I'm Adely Moan, and this is The Slowdown.

I've been thinking a lot about transitions lately.

The way we must move between seasons and pretend it's easy.

I've moved between ages, between jobs, houses, and big life events.

Our whole lives are spent in transition, and yet I know I will feel more at peace in

a fixed or controlled state.

I want things to be known, to be planned, to be smooth.

I remember being in a meditation class at the Tibet House in New York City many years

ago.

In the teacher talking about how we either live in the past or the future and never in

the present moment.

Of course I'd heard it before, but it had never landed on me.

That night on the subway home I had realized that the majority of my life was either

spent deeply remembering or aggressively planning or even catastrophizing.

I tried to just be on the subway with its bodies and smells and humanity.

It's funny to say it now, but that moment changed my life.

Today's poem talks about what it is to always be in a body that is being transformed into

something else, or to be in a body that is asked to be something else.

Playing with the myth of Daphne, turning into a lural tree, this poem expands on what

it is to be in a body only seen as a symbol for something else.

Metamorphosis, the female into by Maggie Queenie, lural tree, limbs bent and twined into

the crown, heather, bank of marsh reeds, handful lashed into pipes, song in another breath,

...