Tag: transformation

Change and Transformation

While the word change normally refers to new beginnings, real transformation happens more often when something falls apart. 

Richard Rohr

Transformation

Change is inevitable. It is a necessary part of living — as necessary as shedding its too-tight skin is for the caterpillar.

The remarkable process of transformation begins with change but over time moves inevitably through three stages. Change is at the start and begins with losing something or someone essential (or at least very important) to us. With the loss we leave the familiar and enter an unknown territory — lost without a map to discern where we have landed or to guide us to back to the familiar. We want to “go home” but we have not yet realized that we cannot go home again. We don’t trust that we can find our way — either back to the familiar or forward to something new and survivable. When we are about to give up hope, there comes a faint glimmer of possibility — and if we move however cautiously towards it we find ourselves coming into a new space that beckons us to a more expansive life than we could have imagined possible before.

Yet transformation begins with pain — with the death of what served us well in the past but has constricted life in the present. Like the caterpillar that feels an irresistable drive to slip off its caterpillar identity and reveal the chrysalis beneath, transformation is not something we initially welcome but an involuntary entry into unknown territory. It often arrives with that heart-stopping “sound” of something precious cracking open, breaking. It commands our attention — we cannot ignore it. It might come as a life threatening diagnosis, a loss of a job we thought was secure, a sinkhole appearing under our home’s foundation, a pandemic shut down that isolates us from loved ones. When we realize what is being broken, our human response is to rush toward what is breaking open and fix it or repair it as we would a wound or hold onto it so it won’t go away. And that may work for awhile, but such “fixes” cannot hold the life force that is expanding beyond what contained it and will eventually open to new ways of seeing and being in our world. Transformation, in my experience, begins there, with that cracking open of something we have relied upon and thought was unchangeable but may no longer serve us — whether we realize it or not.

While we are in the middle of the transformation process, we cannot see those possibilities or new visions anymore than a 5 year old girl can imagine the pleasure and pain of a body that experiences pregnancy and birth.

What has given me hope in the midst of the many transformation processes I’ve experienced is knowing these three stages have always been part of whatever has at first felt like loss. From a long life filled with repeated experiences of the transformation process, I have learned I can trust that there will always — however long it takes — be a richer part of life after I have let go of what has been.

Letting go is always bittersweet and sometimes downright awful and wrenching. And I can truthfully tell you that there is nothing that makes that part easier — or that ends the longing to “go back” in some fashion to revisit what I had or who I was. But knowing that the process of transformation will inevitably open to something life giving helps me to slowly let go of what was and turn away from looking back. I can dwell in what is not yet clear when I trust that in the cosmic cycle of loss, chaos, and renewal there will yet be new life that I cannot even imagine. Even in death.

Spring 2020

Mini Iris that are beginning to bloom just now.

What a magician this late spring weather is this year. I have been lured outside and much of my sadness banished with this strong dose of warmth and sunlight.

The winds are still raging as they have been all spring. Changes in our climate have brought a new experience of strong and consistent high winds that can gust at times up to 60 mph or more. And it has been a bitterly cold until this week. We had 5 nights during the last two weeks of April that covered the grass with a frosty white blanket and left primroses and bleeding hearts with limp, brown-edged leaves. Friday, May 1, was hopefully the last frost of the year.

In my closet I didn’t bother to switch out my winter wools, long sleeves, and heavy weight jeans. It was too cold to wear short sleeves or lighter capris . . . until this past Saturday. That morning found me scrambling to dig out a t-shirt and my Duluth Trading roll-up pants. I had only half-heartedly ventured outside before Saturday — briefly checking to see what was poking up in the garden, what was blooming, and picking the occasional weed before dashing back into the house to warm myself with hot coffee.

This weekend was the “switch”. It often seems that the weather gets stuck in a cold cycle in the spring and then like a flipped switch it gentles out into a soothing warmth. Plants that have been holding their green energy tightly burst from the ground and within days are budding and blooming. They surge upward, their leaves transforming ephemeral light into new leaves and blossoms.

Within me must remain a remnant of photosynthesis and a legacy from the plant world. Sunlight always works a transformation in my body. Energy that has been held tightly and unavailable through the cold and dark winter is released in me as I step into the sunlight. What in the cold of early spring seemed overwhelming and not worth an effort, suddenly beckons my interest and piques my energy. Weeding? Check. Fixing the tangled and damaged netting on the garden? Sure. Deadheading and tying up the daffodils? Can’t wait. Turning over the garden beds with a spade and hoe? I can do that this morning.

I work slowly (my aging body doesn’t move as fast as a younger me), but with energy that lasts through the whole day and into the next.

As late spring’s gentle warmth moves into summer’s sweaty heat and humidity, my energy will flag again. But until that time is here, I will marvel at the wonderful transformation created by sunlight in a body that remembers the legacy of green plants.