Gabrielle Zevin’s epigraph of her book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, is this Emily Dickenson poem:
“That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.”
i for one love the combination of freight and grooved. for now i also picture the train from the polar express movie. the poem today reminded me of furrowing. i am often furrowing my brow. sometimes people who love me will alert me to this fact. “You’re furrowing” is a gentle way to interrupt worrying.
furrow "narrow trench or channel"
Furrow and worry both make a narrow view, you narrow your eyes slightly, knit your brow. Tara Brach often says the etymology of worry is to strangle and it hits every time. Worry, furrow, strangle. The grip of forehead muscles and fear. The freight is sometimes not proportioned to the groove because the groove has become automatic. Sometimes there’s not even any freight there.
"furrow, trench in the earth made by a plow"
furrows protect and hide. they also irrigate and aerate. i suppose the question remains in any given moment, which purpose is the ‘furrow’ serving?
Middle Dutch vore, Dutch voor; German Furche "furrow;" from PIE *perk- (2) / "to dig, tear out"
if i can dig my way in i can dig my way out. Something that I dug this week, that widened the view — Alexis Pauline Gumbs saying “We are all intimately confronted with change in this moment. And what if we did honor change? As a god? What if we gave our devotion to change. What if we sang hymns to change. What if change was what we depended on? What if we chose change parents for our children that could help them transform. What if we opened our hearts to transformation, studied it, thanked it when it came. I’m not going to preach but I want us to offer our breathing today to our own capacity to embrace change, and let change embrace us. We could embrace each other, witness each other’s holiness in all this change.”1
and so the people who love me remind me to relax my forehead, and I do. And I drop my shoulders, too. Inch by inch, learning to herald change instead of brace for it. There’s no other way to greet the sacred, if you can dig it.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs talking about the philosophical foundation “god is change” of Earthseed, the religion in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, invented by the teenage character Lauren Oya Olamina. From Black Feminist Breathing Chorus ↩