Birth Anew ...

Every crack is also an opening.

Mark Nepo

 Excerpt from THE BOOK OF AWAKENING by Mark Nepo:

When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born.  From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle.  Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all of its food and stretches to the contours of its shell.  It begins to feel hungry and cramped.  Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking  space of its world.

Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end.  Its sky is falling.  As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat at its shell.  In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying.  Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born.  It doesn't die, but falls into the world.

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In the midst of any transition, we can feel very much like a chick hatching from an egg.  We can feel the old falling away before we can sense the new that hovers at the other end of change.  In between the stages of the out going old and the incoming new, we can feel oppressed or stiffled or suffocated while digesting what we have learned.  We may thirst for knowledge or guidance.  We endure ... developing patience while searching for the first crack that will allow the light to come in.  As we gather our strength and push forward, we birth anew.