🌿 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. 

🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away… 

I DWELL IN POSSIBILITY—and the space we give it in our lives. 🌿

🌻 I dwell in Possibility
A fairer House than Prose,
More numerous of Windows,
Superior of Doors.

Of chambers, as the Cedars —
Impregnable of eye;
And for an everlasting Roof
The gables of the sky.

Of Visitors — the fairest —
For occupation — this —
The spreading wide my narrow hands
To gather Paradise. 🌻

—Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)

Windows, doors, and a roof made of sky

🪴 What I love about this poem is the space it gives to imagination.

Windows 🪟 through which we might see differently, try another perspective, become more aware. And with greater awareness comes greater choice.

Doors 🚪 opening onto something we haven’t yet explored—a promise of adventure.

A roof made of sky 🌅—limitless, connecting us with something larger than ourselves: nature, the spiritual, the divine.

Dickinson is writing about poetry, imagining it as a house more spacious than prose.

Life’s twists and Poetry’s bends. 

🌱 You see, prose is ordinary. Straightforward. Direct.
It’s our usual way of writing or speaking, with standard grammatical structures, regular sentences and paragraphs.
And there is great value in the ordinary, straightforward, and direct.

But life is rarely ordinary, straightforward, and direct.

It takes unexpected turns.
It twists.
It bends.
It holds surprises in corners.

🌱 Just like poetry.

Poetry is playful.
It flirts with rhythm, beats, metres, and rhyme.
It is bendable—phrases cut
in half, sentences
broken mid-way,
words
placed
individually
on
a
page.

This can be destabilising, but it also opens up a space of freedom, imagination, creativity—a space of Possibility.

Places to explore, places to linger

Perhaps that is why I turn to poems myself:
🪴 They give me room to linger with a question, without having to answer it straight away.

I imagine the “fairest” visitors as us, the readers, bringing imagination, sensitivity, and patience into the poem.

Poems are not puzzles to solve.
They are places to explore,
to linger in,
sitting idly with a word, an image, an unusual phrasing.

🪴 Often times I see clients trying to force life into a set of “prose”—when, in fact, life is more like a “poem”, requiring space for imagination and exploration.

A little room for what we cannot yet see

Earlier this week, I shared how exploring another career helped me find my way back to HR. I returned with new experiences, relationships and a clearer understanding of what mattered to me.

🪴 Not every possibility needs to become a plan. Some help us see our present life differently. Others invite us to open a door.

For me, this poem is an invitation to stay curious—and to leave room for what I cannot yet see.

📌 Perhaps there’s a question in your own life that you keep coming back to.
If so, you don’t have to know where it will lead to give it a little space.

🦋 Happy Weekend everyone! 🦋

With love,
Dina 🫶🏽

Image of me in Valencia, on an impromptu walk to Torres de Serranos

Resources:

• Read Emily Dickinson’s full poem at: https://poets.org/poem/i-dwell-possibility-30
  Source: Academy of American Poets
• This week’s song 🎶 is INTO THE MYSTIC by Van Morrison. A little music to accompany the wandering.
  

🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away… 

WILD GEESE—or when feeling stuck is part of the process 🌿

🌻 (…) Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. 🌻

—Mary Oliver

🌱 Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

If you’re thinking about a career change or are in the middle of one, you may recognise this particular kind of despair.

• The despair of feeling stuck in a hamster wheel and seeing no way out.
• The despair of being in a fog, not knowing where to go next.
• The despair of looking for a job in an unforgiving market, with no end in sight.
• The despair of being 40 or 50 and still not knowing what you want to be when you grow up.

It can feel as though your life has stopped moving.
As though everyone else is progressing, while you’re running hard just to remain in the same place.

Movement beneath the surface

But Oliver’s repeated “Meanwhile” invites a different way of looking at that stuckness: Even when we think we’re stuck, there’s movement.

Just because movement is not visible to us doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

A career transition can be like that.

On the outside, it may look as though nothing is changing.

• You may still be in the same job,
• going to the same meetings to have the same old conversations,
• sending the same applications,
• having the same doubts,
• waking up with the same questions.

But underneath, Oliver tells us:

🌱 The world goes on

—and something is always shifting.

• An old idea of success may be loosening.
• Your definition of who you are, and what you want, may be shifting.

This void you find yourself in right now is a fertile void: the space in which new life can finally form.

The chrysalis

Chrysalises have always fascinated me. In fact, they’ve become a metaphor for how I understand career and life transitions:

Transitions are the chrysalis from which new life can form.

As a child, I used to wonder what was happening to the caterpillar inside. After all:

• It’s just there.
• It doesn’t move.
• It doesn’t eat.
• Is it aware that its body is reorganising itself inside its shell?
• Is it aware that it’s using stored energy to break down and rebuild much of its caterpillar body into something utterly new?

This biological process is called “metamorphosis” because the transformation is so complete that what emerges is unrecognisable from what came before.

The same can happen during a career or life transition.

That is why the line:

🌱 the world offers itself to your imagination

feels like the poem’s punchline.

Your transition is not about what you already know. It’s about what might be possible, while trusting that something may still be making its way towards you.

When we’re exhausted, disappointed or afraid, we often make decisions only on the evidence in front of us.

• The job market says no.
  Our experience is too specific or too broad.
  Our age feels like a disadvantage.

Our confidence has been worn down by rejection. And the fog keeps so much out of sight.

But if we allow ourselves to welcome the fog and the void as fertile ground for metamorphosis, the waiting and the apparent lack of movement become more bearable.

And we may become able to consider an alternative view:

☀️ What if I’m not behind, but in the middle of becoming?

Harsh and exciting

The call of the wild geese is

🌱 harsh and exciting.

Harsh—because transformation is rarely easy or comfortable. It’s frustrating, risky, scary and full of uncertainty.

Exciting—because every transition carries the possibility of becoming something new.

Like the caterpillar, we may not yet be able to see what is taking shape. But something is happening inside the apparent stillness of the chrysalis.

📌 So, if you’re feeling stuck in your career or life in general, remember:

the absence of visible movement is not proof that nothing is changing or moving.

You’re standing in the midst of your own fertile void.

So, take heart (and if you can: rejoice), for metamorphosis is in the making.

🦋 Happy Sunday everyone! 🦋

With love,

Dina 🫶🏽

Resources:

• Read Mary Oliver’s full poem “Wild Geese” here: https://allpoetry.com/poem/15374223-Wild-geese-by-Mary-J-Oliver
• This week’s song is an instrumental piece by Philip Glass called METAMORPHOSIS (1988). It’s 33 minutes long, and its repetitive, slowly shifting music evokes the spirit of the poem and this week’s reflections. I’d even encourage you to play it while you’re reading this blog post.

🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away… 

THE WAITING—or when your next career chapter is not ready to introduce itself yet 🌿

🌻

I was waiting for something
to arrive. I didn’t know what.
Something buoyed, something
sun knocked. I placed my palms
up, little pads of butter, expecting.
All day, nothing. Longer than
that. My hair grew, fell out,
grew. Outside my window, I felt
the flick of a tail in September
wind. A bobcat sauntered across
the grass before me, the black tip
of its tail a pencil I’d like to sharpen.
I immediately hushed, crouched,
became a crumpled shock of
joy to see something this wild,
not myself. (…) Sometimes
what comes to us, we never called
for. (…)
It was as if a bank vault had
opened and I was just standing
there, stealing nothing.

🌻

— Jane Wong, The Waiting
Copyright © 2021 by Jane Wong. Originally published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets.

🪴 If you’re thinking about a career change, you may recognise this particular kind of waiting.

You may be doing all the right things: reflecting, strategising, updating your CV, scanning job ads, having conversations, applying—and still your next step, that ever-elusive job, remains out of sight.

This “in-between” can be frustrating. It has the awkwardness of standing at a station, ready to leave things behind, but unsure which platform to get to—or whether a train will ever arrive to take you where you want to go.

But not all movement is visible.

Wong’s bobcat may have seemed to arrive from nowhere—it didn’t.

While she had been waiting for something to arrive—a waiting that felt like months and years judging by her hair—the bobcat had been on its journey, only to appear at the exact moment she least expected.

Image by Gabriele Brancati on pexels

We spend much of our lives chasing targets:
a target education, a target weight, a target job title, a target life.

But life has its own way of unfolding, too.

And sometimes, what it offers us is not exactly what we had planned—but something we had not yet imagined. Something that makes us feel as though we’re standing in front of an open bank vault, stealing nothing—because it has been given to us freely.

Our time has finally come.

📌 So, if this is you—waiting for something to arrive—remember:

You don’t have to force the whole next chapter into view today.

Something is always on the move, even when it feels as though you’re standing still.

🦋 Happy Sunday everyone! 🦋

With love,

Dina 🫶🏽

Resources:

• Read Wong’s full poem here:  https://poets.org/poem/waiting
• This week’s song : The Waiting by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. Because, yes: sometimes “the waiting is the hardest part”. But “every day also brings another little yard”.