Friday, April 15, 2011

Bigger on the Inside

Do you know the phrase, “It’s bigger on the inside”?  It’s from Dr. Who, the long-running British sci-fi series that features a clunker of a time machine that looks like a tiny blue mid-century British police box – and it is, indeed, “bigger on the inside.” As fans know, it’s called a TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimensions in Space, and it is an often-malfunctioning invention of the TimeLords.  But it does have the fantastical trait of being “bigger on the inside,” containing rooms within rooms within its dissembling streetwise boxy façade.

I know this because I live with nerdy-cool teenagers who are obsessed with Dr. Who, and because of them I’ve been repeating that phrase, “it’s bigger on the inside,” like an aspirational mantra for the past month, as the matted winter-grey crust of Michiana tips closer to the sun.  After all, what better captures the spirit of “bigger on the inside” than the coiled energy of Springtime, jammed into tightly packed flower buds, or into seeds as tiny as commas, their inky exteriors holding back the juicy leaves and fruit that I imagine are tremblingly waiting to unfurl?

In our local community garden, my crop-partner, Tammy, and I spent a finger-numbing afternoon in March tucking heirloom radish seeds into the raised root beds, the wind freezing a string of snot against my cheek, but somehow only ruffling Tammy’s blonde hair and making her necklace – a swinging lariat of ice-blue crystals – sparkle in the breeze.  While we both know better than to be surprised by the germination of those tiny sand-colored seeds, it was still thrilling to return to hundreds of heart-shaped radish leaves, strung like garlands of emerald Valentines through the beds.  And now, swelling below ground, there’s the bigger-on-the-inside energy of the fruit – the cherry bell radishes, magenta and crisp; funky watermelon radishes, in pink ringed with green; and Easter egg radishes, the very essence of Spring, coiled like a … spring! … just waiting to unfurl.

On the university campus where I work, Springtime is a metaphor made literal – brains and blossoms bursting wide open – plenty of perfume and drama.  Our students’ confidence in their ideas trembles and swells as we hurdle toward finals week, just as the magnolia buds on the campus trees are blowing out their pinking cheeks, every living thing straining to hold its breath until the big POP of full blossoming that can’t come too soon. In one of my classes, the students tried writing manifestos for social change, modeled on the radical visionaries of the late 19th century (William Lloyd Garrison, Fredrich Engels, Elizabeth Cady Stanton), and the late1960s (Robin Morgan, Mary Daly) who all wanted to pull down the walls of oppression with their visions of justice. Power to the people!  After a semester of research and rhetorical stretching, students who had been reluctant to write in the muscular voice of activism are almost ready to step up to the microphone I’ll set out soon on our college green, so they can share their manifestos for change.  I want them to feel the risk and thrill of letting their beliefs burst open, full-flower, in the presence of others.  The students are nervous, excited, and they think I’m a little crazy, pushing for this public display of the dazzling immensity of who they are on the inside.  I feel their anxiety; it has been a semester of pushing my own limits, too – of fumbled human and intellectual connections, of learning how much more I have to learn, and how much I want to. I also feel the rawness and urgency of growth.

This swelling feeling of being on the brink of something bigger must be a universal experience of Springtime.  And for someone like me, named April, and born, actually, on this date, I’m reminded how vital it is that when we let ourselves open fully, we do it among people who will receive us tenderly.  In fact, 45 years ago, my mother had the great good luck at Denver’s Porter Memorial hospital to have a Dr. Robert A. Bradley attending my birth – a doctor whose book about family-supported natural childbirth had just been published, and whose ideas became known as the Bradley method.  He understood the old wisdom that beginnings should happen in beloved company. So, when I burst into the world, wet and wrinkled, I unfurled into the eager arms of my Brylcreemed and beaming father and my elegant, freckle-nosed mother, and have ever since felt the surging optimism of Spring in my veins.  And so should we all, at every moment that we are brave enough to burst more fully into being.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on April 15, 2011 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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