Change can change back. Change is volatile. Transformation is completely different – though sometimes it is called change. Transformation never makes the past wrong. It transforms it. It doesn’t deny it. It honors it in a way that you can move forward without making anything wrong, and having the past somehow now become complete, rather than wrong. Transformation has a permanence to it – where once you transform, once you awaken, once you see the stations you didn’t see before, you can’t go back. Transformation has the ultimate power of time, and what the world is crying for now is transformation, not necessarily more change, though some change may be a part of it, the route to transformation. Transformation suddenly makes the past make sense, and new futures open up……. Lynne Twist

honoring

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,

into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you

as you stand where ground turns to ocean: no way

to your future now but the way your shadow could take,

walking before you across water, going where shadows go,

no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass

except to call an end to the way you had come,

to take out each frayed letter you brought

and light their illumined corners, and to read

them as they drifted through the western light;

to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that;

to promise what you needed to promise all along,

and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here

right at the water’s edge, not because you had given up

but because now, you would find a different way to tread,

and because, through it all, part of you could still walk on,

no matter how, over the waves.

…..David Whyte

we never really know do we?…….we stand in this unknown….grasping again and again…and this begging bowl….this empty vessel can never really empty us enough….we keep it half full so with rubbish so that we may feel grounded…..just pause to listen, lift it up like an empty shell…..

We can grow by simply listening,

the way the tree on that ridge

listens its branches

to the sky, the way blood

listens its flow to the site

of a wound, the way you

listen like a basin when

my head so full of grief

can’t look you in the eye.

We can listen our way out

of howling, the way the heart

can soften the wolf we keep

inside. We can last by listening

deeply, the way roots

listen for the next inch of

earth, the way the old turtle

listens all he hears into the

pattern of his shell.

……Mark Nepo