Change is Inevitable

Why hold onto what you have to let go of?

If you really know me (and by now, you may know more than the average Joe Shmo’) you’d know how much I am inspired and comforted by Jhene Aiko. So, it’s inevitable that this admiration would find its way into my writing. Her work insightfully and simply exemplifies life, a divine balance of feminine and masculine energy, working to bring the duality of the human experience, love and pain, manifest to benefit many others. I learn a lot just by sitting and listening to the musical vibrations, vocal vibratos and lyrical cadences that she combines to create transformation in human bodies. This commitment to understanding impermanence, the inevitability of change and transformation that she embodies brings me to center when I feel myself stressing over life’s current circumstances.

I know when I’m really eating away at myself when I look at my hands. The hands are the conductors of the body. So when the nails are being bitten, when the movement of them proves tiring or restless, I know that I need to digest the happenings of the past weeks, months and years (sometimes), to allow the before-mentioned happenings to be moved through my body, through my hands. There’s one particular finger on my hand that I notice gets the brunt of the shame that I’ve been avoiding these past few months, maybe even years. The left index finger. I’ve always hated that fingernail. It seems to wrap around my finger a bit tighter than the others, allowing less space to let the nail bed breathe, and allowing a lot more to remain trapped underneath it. This week, as I find myself gnawing away at the nail, I have decided to be aware of the mess that has been creating anxiety in my mind, and shorter nails on my fingers, especially the left index, who has been dug further into the nail bed than any nail would ever decide to engage in on their own.

In noticing this change in my body, and in my nail, I send grace and gratitude to my mind for having the capacity to see the difference. For being open to learning about myself and my process of dealing with being a human, balancing work life, mom life, and social life as it continues to expose more complexities.

In embracing these changes, these complexities, I have found myself in rooms with people who are navigating these same universal truths: everything is impermanent, everything is changing, yet we are always coming back to appreciating the process of flowing through life and through creation and re-creation.

Before I realize, my left index nail will be back, my babe will be full grown (and so will her placenta’d Flowering Dogwood), my hair will be greying (even more), and my home will become something unbeknownst to me now. In all of this coming to reality and remembering mortality, I trust that everything that is meant to be, will be, and that in trusting this process of life being as it is, I begin to know myself more, and I begin to understand others.

THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU.

Abby xx