Nature's Beauty is Change

The generosity of breathing room

Mud bird nests I saw in a canyon on Sunday. Still in use? Abandoned? Both? Taos, NM.

“Collecting my palettes” from the local landscape these past few weeks has been an object lesson in how color is really an expression of transition and relationship.

As artists, we often attribute the shifting attributes of color in the landscape to the changing quality of the light that surrounds us. But that’s just one piece of it.

Yes, the subtly changing hues we see in nature are affected by the sun and time of day. But they are also expressions of the weather, this year’s precipitation levels, a particular point in the arc of a season, and the unique inner workings in each particular plant as it responds to the changes around it and its own seasonal cycles.

This made me think of how the liminal, in-between space of dawn and dusk are also like that—daily overt expressions of the constancy of change, of how life and time move in cycles and spirals, not arrows and grids.

The same is true for spring and fall—larger scale transitions that every year lay bare the rhythmic nature of life and the flux of everything—that really, the beauty of life itself is change and transition.

And yet, it’s difficult to slow down enough to really experience the truth of what transitional times and seasons offer us because we’re so immersed in our human stories and the frenetic to-ing and fro-ing of modern existence.

Mostly, we humans find transitions challenging at best. Be they big ones—like having babies, moving, marrying or divorcing—or mundane daily ones—adjusting from being at work to being home, shifting from the busyness of outside commitments to the quietude of studio time, or even just making time to exercise—all are moments where we try to heave ourselves from the inertia of one way of doing to the momentum of another very different mode.

It’s hard to not feel impatient with ourselves in these transitions—especially the ones we consciously sign up for. But I think this is because we’re underestimating the nature of transition.

Even in our smallest daily personal transitions, we’re really mutating ourselves—we’re neither this nor that but instead, we’re on the threshold, teetering in a kind of bothness. This bothness is liminality—and it’s a morphing process that requires breathing room—a generous spaciousness where nothing appears to be happening—something our productivity-obsessed culture doesn’t like to acknowledge.

I can easily fall prey to our culture’s fixation on accomplishment and activity, so these mornings of birding and color collecting have felt like offerings from the Earth about the big mystery of being alive—a way-showing about what life is really about.

As I walked back to my car the other morning, my brain full of the transitory nature of migratory birds and color itself, the shimmering beauty of our ever-shifting natural world suddenly stopped being an enriching mental observation and turned into a felt sense of how the entirety of life itself is a gorgeous transition—an endlessly moving, infinite unfolding.

A change so cosmically huge, we mistake it for stillness. For solidity. For matter.

And for a few seconds there, I felt like I truly got it.

Making Change: Join Us!

We’ve been born into a momentous transitional era in human history. It’s hard to wrap our arms around it because really, it’s all we know.

Maybe this span of time is humanity’s chance to really understand how to experience and understand ourselves as liminal beings, endlessly on the threshold, endlessly changing.

Learning to embrace this collective liminality feels like our only choice. To be curious and exploratory. Maybe even figure out how to become grateful for it.

But doing that doesn’t have to be all lighting candles, meditations, or woo.

As artists and art lovers, we know it’s the concrete and specific, really, that shows us the truth about the abstract and the universal.

Which is why I hope you join us at the next Creative Change-Makers zoom call on Thursday May 22 where we’ll make tiny protest signs and loving subversive messages to slip into unexpected places for our neighbors to discover and consider.

As our society reels between grasping at the past or embracing a new way forward, I think of these little signs as a small but creative way to connect one-to-one with random strangers—personal and specific messages that support big group actions like protests or general strikes.

Yes, these little signs are super easy to make, but they aren’t always easy to make by yourself, which is why we’re doing it together.

You can read more about it here.

These Creative Change-Maker zoom events are free for my paid subscribers. (The annual subscription is 36.00 which is just 3.00/month.)

Paid subscribers can register for the call in the header or footer of this email.

It’s happening on Thursday, May 22, 2025, at 4pm Pacific, 5pm Mountain, 6pm Central, and 7pm Eastern.

If you’d like to be a part of it, you can click on the button below to either upgrade or just check it out before committing to anything.

I’d love for you to join us.

And then come back again in June for the next workshop! In the June zoom call, I’ll be offering a zine-making workshop.