Hey there friends,
It’s been a minute. Last time I wrote, I was deep in my tree-ID project, seeking shade in the drought and heat and thinking about our relationships with the plant world. Plants! They are alive poems, in the words of Joy Harjo.
Since then, it’s rained a lot, and the grass has turned back to green in some kind of watery miracle. I’ve given up cutting it. We’re in the midst of the brilliant transition to fall where slivers of summer are still woven through our days. On a walk earlier in the week, I stopped to watch a bumblebee collect pollen from a stalk of goldenrod with the kind of focus that always seems out of my grasp. How refreshing to witness, these nonhuman priorities! The flowers do not shine for us, Marge Piercy reminds me.
This time of year is a poignant moment of transition in the natural world. The ferns are decaying in the woods. Green is seeping from the leaves, copper and gold taking its place. The gardens are abundant but unlike April when all is dewy and tender and light, in late September the flowers are explosively hued - dahlias, zinnias, asters - sturdy but also poised to fade, tilting toward and smelling like the earth they came from.
For the humans (also part of the natural world, so easy to forget sometimes), summer into fall is also a season of change. Sometimes just a change in tempo; other times in physical spaces - homes or schools or offices - and often a shift in the mental and emotional stuff that claims our energy. These transitions feel ripe to me, like fall, because they are so full of unknowns.
What we don’t know can feel murky, dangerous, wild, exciting, terrifying. How do we hold these feelings all at once while continuing to move forward?
Sometimes I wish I were a plant. They work on instinct and evolution. They don’t fret about whether or not it’s time to drop the petals, they just drop the damn petals. When sunlight or air temperature - forces larger than they - tell them to do something, they do it, again and again, getting bigger and stronger and more beautiful every year until they return to the dirt. It’s straightforward.
However I am not a majestic purple dahlia with a bloom the size of a dinner plate so I guess I’ll continue to muddle through the unpredictability of human transitions.
What is predictable is that change will happen whether we choose it or not. And when you’re at the edge of something unknown, it requires faith and trust in yourself to take stock of a situation and say - this feels right. I don’t have a vision or a name for it, but I’d like to continue walking down this path one ill-defined step at a time. Despite not knowing where it’s leading. Despite not knowing how the path will feel from one moment to the next. Despite not knowing how my life will change as a result.
What I’m seeking these days is expansion - of my senses, my consciousness, my instinct to love. And taking that step toward the unknown feels like a step toward expansion - maybe even toward a kind of transformation. Staying still, holding back? Cue the opposite effect.
If we dive headfirst into the unknown though, it’s likely to hurt. So maybe the way forward, the way to move through transition, is gently and with tenderness, holding our feelings and expectations lightly so that we can let go with ease when we need to. It’s still probably gonna hurt though.
It takes practice, this holding lightly. We’re taught in this culture to clutch everything we value. But sometimes gripping feels like narrowing, while releasing feels like opening. I want to stay open, and it’s hard. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch (Piercy again). To loosen our grip on what we’ve learned and believed, on what we’ve done and experienced, on what we feel and think we know and understand - this might be our work.
Sure it would be easier to be a flowering plant, although humans bloom and make offerings and go dormant and come back stronger, too - it’s not as seemingly simple, but just as beautiful. We are also alive poems.
Yours through transitions,
Leigh
PS: This poem and Marge Piercy’s work in general partially inspired today’s thought bubble. I adore this woman and her work.
To have without holding
Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch ; to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can’t do it, you say it’s killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.