on changing shape

becoming star stuff

once in a dream i became everything. i was at once the star and the sky and the cool night and the cloud, and myself staring up, and myself staring down.

i was old, and as a new as the moment. i was light travelling across spacetime.

i was all the universes. i was tiny.

it was easy actually to be everything because there was only size to be, the size and the weight of everything changing.

i was also terrified. a huge glob of terrified welled up in my chest, my throat, my eyes. underneath and top of it all.

i keep thinking about this dream and i keep thinking about this moment.

separately some time in the middle of the night i startle awake gasping at how to make sense of the world.

-moon creeping across the sky whispering brightness.

-the latch of the gate that settled strangely.

-worries: some combination of remembering the kids dentist appointments, whether i order the right size piece of foam, and an existential worry that lives there like a gas…is this the storm/political decision/traffic pattern that makes this place uninhabitable? how do you mend rupture when there are no birthday greetings, no thank yous, no little kindnesses to pad it? what happens when the conversations only come as lonely blue lines on a phone abbrevieated so intensely that only the sharpness is left? is there an antidote to this kind of existence?

i fall back asleep. i am warm. the rain falls just like it knows how too. the morning dawns in all its luxury, the longest most delicious blues. hot tea. soft bodies of safe children arguing endlessly in their insistent voices. a moment whole undeniable, am i also everything in this? what majesty it is. what good fortune i have.

and then before i can catch myself  i wonder how do we do this? how do live? how do we make breakfast? rip out last seasons plants? call ourselves home? hold the paradox being in the bodies? in this moment? this universe?

so i go back to thinking about what it would be like to move like a star, be a star, burning across space/time, and i pull back into something smaller, more human scaled.

care.

one of the  great gifts of the last few years of my life has been to be steeped in care: the giving, the aknowledging, the seeing, and the becoming that happens as care is exchanged. maybe this is what it is like to be a star, shifting, changing, becoming undone.

much of this of course is the reality of life with small children and the endless amount of care it requires to keep them alive but the daily living of it is not a straight line. i can’t find a direct path of me “just” caring for them. i get lost in it when i try.  this care has cracked me open to see the beautiful  and endlessly complicated way that it stretches and touches the world weaving what offers an obvious but almost imperceptible web of listening, responding, generating, and undoing.

it is not just the adult humans in this despite the magnitude of parents, teachers, family (blood and chosen), patient unamed others, but it also stretches out to include the kids, the trees, the rocks in their pockets, their deep imaginations of worlds, dear things that make no sense and totally essential.

the care does this weird thing. it stretches out and back and wraps around itself changing everything in its course. the world is in both a remarkable and totally ordinary way undone by our newest humans. to see them as they unfurl in the friction is one way we get to thank them for these changes they demand into creation. this is born of their discomfort, the friction of their becoming, and what it calls us into being. it is messy, arduous, and demanding of holding paradox, while also holding a wet raincoat, yesterdays lunch, and the cardoor open.

the paradox of this is that because of this discomfort, this friction we become everything and the shapeshifting is breathing. we imagine, make, tend, undo, and call into creation a reality that holds aliveness and connection to the world exquisitly, because it has to.

this is done with as many threads that already exist and new ones are being pulled out the air each day.

i write this now because i think (i know for me) it is a time of calling out in the dark. and i just want to remind you that you know how the call is just right. it is the breathing. it is the shapeshifting. it is the unravel maybe all at once.

the fog  is dark enveloping, changing our shape as we walk. but its also possible that because we are the fog, we are the early morning blues. the rain falling with its serious gravity, we are the light moving across the sky, the cool  air, the cloud that becomes when the wind shifts.

and that might let us imagine something else.