A Small Anatomy of Change


Have you ever noticed how during times of great change, a swell of energy comes into our lives? Much of the energy appears to work "against" the change but the effort it takes to overcome the negations that work to push us through into the next part of our lives.


This past week I have worked harder than I've ever worked. Several deadlines for writing pieces for various publications--one local, one statewide, one regional (still ramping up to the national I guess)--struck at once. To meet them, I had to write hard-well-fast. It's my daughter's last week of school so there's been "splash day" and today's Kindergarten awards day. The Wednesday Night Odyssey class took me to a deep level of teaching and planning, and of course the fair at the mall opened. All of this in addition to my job for which I marketed five books all week, rather successfully. All of this the week after I rent an office and step into the community of healers.


In a turn-of-the-century alchemy book published by some ballsy masons, the authors write of how a pull of negative forces precede a positive leap forward. It's an observation of change, and I'm going to search through the Tao te Ching today to find its correlation. At other times, I've felt pushed to my absolute limits to fill the voids that arise just before some great launch to another level. There are moments when I really feel I could just crumple in the face of it all. But then I work. And from the work comes this peculiar illumination, a sense that I'm being helped from the other side--this helper is bending time, this helper is making my sentences, this helper is making the lines short at the fair--and I realize that the stress is a lesson in letting go, and through being stressed to the max I'm being taught I am not alone. This is a prelude to what's to come, the next great jump of a further into-me becoming.


I imagine this crumpling feeling, the sense that I can't do it, is the human equivalent for the nothingness the caterpillar goes to, the reduction to merely the base of the antennae, before the regeneration begins. And we have to go through this again and again.

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