"this is your hand"-Separateness...Creativity...Growth

"You Begin" ,by Margaret Atwood

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

I am thinking about beginnings, starting afresh,clearing the slate. This has been a rough few days as I think of moving away. I feel I am riding the harsh ,crashing,unrelenting waves of a tsunami.They are however waves and waves by nature and design undulate and contain a rhythmic periodicity, which allows one to gasp for a deep breath to prepare for the next submergence amidst the roaring oceanic forces. I am remembering when I weaned my now adult daughter from nursing amidst her toddlerhood. It was a process of unentangling of a web that entwined the blurry boundaries of mother and child. It was not the easiest of processes for me or my child. There was the constant urge to regress to old patterns of entanglement that prevented individual growth. I remember that I cut open a big brown paper bag and drew a calendar of 30 days where I mapped out the sequence of the gradually letting go,lessening, deleting the frequency of nursing. I remember the pain of the "let down " response that I needed to sit still with and accept.The beginning was a great struggle. I remember showing my daughter how the days were marked, that this was what our plan was and it became a game of sorts with time, a ritual, a pact we had come to become proud of that each of us in our own right was emerging into a new person hood. The distance that grew between us in that month gave me as mother and she as daughter an authentic arena to play,to breathe , to dance,to respect that we are unique and separate and in that separate space real growth and creativity has the possibility to emerge. So these days, I am reminded that growth only occurs in the context of appreciating our separateness and that is the only way it can be and allow it to be,to unfold as the alternative is stagnation, the opposite of living ang growth. I feel the faintest tinge of the let down response again. It is never easy or graceful, it is the painstaking but elegant flow of allowing life to unfold .