February.  The love month.  The month my skin has historically hit its most green (being of “olive” complexion – or so I’ve been told).  The shrimpy month perhaps made so out of some vague attempt compensate the rutheless grind mid-winter in the northern hemisphere can present whether rainy in Portland, sub-zero in eastern Montana or, this year, astonishingly dry in California and wildly cold where my Mama lives in Georgia.

It was February, 2009 when I set out on my first EX:Change roadtrip.  A few weeks earlier, this blog had its beginning and, with a break between the end of the first trip and the beginning of 2010, offered itself as a weekly exercise.  As much as the trip, the book 100 Voices – Americans Talk about Change and the listening at the center of both, these blog entries have given a place for me to be in change alongside all of you.

Now it’s February 2014 – a month that finds me in another time of enormous change.  In that, a lot of re-imagining is going on.  In particular, re-Imagining my work life.  Re-imagining to maximize its vitality and service.  It’s really quite a cool thing to get to do in the middle of a life (terrifying as it feels at times).

Part of that re-imagining involves the help of a brilliant web developer — a woman in love with the environment, devoted to its health, equally devout in her commitment to general human well being and using her late-twenties vision and skill to pull together social media, business development and social activism.  Erika holds change in a way that weaves vibrant networks for inspired and sustained change across many people at once.  It’s the vivid actualization of community for leading together toward vital innovation that none of us could accomplish working alone.

So after the weeks needed for site construction, this blog will continue as part of a new website, a new way for my part in the change to be part of the forward motion that carries us all.

It’s an odd moment in some ways — perhaps such times feel odd to anyone.  Change is as necessary to a lifetime as interdependence – as breath, and water, as food and curiosity.  To really know that — to have change as a perceived and constant companion — to consider how to be thoughtful and active, engaged with others and awed (patient, too) with the unpredictability that defines change … well it’s odd.

Maybe the unfamiliar aspect comes from the fact that I’ve spent most of my life swept along by change — liking it sometime, hating and fearing it others.  That relationship to change seems pretty common to most people.  When I decided to get to know change more directly back at the end of 2008 — with the launch of the EX:Change project for listening to Americans’ notions of change — I didn’t fully know what I was stepping into.  I couldn’t have.

On paper it sounds like no big deal to get it that change is a constant.  Cliches to that effect abound — “the only constant is change ….”  But in the past 5 years I’ve been humbled repeatedly by how much change has had to teach me.  Over that time, I’ve begun walking through change with my eyes more open.  Experiences I never knew were out there have come my way because no longer is change only making me — unquestioned like the great and powerful OZ.  Instead, I’m now an increasingly aware part of change.

While my ego and conditioning would love to take this awareness and convert it into flawless prediction and control — well — it ain’t happening.  Instead, I’m learning the artistry and awe of making and being made by change.

This, esoteric as it may seem,  is the basis of my February Re-Imagining.   And, now that I think of it, it is anything but esoteric.  Having a chance to re-think, to transform life’s work is for one thing, a huge privilege.  It’s also the only practical way forward on my through the changes that sculpt my pathway this time around.

As ever, I only learn from hearing how change looks from your vantage point.  I also look forward to the next entry in this blog stream — the one that will inaugurate the next expression of the EX:Change.

Thanks for your companionship — for your creativity with the change that is your life.

Until soon ~  mc