I'm Forever Weaving and Emerging From Cocoons

The older I get the less I like change, but the more I understand it.

What I mean is I mourn the loss of the familiar. I was sorry to watch my childhood home turned into an insurance office. I loved the years I lived in Boise, but I'm disappointed it is so much bigger and unfamiliar than when I moved there in 1979. My children have changed. I miss their little selves and their little voices; one moved to Colorado, the other turns 40 this year. I miss my aunts and uncles; only one 90-year-old aunt remains.

But in my wise old age, I see the inevitability of change. I've seen two new generations born as we babyboomers watch time tick away faster and faster. The pine and maple seedlings we planted in our yard are now a mature old-growth forest. I remember dial phones changing to push-button, then to cell, now in some cases to watches. The red-headed kid who played with my sisters now is a Pennsylvania legislator.

I am happy to witness my life changing. I'm sorry my muscles have gone stiff on me, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually I like the new and improved me. I changed from a child, to a husband, to a father, to a retiree, then to a drunk. Then God led me from alcoholism and gave me this new life.

Is there something about you that needs to be changed? Any character defects that need sanded until, gradually, they become dust?

One of my recent readings is The Endless Practice (https://www.amazon.com/Endless-Practice-Becoming-Were-Born/dp/1476774668) by Mark Nepo (http://marknepo.com/). The author is a confessed poet, but I find his metaphors of metaphors hard to understand. I do understand this excerpt, which describes what I've been trying to communicate to you today. It's the needed change in me as I grow from drunk to recovering alcoholic:

"Short of being killed, we always emerge from difficulty in a stronger if rearranged form.... By our very nature, each of us is challenged to grow out of one self into another. I am not the same person I was ten years ago, nor was that self the same as the one I inhabited twenty years ago -- though I am the same spirit. We blossom and outgrow selves the way butterflies emerge from cocoons."