When Change feels like Death
Finding Sacred Passage in Life's Thresholds and Transitions
As I sit on my farm, with spring still so nascent, I am present not only to life longing for itself—green shoots pushing through hardened earth—but also to the transformational opportunity held within both endings and beginnings. Our lives are not linear; they are a series of cycles. Not only in the turning of seasons or the passing of years, but in the larger arcs of becoming: childhood into adolescence into adulthood. We change jobs. Some of us have children who, hopefully, become adults. We begin and end careers, relationships, and roles. People die. Babies are born.
Cycles have endings, transition periods, and new beginnings. Even seemingly ordinary markers—Mondays, birthdays, the turn of a new year—carry this rhythm. Each can be understood as the end of one cycle and the invitation into another. Today is no different.
Between the ending of one cycle and the beginning of another lies a threshold—a doorway in which we stand, waiting for what is not yet formed. This is the liminal space: the unknown. We may stand here for a moment, an hour, or for years. My mother waited 23 years after her divorce from my father before falling in love and marrying again. I waited four years between the passing of one dog and welcoming the next. The unknown is often uncomfortable. We want certainty—what comes next, how to prepare, what to expect. In Jungian psychology and other traditions, these passages are also understood as initiations.
What are your endings and beginnings right now—beyond the natural rising and returning of the earth through the seasons? And if you understand them as initiations, what might that open within you? If you reframe the unknown as threshold rather than void, how does your experience shift?
If we can hold this liminal time as initiatory—as part of our profound growth and development, as the emergence of new archetypes or deeper self-knowledge—we can soften into it. We can allow it to be what it is without rushing to resolve it. When we meet this space with stillness rather than urgency, we create room for something new in us to emerge—something that will serve us in the next cycle.
In 2023, I lost both of my parents within nineteen days of each other, along with my beloved dog, among other shattering changes. When I paused long enough to ask why so much change was arriving at once, I came to understand that I was in a deeply initiatory period of my life.
I have been standing—still—in the threshold ever since. The beginning is not yet fully visible, but I sense it approaching. When I forget this, and an unsteady part of my ego takes over, I meet the threshold with fear rather than trust. And then I remember the remarkable humans—especially women—who have walked beside me through times of change and helped illuminate the path.
May you know, in your heart of hearts, that as you stand in the doorway of whatever cycle you are in, you are held. You are seen. You are supported in the fullest expression of who you are becoming. And when you falter, may you borrow the eyes of your people—your tribe, your circle—to remember the truth of yourself: sovereign, connected, and deeply loved.
May your day be a blessing, and may there be peace in your heart and in your world.
