Revolution is a beautiful concept,

and a hard-working word,

bringing and bearing so much in this world.

It is a word like a woman in that way.

 

Revolution is the act of radically opposing, of rising up, of bringing forth change by force. It is giving up on waiting, it is proclaiming “the time is nigh”, it is insistent, abrupt—seemingly all of a sudden, but rarely actually so.

 

And also,

 

 revolution is the slow, methodical, turning, and returning, turning, and returning, of a celestial being situated (and unsituated) in time and in space. It almost seems a sacrilege to try and add anything beyond definition here, but I suppose I will.

 

I will sit and write

my words winding

round and round.

I will see what happens,

and where I end up.

 

When I was 22, I lived in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan with my friend Alana. We were there to bring God’s love, which I suppose we felt needed a little help from us at the time. Or maybe we understood that God’s love was everywhere but felt less certain of other people’s ability to notice it without the proper guidance. Thankfully (at least for my current conscience), the main way we were bringing this love was through English language courses—a mother tongue no more divine than Kyrgyz or Russian (the official languages there) but in many cases more lucrative and thus a good tool to have and to wield in a west-centric world.

 

Our friend Mark called us the day of the uprising at the capital—the beginning of what would come to be called the Tulip Revolution. His speaking voice was always loud and a bit unmodulated. He was a finance guy, I think, or at least that was his general vibe. He had a strange but funny sense of humor and I think he was in his thirties so he seemed like someone’s dad we were hanging around with at after church lunches and other ex-pat get togethers.

 

Is this your first revolution?” he asked in his usual monotone with what we knew was a self-satisfied smirk on the other side of the phone call. We laughed confirming that indeed, it was.

Americans were told to stay locked down at the time, which was easy enough as I happened to be quite ill during the first few days of “the rev” as we were referring to it.

 

In just a few short weeks all sorts of things occurred in Bishkek. The whitehouse was taken over by protesters, the president fled the country, a new election was held, though some feared the next president was just more of the same old, same old. We hunkered down unless told otherwise and for those first few weeks whoever woke up first in our flat would run over to the little portable music player and push play on the pre-set until we heard Lennon’s loud, conflicted voice

 

“You say you want a rev-oh-loo-shuh-uh-uh-un,

Weh-eh-el, you know-oh-oh,

We all want to change the world…”

 

The words blared through our tiny space and we would giggle at our strange predicament. We did, in fact, want to change the world. That’s why we were here. As for this particular political unrest? I’d say we were relatively indifferent. It only sort of seemed to have anything to do with us. We were safe in our home-away-from home and were assured by the American embassy that there was a plan if things got out of hand.

 

My diary from that time offers just a few details of the upheaval. I was hopeful for my students that they might get to live in a more democratized state. I was sad about the looting and the associated losses but suspected that it might just as likely be the President’s men doing the damage to the grocery stores and local shops in hopes to scare the people back into orderly submission. I was embarrassingly proud of my proximity to something of import and simultaneously distracted by my own interior world as I tried to decide whether to stay for another year, and what God was doing in the life of people I referred to as “unbelievers”—as though any person lives without belief.

 

It is a curious thing to revisit myself on these old pages full of so much alternating ignorance and intensity. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same about me, and democracy, and humanity. I’ve been talking with many of my current students lately who have perpetual fire in their bellies. They are eager to burn things down and start over again, tired of hearing “grownups” talk about process and procedures while real people languish. Their bodies are strong and agile, and they want to use them in service of justice. And I understand and appreciate the heat that radiates through and off of them. I probably could have done with a bit more vim and vigor at their age—more of an impulse toward overthrowing, more of a tolerance for dirtier calloused hands. And I do wonder sometimes, as a teacher if I sin when I ask them to learn to live with the discomfort of that which is as yet unrealized.

 

Then again,

 

Kyrgyzstan has had two other revolutions since I was there. Whether that is good or bad or both I admit, I am not educated enough to say, but I do know this: each year there are times when the earth is closer and farther from the sun. We travel round and round it in perpetuity but not circularly as it might seem, rather, elliptically. So, when the earth is closest to the sun in January she must move faster and when she is farthest in July she must slow down. There is a pattern to existence which requires different motion at different moments. And that means not everything can be fire and festival. Some movements must be as patient as they are passionate. I hope I am not wrong to tell my students this—or myself.

 

Revolution is a beautiful word,

full of life and of love.

Sometimes we reach for her like a thin, stick of dynamite,

when everything must go,

when everything must be reconceived

and reborn.

 

Sometimes though, we learn to wait for her soft returning body

 to move us along holding us in her orbit

 as she always does

familiar and mysterious

all at once.