times are a-changing. selves-are-a-growing. the right answer is that I will look back on these times and consider this a period of growth, of change, of learning who I am, or have always been. change just looks like understanding my existing terrain, more, perhaps. exploring my earth. I've always been myself, and will always be, and spaceship earth is always here, and I am just learning.

change feels like: finding metaphors for selves, emotions. learning how to feel who I am. learning what I am feeling, and the different kinds of things I am feeling. learning how to say them out loud. learning how to move through, or with fears. learning to know what my fears are. learning to articulate them, to map how they work, to see how they have shaken me.

change feels like: when I hear someone say something deeply important, I wait. slowly, from within my body, deep bells peal out, or long low bass strings of harps vibrate, generating resonances. I hear these resonances. and eventually they float upwards, through my body, through my chest, and a curiosity, or a knowing forms. and I think, and I realize it, and I share it outwards. it's a question, or a statement. the sharing doesn't have strong goals or aims; maybe there's a disposition, but at the heart of it, it is a stating-of-things-out-loud. an articulation.

and the incredible thing -- the incredible fact that never, ever ceases to amaze me at some deep level, is that the responses, the connections that are possible afterwards are magical, unexpected. we are on a journey. I am listening, responding. my interlocutionary partner is also doing the same. we are reverberating. finding places to go.

M shares a story. through and into the words I hear the depth of a core story that vibrates deeply, the kind of core story you write your life around; I feel the core stories that I've written my life around, and that come back to me, or that I return to, over and over again. I imagine those spirographs, drawing tools, twin plastic gears locked and enmeshed with each other. you place a pen into a hole, and set it going. gears with differing sizes so that a full revolution happens at the least common denominator of these gears. together, the line swoops in, and out, and in, and out, an in, creating a floral, radially symetrically pattern consisting of two continuous revolutions. two gears, just keep turning circularly, and we find ourselves leaving a story, coming back, leaving a story, coming back to it. full of meaning, meaning full.

and so I hear myself saying, "it sounds like something you've thought a lot about", and as I say it I know it is true, because it is resonating with the energy of myself thinking a lot about my stories, and I can hear in my voice the slightly humorful voice of someone who knows that is probably true, and knows that they know that it is true,

and M says, "oh, yeah", her head nodding both smoothly and emphatically, and I imagine myself see the motion of the wave her head makes, down and up, down and up, the easing function of a curve, swooping downwards and upwards, like reeling in silk, or the quality of a certain heartbeat. I recognize, or resonate with, the tone in her voice, in the tones of my voices. somewhere around acceptance, understanding, bittersweetness, sadness, manifested through a kind of wry humor that feels right. this kind of wry humor is what gets us through it. it's gentle but important. perhaps it's all just this wry humor, you know? I think. humor is a force that connects us to acceptance.