Dealing with Change
or not
Change happens weather we want it to it not.
Remember the last time some software you liked forced you to auto upgrade?
Like it or not, we live in a world of constant change. Many changes are so small and incremental we fail to recognize them — until we suddenly have grey hair or our car odometer flips over 100,000 miles.
One reason I like my garden — it reminds me that everything changes everyday. Watching the plants move through their cycles emphasizes the importance of each phase.
Like a caterpillar that must leave behind its larval stage to become a butterfly, I’m constantly letting go of who I am so who I am becoming has space to grow. Like molting, it’s not always a comfortable process.
The green and yellow parsley worm caterpillar cocooned up while I was staying with my mom last summer. I collected them on the carrot greens and I took them to Mom’s. I had the idea that watching the process of transformation would help her as she moved from life to death. We feed them lots of parsley and eventually they made cocoons.
We had to keep her house really cold because it made it easier for her to breathe. I think it was too cold for the caterpillars because they never came out of the cocoons. This living metaphor was more important for me than for Mom. I put cocoons outside — letting go of the idea that I could do anything to help her other than to be with her as she let go of living. When Mom was in the hospice house the Monarch butterflies passed through the garden visiting the milkweed the last afternoon she was here.
