Notices by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin✨ (bethsawin@spore.social)

...uncertain step by uncertain step because what else are you going to do. And you'll discover that bodies are miracles and also messy and that love is strong and that suffering and meanness are everywhere but so is kindness and that almost everything is fragile even when it doesn't look like it

but that people can face things they've avoid for decades in the face of no alternative and nothing is solid and change is real and possible and, as Rilke tells, no feeling is final, just keep going.

...navigating the ice on crutches under the February stars (or February sleet, depending). A dimension of cascading impacts from interventions, but also of resilience of the human body, and more than anything a dimension of realizing you are more resourceful than you imagined.

...from my dimension to yours, is that you are probably stronger than you realize, your friends and family are probably more brilliant and resourceful than you knew, and when your backs are against the wall, what really matters will get clear, and you will move forward...

Hi friends, if you have missed me I have been pulled into an alternate dimension known as caring for a relative with a complex and serious illness, a portal to a dimension that includes 12 hour long emergency room visits (2 of them), ice storms, power outages, tracking doses, insurance calls,

hospital bureaucracy, agencies that should co-ordinate but don't, unexpected drug reactions, brilliant nurses, saline flushes, alcohol wipes, the laundry that comes with a sick person, but also a broken washing machine...

I know there's a bigger slide into crisis than the one my family is in right now, a slide I thought I'd be paying deeper attention to than I can, for now. Something something FAA, something NIH, something vaccines, something climate something justice. For now all I want to offer..

You, we, are made for these times. We know that because here we are, the only ones who can change the future. You only find out how dedicated you are to the future when put to the test.

Try, I know it is hard, to disrupt the patterns that drag back to some past systemic structures that are trying to resurge. A giant whirlpool can be poked at, confused, redirected, dissipated. Especially when it contradicts the instructions and requirements for fitting in to the living Earth.

High fidelity to a just and life sustaining future, at staff meeting, at the dinner table. In community, at the resilience hub, the warming center, the library, wherever. Make that future already here if only microscopically.

tiny actions, in chaotic circumstances seed change in unpredictable ways. Try - I know it is hard - to let go of what the future will be, and act in the moment with the highest fidelity you can to world you want to see emerge on the other side of chaos.

We could be heading toward lock in of something worse, we could be in an oscillation that will flip to something life sustaining. The only prophecies to count on are self-fulling ones. The best way to make it 'over' is to assume that it is. Instead remember...

Reminder: A system's behavior can get chaotic in advance of transitions or transformations. Don't assume that today is the end point of anything. Today is a moment of multifold potential.

I've been posting some about my November ankle fracture & the lessons that have come along with with it. (Here's a snapshot: no more cast & I can take the "boot" off when sitting down"🎉). It's interesting to me, how the lessons percolate into my awareness their own time.

One lesson I just wrote a little piece about for next week's "letter from the director" email, about how you can't rush the healing of a fracture, whether its your ankle or the division between society and nature or climate and health. Sign up 👇🏻 for that https://www.multisolving.org/#newsletter

Then this morning, stretching the injured joint gently, I had a surprise, a visceral flash of the moment of the break, something I somehow haven't *really* revisited. And I was struck with such grief it took me by surprise.

Not grief for myself or for this long recovery or for the things I haven't been able to do, but a more metaphorical grief (?)...

...or maybe grief for a bigger whole. "This is catastrophic collapse" said the voice in my head. This is what it *feels* when you push a system beyond its tolerance. When the foundations go out. I remembered the popping sound of the break.

Of being suddenly on the ground. Of the living structure that has held me up for more than five decades floppy at the end of my leg, unable to respond to the commands of my brain.

Ankles break, foundations of things have been going out underneath living beings on earth as long as there has been life. As my friend says, babies cry, people die. Species come to ends. Homes burn. But not at this rate, not at this pace, this pace which part of us knows is only getting started.