Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation. A Healing Arts Practitioner, she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Integrative Healthcare. She says, " Health is resiliency, a zest for the journey. It’s about coming awake to the joy of being alive. As a practitioner, its a privilege to facilitate that healing process, to help weave new patterns of health & well-being. “ And by the way, healthier, happier people help create a healthier, happier world.

Every turning of the year, the cycle of the seasons, moon, the rotation of dark and light each day speak the inevitability of change. I witness that. I wish I could say that I embrace it.

Or I wish that I wished to embrace change. Sometimes I am awed by my resistance.

When I first came to Bozeman, 35 years ago, it was a gem, truly, surrounded by inexpressible beauty. It overawed me. 

It has been a decade and more since it had that effect — too many changes, too many people. I have often said that it’s like having moved to a new community but I haven’t gone anywhere. I still live exactly where I have these past 36 years.  I miss what it was, wish I had been better positioned to fully appreciate it’s sparse and staggering beauty all those years back, when ranchers & farmers were the aristocrats of the valley, families who had worked the land here for generations.

I once had a friend in Roy, an old woman. I would visit her in that turn of seasons, about every three months, take her food and other treats, then just sit and chat, ask questions but also simply listen. I could hear her sense of loss at 88 years old, of the way of life of her youth, country people in a far flung community who would come together for all-night fiddle dance celebrations.  Of life that moved more slowly, even if it could be harsh. 

It seems that in this lifetime of mine, the only way to survive is to embrace change that arrives at a wildly, chaotically accelerated pace. To live, to age gracefully, is to celebrate it, thrive on it. The truth is that when I intentionally make changes, it is often by fighting myself, dragging myself along, kicking-and-screaming resistant. 

For fully 35 years I ave made my living on Main Street in downtown Bozeman. Last summer, after years of considering it, I moved my  BodyTalk office a few blocks away. It was and is a hugely relieving shift, took months to accomplish. I almost immediately felt the grace of it, a huge release of long-held tension that had locked me in place. I am on Main Street almost every day in any case, in that same few blocks where I have spent most of my adult life, where I raised my daughter in the dressing room of the store I founded and boot-strapped into something much more than a cubby-hole.  

In my generation it was still possible to imagine a straight-line career path. My father worked with the same employer for 50 years.  I came to Bozeman, put down roots, planned to stay, planned to run my retail business, forever. 

Forever has a short lifespan these days. And aging gracefully involves gracefully changing while inherently being more-than-ever the same, more profoundly centered in the “I am” of who I am, a bundle of life-experience, perspective, genetics and epigenetics, of training and choices, of relationships and relatedness. 

I can’t say that I will learn to be someone who loves change but I do have the capacity to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to step forward, drawn by a compelling curiosity about what’s just around that next bend in the trail, yet also relentlessly drawn to turning back, back, back. 

It’s odd to me then, when so many people who have watched my progression over the years seem to have decided that I’m adept at re-creating myself, that it is something I like to do. I smile to myself, silently chuckle even. Ha! If only you knew.

Just the same. It’s January. I do what many of us do. Make plans. Vision my year. And direct myself in whatever convoluted fashion I can, toward that vision. May 2015 bring a beautiful harvest of vision, and a capacity to better share this earth, this valley, this life — for us all.