🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away…
PHOENIX–or rising from the ashes. 🌿
🌻 Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?
If not, you will never really change.
The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash.
Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
with strands of down like floating ash
shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle,
immortal bird. 🌻
–D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Published posthumously in the 1932 collection “Last Poems”
I sometimes offer my clients an image
🪴 I sometimes offer my clients an image or metaphor that captures how I experience them or what we’ve been exploring together. In a recent session, I offered one client the image of a phoenix rising from the ashes.
For this week’s poem, I wanted to find words that honour both the beauty and the pain of such a rising.
Much change mean becoming “nothing”?
I admit that I find Lawrence’s poem uncomfortable to read. He certainly does not mince his words with his opening line:
🌱 Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
And he doesn’t stop there. He keeps going, rubbing salt in an already open wound:
🌱 Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?
Then comes his uncompromising verdict:
🌱 If not, you will never really change.
I honestly don’t know if I can fully agree—his words feel so harsh, so unforgiving. Must the only way to change be through oblivion? Becoming “nothing”?
Reading Lawrence in the shadow of mortality
🪴 When I place Lawrence’s words in the context in which he wrote them, at the very end of his life while dying from tuberculosis, I can begin to understand their intensity.
Maybe Lawrence was trying to make sense of his own physical decay and mortality, reaffirming that this is not the end. That, just like a phoenix (one of his lifelong personal emblems), he will rise and live once more, as an immortal soul.
He’s not just talking about a regular change, like eating more healthily or going to the gym more often. He is talking about complete transformation.
🪴 I can think of a couple of people I know who radically transformed after an incredibly painful experience lasting years. Just like the Phoenix (or the chrysalis image I offered two weeks ago), Lawrence is asking us to allow the pain and the suffering in our own lives, so that we can truly transform—whereby one living form needs to die so it can become something completely new.
When life thrusts transformation upon us
🪴 I still find his opening words incredibly uncomfortable, and I am not sure I feel ready for such an “obliteration”. And maybe that’s why, usually, when such transformations take place, it’s not because we sought them but because life thrusts them upon us somehow, leaving us only the choice of response…
And I keep returning to what happens later in the poem:
🌱 Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
🪴 After all the suffering and burning, there’s a small beginning.
No grand entrance. Just a stirring.
The stirring of what will one day soar like an eagle—an immortal bird.
The small stirring of a new beginning
So, if you find yourself in such a space right now—crushed, lost, questioning your worth, unsure of who you are or who you are becoming—know that you are not only worthy, you are beautiful, and unique, and loved—just as you are.
☀️ And one day, you too, will rise as a phoenix out of the ashes. ☀️
Hope is not a fantasy
📌 Hope is not a fantasy. It is a strategy that allows us to notice the stirring in the nest.
🦋 Happy Weekend everyone! 🦋
With love,
Dina 🫶🏽
Resources:
- This week’s song 🎶 is BLACKBIRD by The Beatles.
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