The oak tree was not always a tree. Another time, another day, it was an acorn. And one day, maybe, it will become the wood in a fire that warms someone. We tend to name things by the form they hold in the moment, as if that form is the whole truth. Acorn. Tree. Firewood. Ash. Clay was once earth. Then hands shaped it, hollowed it and gave it a contour. Now we call it a bowl. But each name is just our way of knowing things. Beyond the name, there is an essence. The form changes, the expression changes, but what’s deepest isn’t made new each time. Becoming then, may not be the making of something or someone new, but the revealing of what has always been there.
Two years ago, I was a backpacker. A massage therapist. A cyclist. Those were ways I knew myself, how I moved through the world, how I was recognized by the people around me. And then...impact. Those aspects of me became, ‘I used to be a...’ Even how I knew myself within my partnership was altered. When I try to remember what it felt like to be myself in my body, it feels like trying to remember a dream after waking up. I can't find my way back to the feeling inside my legs when I walked, ran, or hiked, or turned a pedal. I only know the rigidity that lives there now. The rest has gone the way dreams go, present enough to know it was real, gone enough that I can't step back inside it. The loss is an utter unraveling. It’s disorienting. And it carries a kind of grief that doesn’t come with a funeral.
There is a tendency to want to replace all of that with something new. But the “something new” is not the identities I want to wear. Victim. Disabled. Someone known as struggling to move her legs. Someone that’s pitied even. And I've noticed how easily it is to begin wearing those labels like a nametag, Hello, my name is Corrie. I am disabled. Soon, you refer to yourself as that label. In my daily life, I must also witness my partner continuing to pursue the activities we once shared together. It’s easy for resentment to sneak in. You must also endure the crushing extra labor this injury demands just to exist in a day, and mistaking all of that for who you are instead of what you're carrying. And what we’re carrying is not small. It is enormous, some days unbearably so. That's how we start identifying with our suffering. That's how we let other people, and other people's eyes, hand down a verdict of who we are. The temptation is real. It’s definitely here for me some days.
We let these identities build around us like mud, layer by layer, until it dries onto us so completely. We can no longer tell where the mud ends, and we begin. We forget there's anything underneath at all. But we are more than the shifting mirrors of our identities. Our beauty is sophisticated, sacred, and far beyond image, appearance, or personality. I believe what we are can't be touched by the hand, seen by the eye, heard by the ear, or named by an injury. For me, that means not being known by my ability to backpack twenty miles, or by a profession, but by something far greater that lives underneath all of that. I envision it as Light.
I believe we can grow through what breaks us open. Some of our greatest opportunities can come from our greatest obstacles. We get to learn vulnerability and compassion. But that growth is not a correction of who we are. It is like raw turquoise being cut and turned onto a cabochon. Ground down, sanded, polished, turned against the wheel again and again, not to change what the stone is but to finally reveal the shape and shine that was already inside it. The turquoise doesn't become a different stone. It's just, finally, fully what it already was.
We stand before an achingly open reality, waiting to be let in. But we hold so tightly to things like old identities, control, resistance, the need to be seen a certain way and that grip keeps us at a distance from it. To surrender that grip is not to give up. It’s not to stop trying to create our most beautiful life. It's to stop asking how to control it and start asking how to care for what's been entrusted to us. Accepting the body exactly as it is right now, not the improved future version we're working toward. Accepting this one, exact, tiny piece of time we've been given to live through. Reverence, not resignation.
If our true nature is light or love, then becoming isn't about building someone new. It’s about a willingness to keep stepping into clearer water and let the identities caked onto us to release and disperse. Underneath the mud, underneath the injury, beyond thought, beyond an identity, is something that can never be touched. A very real, yet ungraspable presence.
It takes courage to let go of who you thought you were and meet the one still here beneath it. I think that’s the invitation in all of this, not a new self, but a reclamation of our true essence. I understand this to be real freedom.
Allow the vastness of yourself to be known, as you truly are. You are here, inherently whole, right now, untouched by whatever has happened to your body. I see you in your beauty.