When I write about conflict, I do not speak of war.
When I write about the kind of conflict that creates something new, I do not speak of indiscriminate bombing or of children trafficked.
When I write about conflict that builds intimacy, I do not speak of the tyrannies we swallow in silence for more than sixty years in service of the movement.
Generative conflict is not violence, abuse, tyranny, or war.
This last week of winter has felt heavy — dense with the last vestiges of the cold and damp. The last week of Ramadan, a waning moon before Nowruz, the equinox and the start of Aries season.
Portent, if you are a person who notices these things.
When my limbs feel heavy with this kind of uninspired waiting — I don’t quite know for what — when I find myself slipping a little too far down a despondent wormhole — I turn to books.
This week I drew down a stack of favorites off the shelves. I wandered up to my local revolutionary bookstore (a Harlem fixture), and I paged through Mosab Abu Toha, Isabel Allende, Eve Ensler, Marjane Satrapi, Robin Wall Kimmerer. I collected a tempting stack the length of my arm, walked out with just the slim tome of poetry tucked amongst the beloveds I’d brought from home.
I carried the the pages with me all week like a talisman — leafing through Staci Haines over a flat white, scribbling notes in the margins of a well-worn adrienne maree brown paired with a sharp, clearing hot toddy — chasing away the brain fog like the last of the mist ringed around the fingernail of moon, just after Eid.
As it turns out, every book I pulled in a frenzied yank off my shelf had “change” in the title.
Holding Change — my facilitation bible, all these years.
The Change Tarot — my go-to reference for archetypes of behavior change.
The Will to Change — my medicine and my inspiration, over and over again.
The only one that didn’t — The Politics of Trauma — starts with the line:
“Two questions have been with me most of my life: How do people change? How do social systems change?”
Same, Staci, same.
Change is inevitable — “All that you touch, you Change; The only lasting truth is Change; God is Change,” etc.
There is the change we choose and the change that is forced upon us.
War is forced upon us. Survivorship — from Dolores Huerta’s story to Virginia Giuffre’s story to Chanel Miller’s story to so many of our stories — is forced upon us.
But the change we choose — to speak, to write, to act, to be together — that is what makes new again.
The choices we make — to shove off the despondency, to practice something different, to hold our own integrity and that of our children — that is the change that builds universes instead of destroying them.
It is spring, after all, and the crocuses poke their heads up through the gritty dirt, and so must we.
