I saw a fox on the road. He scurried off to the woods, and I back home to tell Dominique. I wonder if he was in a hurry to tell his furry family that he saw me?
I think about it all. Do the butterflies regard me as a sign from a loved one, as they dance along my shoulders? Do the birds try to recreate my song? Have the flowers been waiting eagerly to bloom? To brush a dewy hello on my spring leg? Do the leaved trees enjoy the glint of my green ring as I swing my arms?
I don’t mean any of this as vanity. Truly. I don’t assume the world is thinking just about me. I guess what I mean is, we all have an impact. The steps we take each day. The paths we cross. The lives we touch. And if we thought about it in this way, wouldn’t our steps be a little lighter? Wouldn’t we move with a little more grace and a little less trample? If I am love to the butterflies, just as they are to me, now, wouldn’t that be some kind of dance?! And couldn’t it continue from butterfly to neighbor? To persons across the globe?
I guess the song said it best, “you may say I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one.” I see it in you. When you join me in Rueben’s field. In Elsie’s kitchen. In Ivy’s shoes. For aren’t they but the fox, the flower and the butterfly? They are for me. And if you’ll excuse me, I have a dance to keep.
I was a little about halfway through my workout when she came in and got on the treadmill. For thirty nine minutes more, I climbed the imagined hill of the eliptical machine. I hopped off to grab the spray cleaner and a towel to wipe down the machine. In my mid step she said, “You know my brother lives in Dallas.”
There it was! The nugget I wait for each trip. We always get at least one. People are delightful! I imagined her putting the words in her “holster”…just waiting for me to pass by. She was not going to miss her chance. I like to think of the words brewing as she took each step.
And me, I wasn’t going to miss the chance either. “Dallas, you say…”
“And they have more snow than we do.” And we were off. Mid conversation. No warmups. Two humans. Let’s go! “We don’t have much here,” I said, as I cleaned up my station. “And his neighbor, only a few miles away doesn’t have any.” “The world is upside down,” I returned. I let her talk about that brother, those snow-full and snow-less neighbors, for 10 minutes. The only rush I felt was wanting to get back to the condo to tell Dominque of our new treasure — our new opening line — “You know my brother lives in Dallas.” I’m still smiling.
What are we here for, if not to engage with those around us? And why wouldn’t we begin mid conversation… with everyone. We are all humans on this planet. People will still vote for someone you don’t like. Fires will rage. Snow storms will never last beyond spring. And this moment will pass in a blink, so I encourage myself, you, to always jump in. It’s what we learned isn’t it? On the school playground? No matter who was swinging that rope, no matter what song they were singing along to the swing, we jumped in. I want to be that little girl, armed with joy, and ever jumping in.
There was her story– just right in front of her– and this time, she wasn’t going to miss it.
Maybe we were all just as fragile as the sticker we stood behind. This sticker with only three words. But three chosen words could bring us together, couldn’t they? Hadn’t they brought us together so many times? So we wrote three new ones at the moment of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris — Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie). And we marched. We gathered. Together.
Lifted by the scents of the boulangeries, we asked for the same — something new, something fresh. We weren’t just journalists and jokers. Not only French, but humans — humans all over the world. People standing up for the rights to be free, and to be safe in that freedom. Safe to laugh, to create and to grow and to love. So we shuffled from foot to foot, knowing there is never really “safety” in love or creation. Knowing that there’s risk in both. But we lifted signs above our heads and out of our hearts, believing still, the risk was never, is never, meant to be our lives. We had to be secure in the living. Standing next to the ones we loved, and the ones perhaps we’d love to know, we said we were one. We said we were together. We said we were “Charlie.”
I can’t tell you which tragedy happened next. One blurred into the next. And we changed our pictures on Facebook from one flag to another. Vowed our support on Instagram. Shouted our discontent. And changed our banners the following week, and sometimes daily. And it was never enough, and too much for others. So we went back to our smiling selfies, and soon stopped changing our banners altogether.
I don’t want to grow immune to it. To look away at injustice. I don’t want to merely shrug my shoulders and move on. But neither can I, we, carry the weight of it all on our shrugging shoulders. Our weary hearts. Somehow we must keep standing, for and with.
This painting is of that day, that day when we claimed who we were. Standing behind the sticker is Pascal. He is my brother-in-law. Really, he is just my brother. The sticker of “in-law” has long worn off and dropped. Maybe that’s what family is — those who are still there once the stickers have worn off. Once the flags have been changed. And changed again. It is who we really are.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves each day, “Am I a part of this world?”; “Am I a part of the human race?”; “Am I a part of this family?” — look in the mirror, look at those around us, and proudly answer, I am.
