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“Shh-sh-sh-sh. Do you hear that? It’s the winds of change…” — Randall Boggs
1.
A small frog squats on my desk between my keyboard and monitor. He’s light tan, almost yellow. He seems content to watch me while I work and his almost-smile reminds me to chill. A frayed, unburned white wick sticks up out of the top of his head between his eyes. I won’t ever light him. Molded candles are supposed to burn down into the center, I think, but I can’t trust that this one will. I think it would be cruel to watch him burn. When I was a child, even into my pre-adolescence, my stuffed animals had personalities and feelings. If this frog’s purpose in life is to be a candle, I am denying him that dream. I know that I might be missing out on a really cool melty-frog sculpture, but there wouldn’t be any going back. You can’t un-melt a candle. I’d rather him stay just as he is.
[muttering] “Do you hear that, doyouhear, thewindsofchange—What a creep! One of these days, I am really…gonna let you teach that guy a lesson.” — Mike Wazowski
2.
The Toy Story guys on a high shelf in my son’s bedroom had apparently been partying while we were out and flopped/froze into a disheveled display upon our return. Although my son spent a grumbling chunk of time restoring order to every other shelf and countertop after our new once-a-month house cleaners were finished with their fantastically thorough get-under-everything dusting, he couldn’t reach to fix Buzz and Woody. He got super flustered trying to non-verbally instruct his non-photographic-memory parents how to make it right and I thought about asking the cleaners to dust around things in my son’s apartment in the future, but having a clean home makes me happy and this allows my son to practice coping when someone breaks his rules. He’s got a friend in his Dad, though. Once we settled Andy’s toys into an acceptable reenactment, we took our own photo so Dad can help them return to their proper positions before our son gets home and I/they can still be happy they had a chance to stretch and shake off the dust (Wheezy the penguin would agree).
3.
On a café patio, I watched a one-legged bird pecking around under the tables for scraps. Except he wasn’t one-legged. He had his other leg tucked up tight under his body. He would hop tentatively on one leg, drop his other foot down for a second to catch his balance, then draw that leg back up under his feathers again. I felt badly that he’d injured himself somehow. My knees and hips have also been complaining lately. My dad’s knees are younger than mine now, since he’s had both of his replaced. Maybe birds’ legs just get old and tired, too. At least his wings still worked. He has more than one way to get around. He was doing some serious core work, though, bending over one-legged to get those crumbs. I need to get more exercise. But it hurts my knees. I feel you, bird.
“You need to be more flex-ible…” — Elastigirl
4.
I am standing at the utility sink in our garage scrubbing goat poop off the bottom of my son’s sneaker when I notice that here I am, already running late, dealing with yet another obstacle to getting in the car (a delay that involves animal feces no less) but I’m not freaking out—although, sure, I’m not thrilled to be late and I’m working quickly, but on another day (even tomorrow is likely) I would be in a pissed and panicky doom scroll about how hard it all is and how much I hate to be late and why did I take him to that ranch anyway and does he even like to feed the goats and the cows and who designed this shoe’s tread with so many tiny crevices and I just cleaned my car and why do I have to manage everything—but none of that came to me on this morning (or even later that night when I was plunging a toilet clogged with a different species of scat) because a few weeks ago I re-started my daily-ish meditation practice, having found as I do every time I fall off the wagon, which is often, that my patience was frayed and my tolerance was thin and my balance was off, but that simple quiet ritual takes a brush to the gunked-up grooves in my brain so I am not sweating this shit but simply scrubbing the soiled sole with appreciation that I saw this before it spread wherever he stepped today and I know that this is a definitely a change for the better.
Thanks so much to
and her November “Essay Camp” at for the inspiration to play with these fragments and see what they might say together.And, thanks to all of you, for reading and listening!
I really love following along and seeing what you're working on, Robin. I'm popping through a handful of Substacks that I enjoy seeing in my feed and sending out some paid subscriptions. I hope to see you in the discussion threads soon. ☀️
I loved this little gathering of different facets of flexibility! Great that you followed the suggestion to put them together. And I’m in awe of that ONE sentence in #4. Freakin’ amazing. A writing teacher suggested to me long ago that I play around with trying to fill a whole page with one sentence. It’s so hard for me to do, it happens only once in a blue moon. But look at you! Love it.