when i was a teenager, my parents bought their first house. located very close to the edge of the city, it was a simple matter to hop on my bike, ride for ten minutes and be surrounded by fields. i liked that i could see farms, there's a magic about farms that i can trace back to my childhood tagging along with my grandfather who as a methodist minister, occasionally had circuits that took him into the countryside.
not very far from where i sit, an event has taken place ... well, more of an unfolding actually,
for these things take a year or so to fully materialize.
a field, the edge of a woodland and a marsh, have all been altered, drained and reconfigured to make way for a senior's recreation centre. it's the nature of living in a city that this is a necessary feature of the growth in the numbers of its inhabitants, and in the changes of the needs of those people.
indeed i expect most people passing by, perhaps not having contained so many of the sensory and contextual experiences of the field, the woodland, and the marsh, might instead see the benefit to so many seniors living nearby in having a place where they can congregate and engage in healthy pursuits in the company
of similarly aged and possibly like-minded people.
the part i can't reconcile is the reconfiguring of the experiential map that connects my mind to that
little part of the world now changed.
it almost hurts.
so many parts of our experiencing are grounded in the fulfillment of expectation.
expectation sometimes comes to life as a picture, framed with hope or desire and then
sealed behind the glass of reality.
change is inevitable.
and strangely, despite the disconcerting off-balance out-of-kilter feelings that accompany change
i am grateful for that inevitability.
i could wish that it felt better.
18 comments:
Ah Steven, and here it is your child hood recollections reconfigured. Lovely writing as ever and such a joy to read.
Steven, I wish you grace and peace as you work through this grief. Give it time. It is sad. I have no doubt your reflective and beautiful spirit will find much to feed you in the loam of this upturned soil.
If they were developing a shopping mall or corporate office center, it would be easy to hate it. Considering the reasons for the configuration, I totally understand why you wish you felt better about it.
The banner is incredible. Oh that blue! I dived right in, then remembered to read your blog.
Since life is always moving with flux and change, why is it that we resist is so much?
My heart goes with you, Steven. Such change seems to invalidate our identity and what gives our lives meaning. But isn't our identity, in truth, so much grander, broader, expansive, and uncontainable. Perhaps, it is only our memories that have boundaries. May the peace of surrender fill you with serenity, create a space for new memories, new astonishment, new wonder -- and above all, grace.
This sort of change has been shared by many many people.
The house in which my parents lived most of their lives was torn down not long after my mother's death to make room for two houses that stand there now. Profit for the developer.
Do you ever wonder how much heartbreak the first peoples have collectively endured? It would have to be enormously painful to see what we've done to their living world.
I hope that the new senior center will be a place where many people experience happiness.
Poor steven, I do so know how that feels.
You are very good about accepting that there must be change, but couldn't there have been a "brown field site" which needed using up? Why is it always the areas of the most benefit to nature which get trampled and built-on?
elisabeth it's such a joy to have lived a long period of time to draw arcs of connectedness from and to. steven
ruth - i was thinking that perhaps in the later years of my life i might even be on the inside of that senior's rec. centre! steven
reya - the soft blue violet of these flowers is about twenty centimetres from my face and i look into them constantly. i wanted that blue immersion to be up in the eyes of the people who visited here. it's beautiful and kind. steven
tess - i generally don't resist change and in this instance i am feeling it much more than resisting it. steven
kathleen thankyou for your generous wishes. steven
dan your story resonates - the house i grew up in in england is somewhere underneath a small office tower!! i hope the cockroaches and mice had the good sense to get out before the lid got lowered on them!!! steven
friko - i'm in a relatively green town with a good urban jungle well established and flourishing. there's a tendency about cities to want to grow outwards. mine- small as it is - is no exception. steven
I know that ache. Change always comes with some emotion - and yet being grateful for change is the one way we cope with it, yes?
expectation vs. reality...how sad the sun must be at times as it looks upon change...and yet it smiles...
pauline hi. i am so ultra-working on the end of the year for my class that i'm struggling to keep up with the comments. sorry to take so long! i love your way of thinking here. it feels very right to me. steven
lorely - the sun. i think it's a good place. everything we are is from the sun. physically. then there's the rest. so i owe that star a burden of gratitude!!! my little difficulties are nothing to that star but so much to me in the moment. learning to release as much expectation as i am able has been my work for the past three years. in terms of cycles it has four more years to go. steven
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