The Change

There are days in late September and early October so hot and dry that every movement through the grass kicks up a fine cloud of dust. The sky is a wall of flat blue and the angle of the sun through your windshield blinds you. The leaves haven’t changed color, they’ve just lost vitality, gone as limp as a glove. You can trick yourself into believing that this is the year they’ll forget about fall, that everything will continue to droop and crack until it all crumbles.

Then you wake up one morning in November and it’s damp and blustery. The wind blows up, down, and in circles like a puppy chasing its tail and a few freshly-naked branches are waving at the clouds glowering moodily above. Everything has changed overnight. The palette went from dull green to a rainbow of soft shades: peach, lemon, salmon, rust, sepia, with a pop of crimson every now and then from a sumac branch or a maple that got excited.

Jacques Prevert, writer of the famous torch song “Autumn Leaves,” saw autumn as a time for nostalgia and lump-in-your-throat longing: “but I miss you most of all, my darling / when autumn leaves start to fall.” Percy Shelley calls the autumn wind “destroyer and preserver” in his “Ode to the West Wind” and begs the spirit of the wind to merge with him–“Be thou me, impetuous one!”--to give him some of its fierceness and prophetic impact.

Despite all this flowery (leafy?) language, it might be a surprise to find out that I really struggle with change. I'm a person who has reinvented themself multiple times; I've had at least three lives so far. But change scares me breathless every time. Every time I encounter it, all I can see is the death involved, not the rebirth, and I bargain and strategize and cling and wail about how unfair it is. I don't want to lose what I already have, to give up an ounce of comfort represented by what is known: the friendships, jobs, houses, pets, and beliefs that circumscribe the different iterations of my S/self. Every time Change comes for me on its pale horse, it feels, as Elizabeth Bishop says in "One Art," "like disaster."

But here I am, again--and how much chest-beating pathos is put into that one word "again" by songwriters and singers across the world!--at a crossroads.

Here's what I believe, though: the crossroads is where we find magic and growth. If you can stay curious and keep your heart open through the pain of loss and rebirth, there are new iterations of you that would amaze your past self.

How do we do that, though? Well, that's what this space is going to be about. A travelogue, a guide, a hand to hold.

Welcome to the Crossroads. Leave an offering.