Trusting Change: Finding Our Way Through Personal and Global Transformation

By Karen Hering

Minister and award-winning author of Writing to Wake the Soul Karen Hering invites readers on the cusp of great change—which is all of us today—to explore the new possibilities emerging in our times.

Whether you are living through significant personal transitions or navigating a world reshaping itself faster than ever, the book offers ten skills for living on the threshold as well as spiritual practices and inspiration for connecting with your own inner wisdom. From the first page, you’ll find a storytelling companion ready to journey with you through uncertainty and change. Hering does not pretend that change is simple. But she offers reassurance that it becomes easier to trust the more we participate in it.

Sharing wisdom found in the body, in nature, and in metaphors, these reflections include creative and embodied exercises that invite readers into a larger story of change. With suggestions for using the book alone and with others, Hering reminds us that trusting change is made possible by sharing its challenges and its possibilities with others. This book is a conversation with the reader meant to also stir conversations between readers as we learn to live into and through our transformative times together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skinner House Books
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781558968851

Karen Hering

Karen Hering is a writer and ordained Unitarian minister. Her emerging ministry of poetry and story, Faithful Words, offers programs that engage writing as a spiritual practice and a tool for social action. Her writing has been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including the Amoskeag literary journal, the Star Tribune (Minneapolis), and Creative Transformation. She serves as a consulting literary minister in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Book preview

BEGINNING HERE

The story of the caterpillar’s goo might ring true for many of us metaphorically, but the chrysalis as an architecture supporting change may be less familiar. A threshold, including the open doorway above it, has more typically served, literally and figuratively, to name our human experience of change and the site where it happens. A threshold is the meeting place between inside and outside, between here and there, between the familiar and the unknown. In my own life transitions, and in programs I lead for others in their times of change, I have followed the poetic tradition of naming these passages thresholds, and the ones crossing over them thresholders.

In its most literal definition, a threshold is a strip of wood or stone at the base of a doorway. In many houses, it is a sill intended to keep the mud from washing into the home. In my cold, northern climate, it is also an important barrier to keeping the cold from sweeping into the house in the winter. In China, a threshold might be three or more inches high, keeping the rainwater outside but also encouraging attentiveness and an awareness of the honor of being invited into someone’s home.

The word threshold also describes the doorway itself and the larger entrance into a building or home. It represents a contact point between interior safety and the outside world. Traditionally, it has been regarded as a site of encounter, risk, and danger. It can be a place of separation, requiring us to leave something, someone, or perhaps even some part of ourselves behind when crossing in either direction. It is a locus of vulnerability where we face the possibilities of transformation, not only in our surroundings but often in identity. On the other side of a threshold, we might be required to do things we’ve never done before, to face fears we have shunned for years, or to discover new gifts as well as limitations.

Honoring the risks and challenges present on the threshold, many cultures have stories, rituals, blessings and sometimes even deities offering protection and safe passage. In ancient Rome, the god Janus reigned over comings and goings. His image, carved over the gates of Roman cities, showed two faces connected at the back and pointed in opposite directions. With one face looking outward from the city gate and the other looking in, Janus provided protection while reminding those passing in either direction to notice what they were leaving and where they were going. Here, in the pages of this book, I hope you will find protected time for similarly noticing both what you are departing from and where you are headed, whatever the thresholds you are crossing.

Chrysalis Space

What thresholds are you on now that are especially resonant to you? How might you describe them—are they wide or high? Welcoming or frightening? Are you crossing them alone or with others? Are they personal or collective or even global? And are you more inclined to face behind you, toward what you are leaving or before you, toward the place where you’re going?

As you begin reading, you might also begin reflecting, perhaps in a new notebook or journal devoted to your thresholds. Take a moment before reading on to name the thresholds, in your personal life, in your community, and in the world that caused you to pick up this book. Are there other thresholds that now occur to you as important in your life today? Name one wish you have as you begin or continue your passage through this time of change.

Paying Attention

The widest physical threshold I have ever crossed in an interior doorway was no simple sill, neatly concealed as the door swung closed over it. This was a beautifully finished piece of pippy oak stretching more than half a foot on either side of the doorway. A gift from the heart of a large tree that grew in England, the wood had been carefully chosen and crafted by artist Ross Peterson. He then sanded it smooth as a riverbed stone and varnished it like a sacred text preserved for reading across generations, a passage written in the cursive script of the tree’s grain and punctuated by its large knots.

This threshold marked the entrance from a small hallway into the sanctuary of the Common Ground Meditation Center in Minneapolis, where I was working with a group from the sangha every Monday for ten weeks. For the first few weeks, every time I entered the sanctuary, I approached the threshold with reverent curiosity and took as big a step as my legs allowed to avoid treading on it, shoeless as I was in keeping with the sangha customs. Remembering ancient taboos against walking on a threshold, I thought how curious it was that this one was made so wide as to be almost impossible to straddle. Then I began watching the sangha members enter the room, and I noticed that every one of them stepped right on the threshold without worry, as if it were an arboreal doormat specifically meant for the soles of their stocking-clad feet.

When I asked Mark Nunberg, the founder of the sangha, about this, he smiled at my efforts to cross the sill without stepping on it. It was made wide to require that you step on it, he explained with a gleam in his eye. It is meant to make you notice, he said, a reminder to pay attention as you enter the sanctuary for meditation and as you leave after meditation is over.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with the ground beneath your feet, wrote Lao Tzu two and a half millennia ago. By which I understand him to be saying (along with Mark Nunberg and Ross Peterson), take note of where you are, the first rule of navigation, if you want to know where you are going. And let your body inform you—the soles of your feet, the palms of your hands, your sense of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, and your body’s ability to convey emotion. All of it can guide us if we stop to notice what our body is saying.

Most fundamentally, thresholds are a call to pause and notice the passage you are making. Pay attention. Use all your senses and every bit of intuition stretching beneath and beyond them—and your body’s larger emotional wisdom, too. Engage as many sources of guidance as possible when encountering the unknown.

This can be overwhelming, like learning to drive a car and realizing it is not enough to look just one way. As a driver, you need to tend to multiple directions and many streams of information. Only with practice does this keen awareness become possible, manageable, even habitual when you slip behind the wheel to drive.

So, too, when learning to pay attention to our thresholds. It takes practice. We live in a world trying constantly to distract us with appeals to buy, to do, to desire, to improve. We are bombarded by so much information that we have become experts at shutting our senses down. We lather our bodies with scents that hover about us like individual weather systems we carry from one place to another. We wear ear buds that obliterate the sounds of our immediate surroundings. We sip lattes so strong it would be hard to taste the salt of a single tear running down our cheek to the corner of our mouth.

This is not a diatribe against the twenty-first century; it is an observation about contemporary obstacles to paying attention to who we are and where we are in any given moment. If we want to wake up our senses, we may have to begin by bursting the bubble we have carefully made to insulate them.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this when flying to a distant country. You board an aircraft that looks like any other plane you’ve been on, except bigger. Maybe the directions for seatbelts and air masks are delivered in an unfamiliar language, hinting that something new has just begun. Maybe the meal choices are more plentiful and varied. But as you make the long flight, hours and hours of it, in the familiar discomfort of that compact, sealed chamber, the triple-paned windows offer your only glimpse at the ground and the miles you are covering.

Then you land and disembark. First into the halls of an airport still possibly temperature controlled; but eventually, with bags in hand, you find yourself outside on the curb, where the exhaust assaults your nose and taxi horns blare and the breeze or the heat or a bracing subzero chill snaps your senses to high alert. It’s as if a drill sergeant marched right through you, blowing their shrill whistle and snatching the cozy blankets of familiarity back from every nerve and receptor in your body and brain. You remember, suddenly, this is why you wanted to travel, even as it jolts you into questioning whether you really should have. But there you are: You are alive. You have arrived. You are awake, on the threshold of a new adventure.

Chrysalis Space

What do the soles of your feet tell you about the road that begins here, wherever you are now? What do they read in the ground that supports you, literally or metaphorically? What does your body have to say on this day—do you feel joy, trepidation, tension, caution, excitement, worry, anger, fear? And where do you feel what you feel? Note: we’re just noticing without judgment. There are no wrong answers here. What you feel and where you feel it or whether you feel nothing at all—any answer is just something to notice and be curious about.

What do you smell and what does it evoke? Have your taste buds been especially attuned of late to the sweet or the sour, the salty or the bitter? Or do you taste nothing at all? And what do you hear—around you and within you—however you do your best listening? What words have piqued your interest recently, what signing or captions? What sounds or vibrations or sensations: The lilting birdsong announcing the dawn or the cacophony of car horns rebelling against grid lock? The oppressive heat or humidity blanketing you as you sit? The bowing and moaning of trees whipped by the wind or the shining descent of icicles falling from the eaves, shattering on the frozen ground below? If you are writing, list anything that comes to mind as you open your senses and your attention to this moment, and then pause to notice any commonalities—or the striking variety or contrasts—apparent in your list.

Learning to Listen

When I try to wake up my senses, I often begin with listening, not because it is a simple place to start but because it is such a critical one. Physically, we often associate listening with hearing, but I’m referring to listening as a form of attention that does not require the physical ability to hear. Rather, it refers to an attentiveness that does not blink or sleep but continuously gathers information from multiple directions and sources, both for our safety and for our delight.

Because we live in a noisy world, waking up our ability to hear, metaphorically or literally, is not easy. It requires sifting through the chatter all around us and turning down the volume on those voices that manipulate our fear and anger and make us defensive and small. Then we can turn up the volume on what we need to grow into a wiser way of being, whether it’s the song of canaries in a metaphorical coal mine or the melodic music of our larger possibilities. In 1905, Nobel-prize-winning bacteriologist Robert Koch predicted, The day will come when [people] will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague. A century later, perhaps we are in that noisy day.

To become intentional about listening, we learn that it is less dependent on the ears than it is on opening the heart, sometimes to messages and voices we may not want to give our attention. In the thresholding groups I lead every year, we begin by reading these words from writer Brenda Ueland in her essay collection Strength to Your Sword