Revolve

Reluctantly, my little girl asks the question — what do you really think of me? — do you still like me? — and I hate myself for it — I hate that I have to ask a thing like that at this stage, in this day and age — I so want to shut up, be a battered up piece of furniture in your life — why am I judging this? — you are measuring the ceiling in the kitchen for the new walls to go in — we will go to the cat shelter to find a kitten for the family of mice that live behind the fridge — will I be there for the first kill? — will I be there for the first ferment, the first filling of those top shelves of the pantry, I am hoping, hoping that I am there to hold the ladder legs — yet I dreamt of Europe all night, of war-torn countries with familiar smells wafting through cobbled streets — and I cannot tell where I was when I woke, or how it felt to be mythologically stretched between tales — Privilege. The ties that bind me to a life diluted — spilling over with options — the medicine is in me still — speaking — this body was hijacked for new scaffolds to be erected — innate systems that spin the galaxy and the airborne seeds of dandelions on the breeze — inside my body now and acting through me — if I don’t resist, they will move me to the drumbeat of their strange music — if I do not move — if I rest — so I’m left guessing that it’s neither discipline nor brute force that will transform the course of my life — but rest, rest as revolution, rest as a pre-requisite for total systems change — somehow it’s the hardest thing, to choose to move slow, take note, not rush or shoot arrows where I believe they should go — rest as revolution, rest as “no, I will not be in your machine, there is a world far more abundant and rich that does not need me to burn out full-steaming towards my death” — with every breath I vow to take a little longer than I’m used to — let these native plants exhale through my lips.