Transformation

Friends,

I’ve been haunted in the best possible way this week, by this Ellen Bryant Voigt poem that I happened across. So let’s just start there, together (with apologies/content warning for the ableist use of “dumb” in this piece):

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Practice

by Ellen Bryant Voigt

To weep unbidden, to wake
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker on the face of the clock
to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward—

is this merely practice?
Some believe in heaven,
some in rest. We’ll float,
you said. Afterward
we’ll float between two worlds—

five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—

until everyone we love
is safe is what you said.

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I can’t really think of a more resonant combination than the title’s humble call to “practice” (evoking Buddhist and Ayurvedic traditions) and those ending lines, “until everyone we love / is safe is what you said.” I’ve read this poem at least once every day this week and it still makes me tear up every time (including right now, as I type this to you).

The snow is turning into morning mist here, as rain and warmth transform it. I am thinking a lot about transformation these days. I understand, really I do, the use of the words “resist” and “resistance.” And yet, as someone who is pretty into the power of words, I think it’s time we used different ones.

To merely resist something suggests a long, slow, painful attempt to stop something inevitable, a struggle trying to hold off something that is going to come anyways. Resistance suggests that there is a concrete, fixed reality that we are pushing against, instead of there being many interpretations of our reality, many experiences coexisting alongside one another, many stories trying to be The Story. Saying that we are resisting fascism and white supremacy and genocide gives them a lot of power, actually.

I’m a lot more interested in transformation than I am in resistance. Not the least of which because transformation is the reality of our world. The world is always transforming—snow back into mist, ice back into puddles, puddles into rain that falls again, winter into spring. Governments grow powerful, governments fall. Antartica, I learned this week, was a tropical rainforest filled with dinosaurs (millions of years ago but still, wow!). The world is constantly transforming, and trying to stop transformation is very painful and usually just plain doesn’t work. Getting on board with transformation, joining with that fact of being alive, seems a whole lot smarter to me.

If the language of resistance works for you, if it feels strong and hopeful, then by all means keep using it. For myself, the idea of resistance feels like something I could try and try to do until at last I get too tired and have to give up. Resistance feels, to me, rooted in fear.

I’ve found a lot more hope and strength in moving towards what I want, instead of running from what I don’t. Transformation is already happening all around me and within me, so the question becomes which transformation I am joining my energy to, and how much of my energy I put there, and when and how. For instance, I love this recent substack from Rosie Pinks called “Keep coming back” which talks about the simple steps for creating community spaces that people will actually keep coming back to.

I’ve been reading Winter World by Bernd Heinrich in the evening before bed. It’s beautifully done, incredibly smart but still possible to understand as a layperson, and has the nice bonus effect of putting my own mundane daily struggles into perspective. Hard to compare those to the efforts of animals surviving subzero temperatures, such as the northern flying squirrel who has almost no body fat and is nocturnal, meaning they’re zipping around during the absolute coldest hours.

What are you reading these days?

As I was finishing this, I happened to see that the terrific poet Jason Schneiderman has a new poem out today, and I think it’s a beautiful friend poem to the EBV we started with, so I’ll leave you with this.

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A Beautiful House with a Hot Tub and a Pool

by Jason Schneiderman

I miss my magnolias, miss my maples, think
where did they go, think, oh yes, to the past,
that place where everything goes and can I visit?
No, but also yes. And can I stay away? Also yes,
but also no. And in the same way that languages
only get simpler, people only get sadder. Yesterday
at the dentist I thought Thank god for nitrous oxide
and I thought Thank god for Dr. Rachel drilling away
in my tooth but wanting nothing she does to hurt me.
I wish that were true all the time. That we all wanted
nothing we did to hurt anyone at all. My friend
with a beautiful house insists that we call his pet
a companion animal, which I don’t think changes
very much, but I want nothing that I do to hurt him,
so I call his dog a companion animal, and then
I think Is that what my trees were? Not really
my trees, but companion trees, offering me
their flowers and then their leaves, offering me
their oxygen in exchange for my carbon dioxide,
not exactly grateful for my copious applications
of neem oil to kill the parasites invading their branches
but flourishing in the absence of those pests, the flowers
and leaves all I really wanted in return. I miss
my companion trees, my flowering Jane,
my flowering Brown Beauty, my flowering Star,
my leafy red maples, scarlet and feathery
all summer. My friend’s companion animal is licking
my face and my friend asks Could you be content
anywhere? And I say Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but then I think Is that true? Of course it’s easy to be content
at my handsome friend’s beautiful house, by his
heated pool, in what might be a physical manifestation
of contentment if ever there was one. So I think it again
on the subway, think it again writing emails, think it again,
but alas sadly: No. It’s not true. I can’t be content here
in my uncomfortable present, in my uncomfortable chair,
on the uncomfortable subway, at this uncomfortable desk,
in this uncomfortable classroom. But oddly, I am content
to visit the past, to say Hello everything I’ve lost,
to say I wish you could come here to the present,
my lost companion trees. I wish you could meet
everything I’ve found.

xoxo

Adrie