Creating The Webbd Wheel: Growing Away
In which we allow ourselves to change ...
I love to garden. We moved into a new house this spring, and I’ve spent as much time as I can in the garden, weeding, trimming, pruning, clipping, rebuilding rock borders, and discovering both familiar and new plants and flowers.
This morning, as I worked, the July sun on my bare shoulders, the humid air thick, and mosquitoes tickling and getting squashed or not tickling and successfully stealing blood, I thought about how life grows, expands, reaches, and changes. Wildflowers (aka weeds) creep along the surface of the soil or just under it, paying no attention to boundaries and borders. Leaves and flowers stretch for the sky. Wild morning glory and other vines twine and swing from stem to stem and leaf to leaf. Seeds voyage far from their mother plant and find new homes.
One of the prominent themes in the Webbd Wheel is that of change. Sometimes it’s welcome. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes we know it’s coming. Sometimes it catches us by surprise. We are each shaped by change, pushed, pulled, molded, twisted. We ourselves are constantly changing, along with everyone and everything around us, though it may be so subtle we don’t notice it.
Last week, in post #30, Eurydice tells Mary the story of her death, and expresses her genuine grief over growing away from Orpheus. She didn’t want to. She didn’t mean to. But change came, and they were separated, and Eurydice started down a new path, one Orpheus couldn’t take. By the time he made his way down to the Underworld in search of her, she’d moved on. She didn’t want to go back.
This week, in post #31, Mary feels restless. When she arrived at Janus House, exhausted and drained, she wanted nothing but rest and renewal. Now, she is ready to go forward, but doesn’t know how, or what, or where. Molly, too, is no longer content with the ongoing winter and Janus House routine.
Sometimes we feel if things don’t change we cannot survive. Other times, we feel we can’t bear it if things do change. The idea terrifies us.
Knowing change is coming, hearing its footsteps headed toward us from far away, but not knowing its exact nature or when it will arrive, is hard. As change approaches, our devils and demons wake up and start telling us scary stories. We feel unsettled, uncertain, insecure. We’re afraid to move forward, but we know we can’t stay put. We anticipate the loss of familiar people, places, and routines. Yet something calls to us, beckons us, waits for us, and we long for it.
This space is uncomfortable, the space of waiting, of suspension between one thing and another. It’s uncomfortable to outgrow relationships, jobs, and places. It can feel like a betrayal.
But change is not wrong. It’s not bad. It’s the natural flexing of life. Nothing stays the same. We’ve all had the experience of circling back around to music, a movie, a book, an old friend, an old place, and discovering it’s not longer as dear as it once was. We’ve outgrown it. We’ve grown away.
The wheel of life turns, and goes on turning, stopping for no one and nothing. Cycles and seasons, tides, the moon’s phases, our planet’s slow revolution, are inescapable. We are born, we grow older, we die. A seed sprouts, grows, fruits or flowers, and dies, returning the next generation of seeds to the soil.
Janus House is a resting place between one thing and another, a threshold between life and death, a place where time is not and any state of being is allowed. Mary and Molly, Eurydice, and Kunik will move on when they are finished with Janus House and it is finished with them.
We can’t control most change, but we can surrender to it, as one surrenders to the current in a mighty river or in the sea. We are not in charge. Life is bigger than we are. Whether it comes breathtakingly fast or agonizingly slow, change is always with us and will always catch us. We can neither outrun it nor force, slow, or speed it up. We can’t stop it.
One key to a happy life is allowing it to be what it is. Perhaps this is the greatest form of love, simply allowing plants to grow where they will, allowing ourselves and others to change, allowing change to have its way with us as we grow up, grow out, and grow away.
(This essay was published with post #31 of The Hanged Man.)