Quotes About Transformation

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Things take the time they take. Don't worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

Drive down any road, take a train or an airplane across the world, leave your old life behind, die and be born again~ wherever you arrive they'll be there first, glossy and rowdy and indistinguishable. The deep muscle of the world.

You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.

from Hum, Hum Oh the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to stone. In those years I did everything I could do and I did it in the dark— I mean, without understanding. I ran away. I ran away again (from poem: Hum, Hum)

Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?

And then I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills, like a million flowers on fire -- clearly I'm not needed, yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value.

For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. Don't love you life too much, it said, and vanished into the world.

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?

The salamanders, like tiny birds, locked into formation, fly down into the endless mysteries of the transforming water, and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be— that anything is ever final— that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death? (from the poem 'What Is It?' )

Then I remember: death comes before the rolling away of the stone.

to be absent from the world and alive, again, in another...

Congratulations, if you have changed.

I did not come into this world to be comforted. I came, like red bird, to sing. But I'm not red bird, with his head-mop of flame and the red triangle of his mouth full of tongue and whistles, but a woman whose love has vanished, who thinks now, too much, of roots and the dark places where everything is simply holding on.

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

Lo, and I have discovered how soft bloom turns to green fruit, which turns to sweet fruit. Lo, and I have discovered all winds blow cold at last, and the leaves, so pretty, so many, vanish in the great, black packet of time

Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light.

quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.

But all my life—so far— I have loved best how the flowers rise and open, how the pink lungs of their bodies enter the fire of the world and stand there shining and willing—the one thing they can do before they shuffle forward into the floor of darkness, they become the trees.

Who can guess the impatience of stone to be ground down, to be a part of something livelier?

From the time of snow-melt, when the creek roared and the mud slid and the seeds cracked, I listened to the earth-talk, the root-wrangle, the arguments of energy, the dreams lying just under the surface, then rising, becoming at the last moment flaring and luminous -- (excerpt from the poem, Wild Trilliums)

Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame.

One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning --- some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain. 6 But to lift the hoof! For that you need an idea. 7 For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. Don't love your life too much, it said, and vanished into the world.