Over the last four days, I watched a guest go through her process of transformation ….
Step 1. Politeness: Lovely to meet you, everything is fine, thank you for asking!
Step 2. Vulnerability: Actually I’m a failure as a mother, as a partner, as a provider; the truth is I’m useless.
Step 3. Courage: Dare I? Dare I change my beliefs? Nurture my every inner voice? Dare I forgive myself? Dare I tell myself the truth when I’ve swallowed the lies of much of our culture, of our religions, all these past years?
4. Her on-going choice: I WILL. I’ll practise nurturing myself, I’ll learn self-forgiveness and begin to embrace The Truth as it comes to me. I’ll reach for my courage and make this commitment to myself. I’ll make the change!
Her mountain of pain and the sheer courage needed to trust new beliefs, inspired me with awe as I watched her inward journey;
then witnessed her transformation,
as she planted herself firmly into new perspectives, new beliefs, a new focus!
It had been her time.
And last night, a poem emerged from deep inside me from a 40 year old poem written by a woman during the painful changes happening to her from the women’s movement. I could only remember the first two lines! What wanted to emerge from me attached itself to those first two lines …
MAKING A CHANGE
They who think it is easy to transplant a tree into new ground
Know nothing of the rock hardened clay that clogs the roots,
That renders requests, negotiations, pleadings and struggles, as useless!
That grips the tree, stuck tight.
But it is her time.
Time for her WILL, which had been 5 cm from self destruction last week,
to reach up through her depression, self-hatred, grief, fear and deep, deep shame, to grip hold of courage!
Courage to feel her pain, to deliberately listen to its years of unmet needs.
To watch her new emerging beliefs about herself.
Her commitment to self nurture, self forgiveness and to embracing her Truth.
The new ground in Aotearoa, was offering itself to her.
Yet, even the new ground felt insecure, uncertain, TOO comfortable, too flimsy,
Compared to the solid, concrete-like rigidity of the old.
Then …. a fragile, flimsy, but desperate hair
From the bruised and battered root of the transplanted tree,
With courage, seeks its way deeper, trustingly, into the new soil
Beginning to sense the healthy nutrients, real live sustenance, seeping through it’s cell wall,
Silently, consistently, nourishingly.
What relief! What gratitude! What freedom!
Photosynthesis, a tree’s life-giving process, is beginning as never before!
The miracle of transformation has happened; and is happening, and happening, and happening, and happening from the old ground into the new.
This was her time but it is also our human right to transformation.
The miracle of just ….. “making a change”
Bev Holt, May 2022
