Blog by Alan Seale, January 17, 2022, Transformational Presence
In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2022, the New England coast of the U.S. was blanketed in a dense fog. Moment to moment, the surrounding landscape silently appeared and then disappeared again and again, as if something was about to be revealed. In the mystical stillness, the words of “The Turning” began to flow through me. It was the dawning of a new day.
For many of us, 2020 and 2021 were hard. At the same time, there were gifts. And sometimes “hard” and “gift” were happening at the same time. That was certainly the case for me, especially throughout 2021. The details are not as important as the deep inner transformation. However, I was aware that everything I experienced last year was shaped in some way by an ever-present undercurrent—the long and beautiful and profound goodbye to my parents. (My mother passed away in November 2020, my father in 2010.) That long goodbye was at different moments tender and rich and heart-wrenching and celebratory, and occasionally all of those at the same time.
In the last days of 2020, I sensed that something was shifting—a chapter was coming to an end. And then in that magical dawn of January 1, 2022, the shift named itself “The Turning.” Perhaps this poem will help you touch some part of your own experience of the last two years.
The Turning
by Alan Seale
It’s a new day.
Something has shifted
and I am profoundly grateful.
There is a smile in my chest
that I have known before, yet
in this moment, I can’t remember when.
Such incredible inner joy.
I feel like someone or something
turned up the rheostat of my being.
Can this really be?
I have felt the shift coming over
the last few days, yet
I woke up this morning
absolutely beaming!
Is this real?
I know enough about
how the world works to
recognize that
nothing has gone away, nor is
something else suddenly here
for the first time.
It’s just that my
position has changed
relative to life.
At the same time,
life is just
doing what it does.
It’s just continuing to
unfold in its process—
in its evolutionary flow.
And so am I.
Maybe that’s what is so strangely
beautiful
about it all.
I had to go through what
I had to go through.
I couldn’t avoid it;
I couldn’t get around it;
I had to go through it.
And it was messy and really
uncomfortable
and sometimes I wondered if
I was losing it—
losing my grip on reality—
or falling into despair
and wondering if this was what
life was going to be like
going forward. That feeling
like you’re never going to
get out of where you are.
Time stops;
liminal space takes over.
And there you are.
And then comes the turning.
That moment when the
fog is suddenly lifted and
you can see clearly and the
weight in your chest is gone and
you feel like you are
alive again.
I say “that moment,” yet it’s
not necessarily so literal as a
specific moment. It’s a broader
moment in time—a moment
that is its own liminal space—
a moment in which
time stopped and
you don’t know for how long.
Yet it was long enough for a
metamorphosis to happen—
a metamorphosis of your
being
and how you looked at
the world—how you
engaged with life.
A metamorphosis in your
presence.
It feels like a paradox to say that
nothing has changed and
everything has changed.
Both are real.
Nothing has changed in that
life just keeps unfolding—
moving forward in its own
process.
It was going in that direction anyway.
Yet something shifted in my perspective
and in my understanding of
who I am and
what life is and
who I choose to be
within that greater
unfolding. And that changed
everything.
In those moments when I
acknowledge
that there is a
Greater Intelligence at work—
something so much
bigger than me or what I can
comprehend—
and when I choose to
trust that Intelligence to
guide me and show me each
next step,
a turning becomes more
possible.
The turning itself comes in its own time.
It somehow can’t happen until
I have gone through what
I had to go through.
There aren’t any
shortcuts.
There just aren’t. Believe me,
I looked everywhere for them, but
they aren’t there.
I am in my own
gestation process.
The gestation of life—
it takes as long as it takes.
And so are you; so are we all.
What I keep learning
over and over again is that
it’s a life-long process.
Maybe even a
many-lifetimes process.
Rationally, I can’t be sure of that, yet
my greater knowing says yes.
We can only be
where we are.
We can’t be someplace else in our
process other than where we are
right now. Yet the moment comes
when we are
ready
in the whole of our being
to be someplace else—
to shift our perspective or
our position relative to
life.
And then the turning happens.
It’s a new day.
Something has shifted
and I am profoundly grateful.
I don’t yet know if it’s
permanent. It’s for now.
Yet somehow I sense that
this is a really important
turning—the kind of turning
that I’ve experienced a few
times in my life—
those “before and after”
moments that stay with you
forever.
Only time will tell.
For today, I’m grateful for
the turning. Something has shifted.
I must take very good care of that.