6: Say It Anyway
Winds of Change
I’M NOT THE SAME PERSON I USED TO BE AND I’M STARTING TO TELL THAT STORY. When I began to see just how big the change was going to be, I was afraid of a lot of things, but most of all, I was afraid that no one would like me.
On October 18, I headed to my first Meetup with a group that was writing in a variety of genres, not just memoir. As I drove south on Highway 99, I wondered what everyone would think of my work.
I tried to focus on the shops along the way to see if there were any I wanted to visit in the future. One of the buildings stood out with a swash of emerald green and a huge round logo. Rat City Rollergirls. A woman I’d gotten to know in Anacortes talked about coming to Seattle to skate in roller derbies. I wondered if this was the place.
I arrived at the coffee shop and we shared some of our writing. Then the woman who organized the group suggested doing something I’d never done before: write from a prompt.
We finished one, and I felt pretty good about it, but on the second one, when I reached a couple of words, my fingers stopped.
“Don’t do it,” I thought at first.
“There’s no other way to say it,” I argued back.
“You’re making your writing sound too important,” I countered.
“Why can’t I think of another way to put it?”
A few seconds later the group organizer said, “It’s time to finish your last sentence,” and I wrote down the words anyway.
I used the cliché: the winds of change.
Clichés lurk in the recesses of every writer’s mind like coiled snakes ready to strike. We know we should avoid them at all costs, that they suck the life out of sentences, but it seemed more like it was going to kill me to avoid saying what was pouring onto the page.
Everyone read their stories, and I was impressed with the quality of the writing, then it was time to say goodbye. I still felt kind of uncomfortable with what I had written, so I left thinking, “I read it pretty quickly, and the coffee shop was noisy. Maybe they didn’t hear everything.”
I stopped at home to have lunch. Then, a couple of hours later, I headed to Target. When I pulled into the parking lot I saw a Rat City Rollergirls’ car. It didn’t have personal meaning to me beyond its relationship to the woman I knew, but I took a picture anyway, not knowing what might be coming.
When I opened it in Photoshop, I realized I hadn’t taken the photo in a way that would clearly show where I’d seen it. Then I looked again. I’d managed to capture enough of Target’s red shopping carts to show that I didn’t just take it in the Rat City Rollergirls’ parking lot.
Not long before I logged onto Facebook, a group I followed shared the song, “Wind of Change,” by the German rock band, the Scorpions. The post indicated it had been up for about an hour. I remembered hearing the song in college, but I didn’t regularly listen to any of the Scorpion’s music. I also didn’t have any interest in politics at the time. While the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union obviously affected many people deeply as it did the Scorpions, I was happy to hear about it, but I didn’t give it much more thought. Still, the phrase had appeared twice that day, and I’d encountered the Rat City Rollergirls twice as well, so I shared the events with a Facebook Synchronicity group.
Within a few hours, one of the members shared a story about the first time he heard Wind of Change. F.C. said that he was watching a flock of albatross as they followed his ship and that the song “welled up the eyes.” He also said that this was the second time within 24 hours that the albatross had been part of a conversation in the Synchronicity group, and he tagged the other person he had talked to just a few hours before.
The other member replied to his comment by sharing a story about aircraft carriers, war, and sea birds, adding “sea birds...have impacted a few aware people it seems.”
I could finally see that this was like many other events I’ve experienced over the years where synchronicity was part, but not all of it. The meaningful part of this story was the fact that the conversation had gone this direction.
I have a profound “sea bird” story, but for years, I’ve wrestled with the idea of sharing it. It is deeply connected to who I am, and it challenges the foundation of most religious belief systems, so it isn’t something I could explain in a comment or even in a short story. The connection for me between the wind of change, the appearance of sea birds in this post’s comments, and a point early in 2013 when I thought, “Of course, a sea bird,” spans almost my entire lifetime.
The story is currently at the end of an unfinished memoir that is the next project on my to-do list, and as I was working on this project, the answer arrived. An e-mail I received mid-March pushed me to do some research and that led me to a video by Lee Gutkind, the founder of the magazine, Creative Nonfiction. From what he said, I now know that I need to include it, no matter how difficult it seems.
It’s a strange thing to experience.
Having to be afraid to tell other people about ourselves. Knowing that there are people who think they can define who everyone is and should be because of their life experiences. Knowing that, in some cases, if you say what you want, you can face attacks that are venomous, even deadly.
I’d never really given much thought to the wind of change before I struggled that afternoon to try to avoid using the phrase. But listening to the song, processing F.C.’s comments, and thinking about everything that has happened in my life enabled me to see the wind of change for what it is.
It is the breath of humanity, real or virtual, that speaks for the downtrodden, the abused, the displaced, the unrecognized, the unaccepted. Each voice is inspired by experience, including events in our lives that are wrought by the Creator/God.
I was led to believe that the Creator/God didn’t intervene in people’s lives, that everything was said and done with the crucifixion of Jesus. But about a year after I walked away from organized religion, one beautiful, unexplainable event after another started to occur in my life, and no one told me how to interpret them.
I began to search everywhere, and I slowly began to see that many people have experienced unexplainable, phenomenal events. Some of them have tried to create belief systems, but from what I have found, they are too limited. Comparing my experiences and my path to theirs has enabled me to see that many long-held beliefs, which include religious and spiritual views about the way to understand the Creator/God and experience a personal relationship with that source, are untrue.
I believe that my stories, which include the events shared here, the path I share in my memoir, and a number of other stories that will follow, will help to create a much-needed shift in current perspectives.