The Season Before Emergence

From This Week's Love Letter

Dear Friend,

When I was twenty years old, I finished massage school in Taos, New Mexico and began the long drive back to my hometown of St. Louis.

I had changed while I was away. I had spent months immersed in healing, learning about the body and energy and beginning to understand that I wanted to devote my life to this work. I was young and wide open and becoming someone new.

And I wasn’t quite ready to go home.

Luckily, my drive happened to coincide with a camping trip my best friends were taking along the Meramec River.

After a full day of floating down the river, we made camp along the bank.

And that night, the cicadas came.

Not a few cicadas.

Thousands of them. Maybe millions.

It happened to be the year of a prolific periodical cicada emergence in Missouri, and they were everywhere. The woods were reverberating with their song.

While some of my friends retreated to their tents, I was completely entranced.

I picked up a drum, walked away from the campsite into the woods, found a place to sit by myself, closed my eyes and listened.

These creatures had spent years beneath the ground. And then some ancient knowing had told them: Now.

Now you climb toward the light.

Now you leave behind the body that carried you this far.

Now you open your wings.

Now you sing.

I have never forgotten that night.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that I encountered Cicada at that particular moment in my own life.

I was emerging, too.

I just didn’t know yet how long emergence could take.

When we know that something wants to change in our lives, we often want to hurry it along. We want to know what happens next. We want the new work to succeed, the relationship to arrive, the answer to become clear, the next version of ourselves to please hurry up and get here.

But life has its own timing.

There are things that have to ripen before they can happen. People we haven’t met yet. Things we still need to learn. Experiences that will change us in ways we cannot anticipate. Pieces that are moving into place without our knowledge or assistance.

This is one of Cicada’s great teachings.

You cannot force the season of your emergence.

But that doesn’t mean there is nothing for you to do.

While we cannot control the timing of our lives, we can help create the conditions in which we are able to flourish.

Who are you around when you feel most like yourself?

Where do your ideas come easily?

What makes you brave?

What exhausts you? What makes you shrink? Where are you continually trying to grow in soil that does not nourish you?

We cannot make a flower bloom. But we can support it with the right amount of water and sunlight.

We cannot command our own becoming. But we can make the conditions of our lives friendlier to it.

And then there is the part that requires trust.

There is not one final version of ourselves that we are meant to become. There will be many. We will emerge into one season of our lives, live it fully, and then, eventually, feel something new beginning to take shape within us.

Again and again, life will ask us to become someone we have never been before.

Perhaps there is something in you right now that has not yet made its way into the light.

You do not need to drag it out before it is ready.

Give it good soil.

Give it what nourishment you can.

And trust that when the time comes, something within you will know: Now.

And then, dear friend, sing.

With love,

Carrie

What in you might still be in its season before emergence?

I'd love to hear your reflections in the comments below.