By the time you read this, we’ll be stumbling around among boxes and rugs and furniture, beginning the process of making order of our lives again. How many times now? Together, five times in 30+ years. We lived on Starr Road in Newark, DE, the longest, 11 years. We adored that house, those woods, but we didn’t want to retire in Delaware, so, off to Michigan to a wreck of a house that we spent eight years making beautiful. Then Jerry’s back surgeries, so then off to a quite different space, a condo in Grand Traverse Commons, a renovated State Mental Asylum. Very cool and beautiful.
Now look. I can hardly believe we’re moving into senior retirement housing, but I’m guessing most people feel like that when they make this move. What, me?
I’m writing ahead of time of course. I’m thinking about disruption and its effects. Some people live their whole lives in one town, some in one house. What’s that like, I don’t know. Maybe you dig in, become part of the meaning of the landscape. Maybe seeing the same thing every day becomes a kind of Zen focus, a ritual that prompts a deeper awareness.
I’ve participated in both Christian and Zen Buddhist ritual in my life. The Episcopal priest said, “No matter what you think you believe, if you worship with us, you’re part of us.” I took this to mean that the ritual itself was intended as the glue. The Buddhist monk said, “If you attempt to follow this ritual, you train your body/mind awareness, and you see you can’t do anything exactly.”
But also, familiarity can render our surroundings invisible. The result is a deadening of the senses, a zombie-like movement. I guess it depends on the person, and the intention. We all have habits. We’re all zombies a little. We all miss our lives to the extent that we go numb.
I have liked change. I’ve frankly had more of it than I would have preferred. Some change I’ve wanted, some have come to me unbidden and unwelcome.
Put me in the same place for a while and I’ll be content with moving a bit of furniture, a vase, a basket or two. Painting a room. Jerry says I treat a room like a poem. I work to get it aesthetically “right.” I am always most interested in what I’m working on, not what I’ve already done. Understand, the product/poem does please me. I may stand back and admire it for a good long while. But eventually I want to move on.
Octavia Butler by Katy Horan from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted and transformed our world. (I got this, and the poem, from The Marginalian).
Octavia Butler (1947-2006) opened her Parable of the Sower this way:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
The P.S. . . . .
I’ll make a quick trip to Mackinac Island library on the 16th to read prose and poems with Jim Lenfesty. That’s all I can manage this month.