The mandala has completed its transformation from star to circle. Part 4 is solidly, line in the sand, no questions asked, clearly stating: I am transformed!
The deep dark green yarn helps define the shift, and as I worked this beautiful color into the mandala I mused on transformation and hope.
There is a certain darkness, risk, and danger to transformation. Like a garden, transformation needs a time for dying, burying, tearing out in order to create space for the new life, form, structure. The quieting time of winter, plowing under, fallowness is vital to health and renewal, growth, rejuvenation and transformation in the spring blooming time. So it is with transformation. To bloom, energy has to be focused on the new life, not the deadwood, dry stalks. Those are dug into the earth to nourish the new crop.
What am I risking now, pulling out, plowing under in my own work of transformation? What darkness or unused "things" can I remove to make room for new growth? I have plenty I can work on; however, it seems that life surfaces those things that require consideration whether I want to work on them or not!
Then there is hope. Intuitively I wouldn't think that hope has a darkness in it, yet as I circled the Still Point in the mandala, meditating on transformation and hope, I understood that despair, fear, doubt, discouragement, disbelief are opposites of hope, and without the darkness, how can I know hope?
These last hard years of global loss of life and freedom have certainly been the dark side of hope. Perhaps as this new spring begins its annual flirtation with winter, pandemic restrictions begin to lift around the world, and family gatherings are more common again, we can steward the hope springing out of the deadwood of this recent past.