Until the Flood

on the varieties of transformation

"I pray for the flood
and I pray to be spared by the flood.

I pray for the flood
and I pray that the flood will never come;"

- Prayer (I), Jess Housty

I've been thinking about kinds of change, the varieties of transformation. I've been listing the metaphors available to us, and using them to ask myself questions: Is this a pivot, or a chrysalis? Was that a crucible, or an unfurling? Each one a way of tracking our experience, each a way of making meaning out of the past – and maybe making the present more bearable, even more alive. Will this be a rooting, or a bloom? These are questions of pace and tempo, of continuity and rupture. These are questions of energy, of tenderness and violence.

You might notice that my metaphors are slanted upward, toward ascending transformations. I just noticed, myself. What about degradative change? I find myself protesting: I'm looking for metaphors for my own life. I'm looking for framings that I can use to support my people. I want a break from talking about descent. But even now I see how hypocritical, how colonized it is, to try and talk about bloom without talking about rot. We are here to flourish and to wither. There's no sense pretending otherwise. We are here to pass through crucibles, and sometimes we just get burnt. Not long ago, I had an experience that left me with the feeling that life, at the root of it, is a grim spectacle of loss. I recovered, but not without a mark. Let's be real: life is not not a grim spectacle of loss. It's a plain fact that we will all lose everything.

Everything.

This has always been true, for everyone. But there's also something particular about right now. We are living in a time of collective descent. We are witnesses and participants, willing and unwilling. There is no escape from the condition of this world. So I guess we can talk about it, since it looks like we have to. Is this dissolution or collapse? Was that withering or eclipse? Each another way of making meaning, a way of finding our way through… all this. Will this be decay, or disintegration? Could this be a long darkness, or is it a scouring flood? Can we imagine a dawn?

I have to believe that talking about this, that facing this, extends my capacity for joy. Deepens my readiness to love. That the reasons for grief are heavy, but the reason for grieving is liberation. Yes, life will take everything from us. But it only takes what it first gave. So I want to believe that letting the darkness move through me makes room for more light. My friends in various 12 Step programs have shared with me their beautiful commitment to "Living life on life's terms." As I read it, Step One is looking at life full in the face, exactly as it is. And Step Two is deciding to love life anyway. I do find that I would rather skip straight to Step Two.

It's hard to hold both narratives, the societal and the personal, at the same time. But they both continue, woven but independent, and stubbornly indifferent to my capacity to hold them. So what kind of change am I experiencing now? In September I will have been in this valley for four years. Around the time of my arrival–burned out and utterly flattened–someone asked me to describe my state with an image. I said I was like a perennial that's been cut back to the ground. Life above the surface is gone, even though the roots are alive. Perhaps a single tender shoot reaching up through the soil, reaching for the sun. Back in my days as a permaculture teacher, we would talk about the first four years after transplanting a perennial like this: Sleep, Creep, Leap, Reap. First no signs of life, then slow emergence, then rapid growth, and then finally fruiting, abundance. Harvest. Sweetness. I'm four years in now, I would like this to be a year for reaping. There is sweetness here. Of course there is.

Every pace and tempo, each metaphor, has its own medicine. I will keep trying to find the romance of this tempo, whatever it is that's happening now, however I decide to explain it to myself. I will keep finding the medicine in this incremental pace, however much I yearn for rupture, however much I yearn for the dam finally breaking and letting the flood through, at last, at last, at last.