walkers, heck, even at my family ;)! I used to keep a guard up - to protect myself from rejection, presumably - but these days I’m less concerned with rejection and more interested in true connection. That’s a big change that came on slowly.
On that note, I can’t stop thinking about this quote from midcentury method acting coach Stella Adler:
There is one rule to be learned. Life is not you. Life is outside you. If it is outside, you must go toward it. You must go toward a person, and if he or she backs off it’s their fault. The essential thing to know is that life is in front of you. Go toward it.
Go toward it, and notice when that forward movement changes you. See you out there.
Oh, and there’s a good chance I’ll be listening to this album (especially song #2).
XO,
Leigh