Endings. Beginnings. The in-between.
Transition time is the in-between and can be beautiful if we can sit with it.
Melanie Weidner, Potential, 2008
When I painted Potential, above, I started with the black, angry and unsure strokes of frustration, feeling lost, taut with longing, lacking all clarity. By morning, the first piece of wing wanted to shine out of that “failure” of a painting. Maybe by next month I’ll fly again– until it’s time for Leap, Molting, Cataclysm, or another season of Butterfly Mush –Melanie
“How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.”
— elizabeth lesser, author
In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of doors, gates, and transitions. Janus represented the middle ground between both concrete and abstract dualities such as life/death, beginning/end, youth/adulthood, rural/urban, war/peace, and barbarism/civilization.
The universality of transitions in life both bonds us together and turns us inward to manage the emotions, or just live them. We can mask the feelings they bring up with busyness and technology, which threaten to steal this time of introspection and growth. Or we can sit in the mud like a lotus flower, privately growing and preparing ourselves for the next phase.
See
Life is full of transitions, and they are rarely smooth or comfortable. As a teacher, I am now transitioning to summer break. While I eagerly anticipate some much-needed rest, the sudden end to my daily to-do lists and the responsibility of tending to children's material, mental, and emotional needs leaves a void. It’s a wonderful opportunity to reclaim time for my own mind and body, a golden hour, but it often starts with a sense of feeling lost and isolated.
Being in the golden hour and looking at the images below fill me with a sense of sacredness and loneliness.
Anna Ancher, Evening Sun in the Artist’s Studio at Markvej, after 1913
Leon Wyczółkowski, Plowing in Ukraine, 1892
Thomas Moran, The Golden Hour, 1875
Claude Monet, Grainstack (Sunset), 1891
Allan Shulman, The Betsy Orb
The Betsy Orb is also known as The Egg which I love as an obvious metaphor for the transition and change. An egg doesn’t look different on the outside, but inside it is transforming. Sometimes the emotions of transition make us feel overwhelmed, as if we're about to burst. The uncertainty can be tight and uncomfortable, yet, if you allow it, you may sense the stability provided by the anchors that the past and the future provide.
Within this grief,
I can hear
a lotus blooming
Say
What are some of your experiences with transitions? How did you navigate the in-between spaces?
How do the images above make you feel?
Learn from the Lotus. Let nature guide you. (medium)
“It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life. Grief led me back into a world that was vivid and radiant. There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.”
-Francis Weller
Do
Take some photos during the Golden Hour. Here’s how!
Journal about the in between.
Offer support to someone going through a transition, whether a loss, a new venture, a birth, a retirement, new home, divorce, physical or financial changes…
Join Wonder Mob, a community of ‘wonderers’ like you! MN Readers, sign up for summer camps and classes! Please share your reflections with me by replying to this post, or post and tag my Wonder Wander Facebook or Instagram pages!
Love how you use art to annotate thought in your writing. It’s not like anything else I’ve read. An enthusiastic follow!