Melanie, (and for some reason, I cannot upload picture of her today), is a people person. If you were to see said picture(s) of her she would be surrounded by people – people who call her a dear friend, people she is laughing with, dancing with, chatting with. What is evident is that she cares about these people and what you can’t see is how big her heart is – for the world and for her community. She currently works giving care and attention to autistic children and will shortly be going back to school to get her Masters in Social Work so she can provide better care and education to herself and others.
Melanie is starting us off with our new spring prompt GROWTH IN CHANGE. She read this at the open mic night and I felt it needed be shared with more people. Thank you Melanie!
I am not a patient person.
I find slowness absurd, expecting sufferable, and waiting intolerable. I must be moving, I must be doing, I must be accomplishing; I reject the notion that things might not, cannot, or will not happen, so I take it on myself to facilitate that “happening”.
I am not patient, I do not know how to just be; I do not know how to trust my muscles and joints to gravity and allow my body to gently sit, letting my mouth and nostrils expand and suck in this miraculously available oxygen. To allow it to permeate my bloodstream, voyaging through my veins, delivering fuel and life to my organs, which all labor together symbiotically to ensure that I remain a healthy, functioning being. I do not know how to be patient and let my body do what it innately does, what, in some sort of holy inspiration, it was designed to do. Do, and do well, do absolutely perfectly (most of the time) completely without my assistance.
I am impatient, because I am terrified of things “not happening” when I am doing nothing to make them happen; despite of the fact that my body, my land, my world, everything manages to not just exist, but thrive without me. My impatience induces a habit of creating needlessness: my unhealthy habits, my unnecessary exertion, my controlling mentalities, my impatience over the fact that things aren’t going my way, my capacity to criticize and ostracize, my ridiculous dependence on things. Needlessness is my constant companion in this dark cavity in which I am comfortable to nestle, incapable—or, perhaps just refusing—to accept that this existence I’ve enjoyed is not contingent on myself. Refusing to accept that I have no control.
The realization of this horrid reality instigates all sorts of different reactions: some find this emancipation from control quite comforting, embracing their relinquished responsibilities from life’s supposed burdens like a warm blanket, happy to dwell in the surrounding nothingness. Others, however, find themselves in a panic, their wholly control-less nature an empty and suffocating void, an intolerable vacancy.
So, like me, they’ve fabricated a world where they do have control by making themselves dependant on needlessness. They, like me, refuse to believe that we have everything we need, and that we’ve already been given everything that matters, and that our bodies and our plants and our ecosystems know what they are doing. Fancying ourselves to be the wisest, strongest, and cleverest, we instate dominion over the things of the earth that do not defend themselves against our impertinence, perhaps, because, unlike us, they are confident that they have nothing to prove.
These things are used to create more things to feed our needlessness, leaving places barren in our wake. Our ethic is consumption, and we have been conditioned to earn livings to purchase lifestyles. We perpetuate a cycle of acquisition and waste, removing from earth and our bodies the very elements that make them function and thrive. We exploit what’s good so that we can prove to our terrified selves that we are in control.
What if we were bold enough to return our illegitimate control? What if we were confident enough to live as though we aren’t needed, but have in fact been given everything as a gift to enjoy? What if we listened to our bodies and our earth, and vowed to only give it good things? What if we made a covenant with ourselves and our land and our neighbors to re-learn how to be producers, rather than consumers? By renouncing our control that we have illicitly usurped, we actually become the wisest, the strongest, and the cleverest; by acknowledging that we have very little to do with the perpetuation of existence, we become freer beings, unrestrained by a lifestyle of needlessness. Instead, we become open to living a lifestyle that can meet real needs, a lifestyle centered on enacting justice, embracing mercy, and living in humble wonderment of to Whom we can attribute all of this beauty. A lifestyle that honors life, rather than trembles in fear of death.
I want to be brave enough to relinquish my control and regain my patience. I want to learn to lay down on the grass in peace, trusting my body and the earth that supports it. I want to embrace the radical assumption that I don’t need the needlessness, because I am actually not needed, though deeply, deeply wanted. Come, dive into this great warm abyss with me; let’s be courageous enough to surrender our control.
