Potential is a tricky subject. What a warm, beautifully arousing ideal: to have potency within, latent, waiting to pounce, a promise of ripening! Yet also what a sad and scary obligation: to fail, to fall, to misuse or waste, to lose, never to launch, forever to be stuck behind a glass of now, never rolling in the plushness of what could be…
Potential is a romance that sours a day after delivery as often as it blossoms beautifully for a week or more. It is sex for pleasure, potential being ripe and waiting for perfect conditions to pounce—conditions that’ll spin your head from news of the growing thing inside (even though you didn’t do anything differently this time)… and there are a million miscarried potentials bled out each month, not recognized nor given a first thought, much less a second. Unless it’s fed, one day potential withers on the vine, unviable, unwanted, out of mind.
What potentials course through your veins or whisper in your ear at night? Do they communicate secretly in the form of slumbered visions, asking for materialization and corporeal form in the sunlight? What potencies have you ignored for comfort or ease, for lack of support, misunderstanding, or because a dark void of deeper knowledge has a hold on your light? Have you let your potency evaporate away, dispersed? Do you disbelieve in your own worth? Does your You inside actively speak up about “what could be” if you’d just meditate on those hidden dreams buried in your chest, if you’d just reach out for that singular something, warm, oddly fitting inside?
Potential is a shapeshifter. Once it was small and uninitiated, a hungry little creature mewing at doors and searching for a friendly face. In time, one or two faces found, the belly grew with nourishment and possibility. Creature becomes something more, a growner thing, an animal with gravity.
One day Growner Thing goes about its day, and stumbles on the root of a new question. This question demands to be heard and considered tenaciously. The question sprouts, unfolding into a beautiful-terrible bit of flora, intoxicating in its splendor, demanding to be known! Known, though not as an other—but suckled, chewed on, eaten, masticated, and moleculed in the belly, whisked away to the bloodstream, ending up coloring the brain of Growner Creature. Question persists as it’s able. One day Growner Creature bites…
What unfolds is soft and terrible. The shifting of shape is a private delight, a secret ritual performed alone at night. The changing is a changeling merging with the what-once-was Grower Creature, and Growner Creature becomes Resplendant, a new thing. There are aches and pains from growth, as we all know. There are months of fog. There are minutes of euphoria. There are masses of other Resplendants, sliding down the walls and dropping from ceilings all around, swinging from chandeliers, and tripping you up in the halls of this hallowed changing space. Everything is too small and too incomprehensibly open wide, alive, to know what any moment asks (except the ones you inexplicably do understand). The shifting is a ritual of knowledge, of changing perspective, of holding onto where you’ve been while mixing in new experiences containing savory morsels of what else there is to take in.
Changing is a time to hold on, not do the math. It’s time to believe and question and understand the struggle of overwhelm; the fear that you truly know nothing at all in the end. Building blocks vs. the scales of cancelling-out look similar under a microscope, but from afar, a more wholistic picture reveals universes of articulation, unforetold branches on the path you’re on: new endings.
The shifting is a most incredible gift, and it’s the loneliest place you’ll ever live. Seemingly hyper-visible to the masses, yet frequently critiqued as “unknown”. Mobs are hungry for archetype and marketable images already well defined, and you’ll nail one type or another, as you quest to “pass”… or you won’t. At some point you might stop trying, reflecting back on the seed inside. That seed encouraged you to try on this magical self in the first place. You’ll have no idea what you’re supposed to end up looking like (unless you do), and every now and then (or frequently) you’ll feel dissatisfied.
Maybe you’ll try again, or you’ll head back from whence you came, leaving that particular impulse/potential behind: that old dream. Maybe you’ll return to shifting in the moonlight, celebrating your multi-faced facets quietly, secretly again. Maybe you’ll find a form that fits and never shift henceforth! Maybe you’ll realize the shifting is where you live and study this transformational dance inside and out, shifting in perpetuity before your life wears out… Regardless of your path, my worthy humanimal friends, there is potency deep inside—always waiting within.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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