On the Cusp of Another Reinvention

Below the surface, something new is pushing through & changing the landscape of my life.

I am transforming again.

Life demands it. Sometimes I wonder how anyone manages to stay the same when I am constantly evolving. Would it have helped if my roots were deeper, if the ground beneath me had ever been stable? Would I have securely attached and grown steadily toward the sky, or would I always have emerged anew with every season of my life?

This season asks that I grow. Literally and figuratively.

My inner world is shifting, and my outer world is spent with my hands in the dirt pulling up weeds, planting new seeds, and nurturing what’s mine. On the outside, nothing has changed, but below the surface, something new is pushing through and changing the landscape of my life.

I am trying to evolve with grace, but I spent a whole day crying while I cleaned out a closet. I conveniently forget that growth is painful until I am weeping into a cardigan and wondering what this new phase will bring. I don’t know how much room there is for grace in this process. There is only feeling my way through it, and I am overwhelmed and overcome by the stages of transformation.

I told my friend that I would be an orchardist by the end of it. That’s no metaphor. The fruit trees I planted as a nod to my childhood have grown the roots of a new dream.

I am a writer, and I always will be, but there’s a version of my life where I take fruit and cut flowers to the market when I’m not shaping words and worlds. I spin clay into vessels to display my creations. I become something more than what I am but only because of the work I’m doing now.

I walk barefoot through my garden and check on my bees and bats in their small houses. I dig up new bulbs and whisper to them a story of new blooms in a new season. I put seeds to bed, quietly tucking them in with a story to give them the strength to push through the cold and the darkness.

I tell myself that same story when my sweat mixes with my tears and the drought gives way to weeks of rain.

I always knew that there was magic to be felt in this stage of my life. I could see it in all the 40-something women I met along the way. I suspected that I would come into my power, too, when I crossed that threshold. I would know and love myself in a way I never had before. And I did. I do. But I didn’t expect the growing pains of this transformation. I didn’t expect to find myself on the cusp of yet another reinvention.

Society tells women to fear aging.

We’re told there is nothing new to be experienced, and we should simply relegate ourselves to obscurity and silence to allow younger women to rise.

Yet, in our middle years, we are pulling the younger women up alongside us. We become the wisdom to their youth, the mother to their maiden, and we are more powerful than we’ve ever been before.

We evolve as many times as we need to in order to become who we were always meant to be. I look around at my garden and feel the presence of the women who came before me who tended their families and the soil. They have long returned to the earth but see how I have bloomed from the seeds they once planted.

I tell myself this when I am in the darkest part of my gestation.

This is when the roots grow. This is when I start to find the strength to rise. This is the place where dreams once planted will grow to new life. Growth is painful, and I cannot control the weather. Yet, I cannot so easily give in to outside forces when I feel the possibilities inside me.

On the cusp of yet another reinvention, I let myself believe in the possibilities. I feel hope down to my toes as they dig into the soft earth of my garden bed. I promise myself that the tears and the darkness will give way to new beauty if only I’ll let them.

I hold on a little longer and lift my face to the sun. I feel the fine lines drawing stars like sigils across my skin. My inner world is filled with shadows, but my outer world is waiting only for time to do its work and allow the beauty to emerge.