Renewal and Transformation
My daughter took these photos, as we were walking in a shady, pine, oak, alder filled park near her home in Kirkland, Washington.
It was a cool March Day; the path was windy, the air soft, and the views kept surprising us with the stream that flowed by the path, particularly since it was a “city park.” I felt like I was far from any city.
The path was somewhat wild, with many turns, and surprised us with roots that grew beneath our feet. Friendly people passed us with their dogs, saying or nodding “hello,” and we chatted with a few.
It was remarkable to find such wild in the middle of the city.
Near the end of our walk, we heard the sweet sound of the bird, breathed the clear, cool air, and smelled the somewhat musky odor of the vegetation on the forest floor. We came to a rather astonishing pattern of mushrooms growing on a dead log. As I didn’t have my camera with me, my daughter offered to take these photos.
“Fungi have a habit of growing on dead things,” she later said to me in an email in which she sent her photos to me.
I really loved that.
I loved that because out of letting what it’s time to let go of die, new growth can arise.
And then, she suggested I write a blog about transformation and renewal.
She knows that my life is devoted to transforming myself, renewing my self, and guiding others in their journey of creating their own life transformations.
So that is exactly what I’m doing—sharing a personal story around renewal and transformation, AND it is a story about my relationship with her, which she has given me permission to publish.
She was 22 at the time. it was time for me to stop seeing her as one human being and start seeing her as another.
The year? 2019, pre-Covid.
The place? Isle Royale National Park, in Lake Superior, the largest island in the largest lake in the world.
I’ve gone there almost every summer since I met my husband, in 1981.
Don’s grandmother’s father bought the land, before it was a national park. We still use the cabin to this day, with an arrangement with the park to volunteer for the Park Service. We are ever grateful for the opportunity.
That summer in 2019, I found myself in a dire place. My now super creative, talented adult daughter who, when she was a child going through school, had been labeled “cognitively differentiated” and was asking of me – well, truth be told, demanding of me – that I shift my thinking about her, and my ways of relating to her.
So I had work to do that summer -- the work of re-perceiving my daughter from being in some ways, someone who “needs help” to seeing her as the Whole, Wise, Responsible, Spiritually Mature, adult that she is.
I had a big threshold crossing to make. A threshold crossing is the space we occupy when we have left one room, the familiar one, and have not quite yet entered the next.
Sometimes, threshold crossings can be scary, disquieting, challenging, and take a long, long time. Our planet is going through a threshold crossing right now; you could say, as is each of us, one way or another, as we grow to see what this new post-pandemic life is and who we are in it. And, of course, Covid itself was such a crossing for our entire planet.
I had two weeks at Isle Royale that summer to make a crossing I was committed to making.
I had seen this one choking me for a while now, but while seeing it, I had not as yet made that shift.
Now it was time. My daughter was in strong demand, and her voice was, well, let me say, not shy.
I was completely committed to entering that next room.
Not making that crossing would have cost me my relationship with my daughter. I was unwilling – completely unwilling – to pay that cost.
Sometimes, asking the question, “What is it costing me to stay stuck in this particular area?” is a good question to ask.
You will find, if you are honest, the cost always outweighs the payoff.
When we arrived at the Island that summer, we came across a most unusual event: the bridge to our front dock was missing! It had been carried away at Spring Ice Melt to who-knows-where.
The missing bridge, the lone dock, resting on its bed in the cold waters of Lake Superior, and my own inability to get to that dock became a metaphor for my work; the work of building an inner bridge to the dock, which now represented an alive, honor – filled, appreciation – based, loving, compassionate, relationship with my daughter, another adult.
The threshold I needed to cross was an inner one, where I moved from holding her as “needy” to one where I would hold her as Whole.
And cross that threshold I did, over a period of two weeks, with the Amazing Guidance from my Inner Muse, who woke up, in a big way, out of my hunger for guidance, and spoke to me through poems. The poems/Teachings/Reflections came so rapidly that I began to carry pen and paper with me every day, to write down their lessons.
The poems had titles like….”Isle Royale Teachings” (about embracing impermanence) or “Wake Up Wind” (about leaving a life of familiarity behind you,) or “Heart Break”. – around softening the heart rather than letting it stay brittle – or “Dock’s Lament” (about letting in grief for what it’s time to let go of, or leave behind, and moving through it) or “For Giving Endings” which is about just that – giving endings “where those endings are now due.”
So, in the course of those two weeks, with much journaling, reflecting, meditating, thinking about, and being guided by my Muse, I left behind my entire belief system, my story, about my daughter.
The good news about stories is that they are just that: stories. Stories can be created and destroyed. Beliefs are stories. Ideas strongly held can be stories. The question to ask about stories is: does that story empower me or disempower me? Does it hurt? Does it help? If it hurts, you can let it go and invent a different story-- one that empowers both you and then. “It’s all invented,” Benjamin and Rosamund Zander say in their book, The Art of Possibility.
Of course, stories never sound like stories to us. They sound like facts, like “is true.” And you’ll even have evidence to prove that you are right about the story you are telling yourself, or the unquestioned belief you hold so strongly!
So it takes something, to even go the distance of seeing a story as a story.
Sometimes, our stories produce deadness. A dead way of thinking, a dead way of seeing the world. As the Muse of my poem, “Deeper thank you Think” tells us;
“Leave what is dead and time to shed;
Leave your old life behind.”
Dead things, when you actually let them die – whether they are beliefs, ways of holding yourself or others, relationships, old desires you’ve been attached to – when you actually let them die, can breed new life, much like the process of humus becoming soil.
So, I followed my Muse’s guidance, and inhabited the teachings of each of the poems, and crossed the threshold that was mine to cross.
It was the morning on which I knew I was freed up; I had shed my old story about my daughter.
I took this photo, standing in front of our cabin, and in front of the non-existent outer bridge, that morning:
On that morning, I knew I had to get out to the dock.
A black and white butterfly landed on a branch on a tree by me. I considered it a gift.
I looked at the purity of the colorful rocks underneath the clear water. The lake didn’t look very deep. And the dock seemed just a few short steps away.
My husband, my dear sweet, safe, supportive, tall, gentle, wise, powerful husband stood behind me, listening, as I said to him that I was going to wade to the dock.
His voice emanated concern.
“It’s deeper than you think.”
I thought that would be a great line to a poem, and I wrote it down.
I wanted to go anyway.
The second admonition came soon after.
“You WILL get wet and cold.”
There was enough warning and menace in his normally soft voice of support that I stopped.
I never did get to the front dock that morning, as passionately as I wanted to. I bowed to his wise words of caution.
Lake Superior is the coldest of all the Great Lakes.
Later that day, I stood on the front dock anyway. Some friends arrived for dinner and we used a boat as a bridge, to cross from the dock to the land.
Celebration time!
And here’s the whole poem:
Deeper Than you Think
(written by Don and Amba Gale)
The wade to the front dock is deeper than you think. You will get wet and cold. To stand on the front dock and celebrate the sun, the wind, the blue sky and the water, requires some sacrifice. Leave what is dead and time to shed. Leave your old life behind.
—From the book, Crossing Thresholds, Island Reflections (Find out about the book)
Dearest Reader;
Thank you for traveling the path of this story with me. If you’d like to affect your life further, you might want to grab a journal, have a cup of tea, be still for a while, promise to have an honest conversation with yourself, and ask yourself a couple of simple, yet possibly life altering, questions:
What is dead in your life, and time to shed?
What is it time for you to leave behind?
Thank you for reading my Substack. I am inspired by you, my reader, and so many others on this beautiful platform.
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