small changes -
(written on Aug. 30, 2020. edited today.)
Alicia Keys on “Unlocking Us with Brené Brown”:
It just grabbed me by the throat. We shift ourselves not in sweeping pivots, but in moments so tiny that they’re hardly perceptible. Even in our own view years can pass before we finally discover, after handing over our power piece by small piece, we no longer even look like ourselves.”
While weeding in the garden and around the shed today, I put in my earbuds, then don my gloves, and listen to an episode of “Unlocking Us.” I pull on long vines, snaked around the wire mesh fence that border the driveway. I listen to Alicia talk about a “series of moments that bruise the spirit.” These tiny moments, these small betrayals. I listen as I grab the vines that prick and poke into my gloves when I’m not careful. I tug and pull, willing the vine, roots and all, to leave the space. The very same space a few months ago Bryan and I had weeded and pulled apart, just like this moment, to cover the area with a pile of woodchips that dwindled ever so slowly from our driveway. Woodchips that Bryan had turned and turned to prevent the pressure and weight of it from causing a small fire inside. And I continue to listen, as I make my way to the garden beds, some plants drowning in weeds. I listen and pull thinking how these tiny weeds, once seemingly imperceptible, have grown to blend in with the carrot tops, the mint leaves, the ginger plants my mom had gifted us from her own garden, weaving it’s way around the watermelon vines. And aren’t weeds and time like tiny shifts that I overlook and hand over to mother nature, to others, pretending they won’t become sweeping movements across my garden? Like all the tiny moments I decided not to apologize or I decided not to bring it up or I decided to fold into myself so that these small betrayals to my garden finally make way to the watermelon, now rotted, cracked open, covered in bugs, discovered only after I had cleared the weeds in the garden bed so I could finally snap the watermelon from it’s vine to carry it over to the growing weed pile in the back corner of the yard, to mourn what it could’ve been and grown into - large and heavy and sweet. I go back in the garden, head down, listening and weeding as I go, thinking about tiny imperceptible moments just like this one.
