Thinking about CHANGE
Inside the head of a flower
The sun’s
a swinging pendulum
from, Le Nombre Des Ombres, by Andrew Joron
The swing of life for me the past couple of months has been extreme. From sitting alone one evening in the quiet of my home to answering a surprise incoming call. From flying through the air on United’s last flight of the day (seated between two strangers wearing headphones moving music I could feel), to stretching my legs once in the aisle. From the brisk coolness inside the plane to the sand and wind of another state. Then driving a dimly lit rental car on dimly lit streets to the alarming dazzle of a hospital.
I’ve swung from the familiar fullness of a home (its dozens of ceramic roosters, one Lazy-Boy with worn armrests, family photos in every nook and cranny, tennis shirts, canned goods, a red, soft-bristle toothbrush inside a plastic tumbler) to the work of emptying it. From the sudden forced unbuilding of a long-lived life to sitting alone again weeks later at a park near my home, watching a robin on a budding tree branch. Since then, I’ve swung from precision and pattern to the random plopping of two unlike things together, from paraphrase to essay, originality to imitation, from numerous stumbles on my laptop to unplugging. From assumption to meaning. From the real photo to the virtual one. Lately, my life rhythm has thoroughly depended on what I do with it. Like a pendulum. Maybe it moves a little back and forth. Maybe it doesn’t move at all. If it pulls far to one side, it will definitely swing just as far as it does on the other side.
I don’t know what swinging sunlight inside the head of a flower looks like or what it does. Yet wouldn’t it be spectacular if just a tiny bit of moving sunlight inside a small thing was acting like a tributary (ebbing over to the left bank, flowing back to the right bank) on its way toward some watershed to the main stem, the coming-back lawn, the pondering robin, the passersby?
Perhaps the point of this inconclusive message is that as we aim to shift parts of our world, we owe it to ourselves, our communities, our friends, and our foes to let swinging guide us, to meet the back and forth, the good and not-so-good, all of it, to let life be a pendulum of sorts, perhaps one day a small shine inside a flower or another, a beaming to the watershed.
Gayle (Originally March 2024)
