Rearrangements
One of my dearest people wrote last night that “2021 can go straight to hell and rest there forever w 2020.” And god that’s so true but there is also this whole other thing, which I keep describing to myself and whoever I’m sitting next to as:
“this year rearranged me”
and a sweet way I can feel it is in writing this now…and knowing I haven’t written much since summer…at which time I was like “ok, HERE’S how this newsletter will REALLY be from now on! I’d said originally it would be at x frequency and have y parts but actually that’s changed, and here are my new promises of predictability!” But a thing I’ve learned in my rearrangement is that I cannot actually predict myself, and I cannot assure you that I am predictable,
and
it’s
ok!
Like…maybe you, if you’ve been around here a minute, liked the assurance that these would stay brief, arrive regularly, and have a consistent format, or maybe you never needed or even noticed it. For me it’s actually a whole journey to be like, “ok whatever!” about that, to let it go, to not feel responsible for helping you (who never asked) feel some measure more of certainty in this world, which is not something I can give you anyway. And that’s in the context of this odd newsletter but I mean…also everywhere in all my everything. My learning and practicing this year wasn’t (just) cute licheny mutuality, but also the really hard-for-me part of interdependence that is trusting that another being can hold both their own self and me well at the same time. I find that, for real, very hard, but I am, for real, practicing.
So it’s truly magic, and a big part of my rearrangement, that people came into my life this year and somehow immediately taught me that they have me, as in
“I got you”
which is a thing I learned that it matters to me to hear and believe about small things and big things,
and other people who’ve been in my life a longggg time showed they have me in ways I’d not previously all the way known but wow have been moved to tender tears by almost daily, because this was also a year of reaching, like just wooooo way out, often wildly, like a pea tendril,
which comes from tendrillon, French for “bud,” which comes from either “tender” like “soft, delicate” or “tender” like “reach, extend,” and no one can say which anymore,
but I have been met, and held, over and over, and that, that, that has rearranged me.
and so I am delighted to report that I have no fucking clue when the next one of these will come, or how long it will be, or what it will be about, and that feels like the most licheny practice I can offer you, the ones I love.