IN CHANGING WE ARE HELD BY WHAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN

EARTH FACTS  •  BELONGING   •  PORTAL

Greetings from the final month of this year, this calendar, and our year-long spell. This is Jo, starting off this ending with the complete poem that wove its way through our 2023 calendar, Home:

Beside time we make a circle
Behind the mind we find a home
Within the edge we clear a hollow
To sing the future not yet known
Singing—in darkness we uncover
Light is not what we expect
Something moves the smoothing of this day to the next
Listen for the wind whose breath blows back again
With stones like bones and earth like skin
Growth and decay slow dance together
Carried by current we leave to remember
In changing we are held by what has always been 

What is it that holds us in the last line of this poem? What has always been? One framing is that change itself is the continuity. In this image of fire and stars, we are taken back to our own ancient history—to when we learned to make fire, and further back to the births of all these stars. All these fires are always changing. This fire will eventually go out, and the stars we now see will someday go dark. 

Those of us shaped by modern mythos have been conditioned to fear change, fear the unknown, fear the inevitable turning of the wheels of life and time and growth and decay. The story is that we should somehow be separate from this cyclical flow. And yet, here in the Anthropocene this same modern paradigm is solely responsible for the unprecedented planetary changes we are witnessing in our lifetime. The earth has been through more radical transformations, but none traceable to the behavior of a single species—not to mention a species capable of discernment.

In our collaboration for this year’s calendar, Corina and I sat with these truths and called out in heartbreak, fear, grief, disbelief—our hearts full and aching. What came back to us was an embrace. The feeling of this embrace is what we hoped to imprint into the calendar, into each image, each word, and especially December’s image and spell. Our first idea for this painting is what sparked one of the names we have for it, which is Signal Fire. When I reach the last line of this poem, it begins to repeat and expand in my mind, like so many signal fires stretching across a landscape. In my imagination, this phrase echoes and extends beyond my perception, until the prayer of being held by change expands so wide as to embrace us all.

One of my toddler’s favorite books is called A Rock is Lively. It’s a lovely read, tracing how rocks are formed. It’s always good to remember that even seemingly stable rocks hold the legacy and promise of extreme change. It’s a wild meditation to imagine the stable earth beneath your feet churning, roiling, breaking apart, crashing together. It is a beautiful practice to ask the earth what it remembers—as though we are sitting with a great elder and opening to the stories we need to help guide us. 

Nothing is truly stable. Nothing stays the same. And, we are held. As Octavia Butler says:

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.”