The Winds of Change
photo by Kelly Sell
To love someone long-term is to attend to a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they are too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.
-Heide Priebe
We had writing group last night and I offered the above quote as a writing prompt for the session. Personally, I am not a huge fan of writing prompts. Writing prompts always take me back to high school English class when I was told to write on topics about which I had very little interest. I often freeze inside when a prompt is offered, as though the assigned topic stifles an organic unfolding of what is churning within, ready to be brought into words and onto the page. But, as it turns out, the people in the group like prompts and find having a prompt more useful than not having one.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see the utility of writing prompts even if I do not enjoy working with them. Prompts often provide me with some insight I might not otherwise have gleaned on my own. I am the same way about asana practice, I guess. I generally like practicing according to my own plans rather than someone else’s. That being said, I gain a lot of insight from a good teacher’s instructions, prompts, and sequences.
At any rate, I ran across this quote while scrolling through my Facebook feed and offered it as a springboard for writing last night. Having been married for almost 25 years, I see these principles operating within my relationship with Kelly. Loss, interior discoveries, hard truths, and new dreams continue to roll through our marriage like rising and and falling waves on the ocean that eventually break on the shore of deepened and expanded understandings.
Of course, the principle lives inside my relationship to practice as well. No longer am I the bright-eyed, hopeful young devotee gazing adoringly at her guru, absorbed in the flush of love and grounded in what now seems like an overly simplistic faith. Nor am I the eager asana student I used to be— happy to spend long hours on my mat and interested in talking about poses and industry upsets for hours at a time. And, seasoned by countless visits to, and returns from, the underworld of burnout, disillusionment, and betrayal, I am no longer an idealistic new teacher in wonder at the opportunity to teach.
While we may need to attend a thousand funerals for who our loved ones once were, can no longer be, and were never able to become, it seems to me that I have died at least a thousand deaths to the person I used to be and who I thought I would become. Of course, death, like the sages say, is perfectly safe. Clearly, death is not always safe to the ego, to preconceived notions of reality, or to the assumptions that equate safety with status quo. However, death is perfectly safe from the perspective of transformation where all life moves from birth to death into decay and on to eventual rebirth, where it begins again— renewed and redeemed, having returned to its source in Love.
Watching the cottonwood and aspen leaves turn from golden yellow to brown and fall to the ground carried along by the autumn wind, I am reminded of this transformational cycle embedded in the natural world. Perhaps it is the global pandemic and the ceaselessly-rising cases of Covid-19, the ever-increasing death toll from the virus, the outrageous political theatre threatening people’s lives as well as the life of our democracy, along with the process of packing up my house into boxes in preparation for a cross-country move, but I am feeling a tinge of brown around my edges, and, like the leaf that has let go of the branches and structures that held it secure, if only for a time, I am falling to the earth, carried on the winds of change.
None of this feels bleak to me, nor do I feel completely at the mercy of the changing winds. In fact, the bittersweet recognition of the cycles of nature as they live inside my own transformational process is reassuring, if not always joyful. I know I am not alone in these feelings and challenges. My family, friends, students, and colleagues are being carried by the winds of change through unanticipated losses, harsh relational realities, financial strains, and moments of despair graced by glimpses of new possibilities, surprise connections, and renewed and deepened faith.
So, onward we go on the cycle of transformation—alone together—carried by the winds of change, returning to Love. May it be so.
More soon.
Also, please Vote Blue. (Remember, we need a landslide.)
Oh- and a two-session Asana Junkies is on the books right before I move in the beginning of November,
