betwixt
transitional periods and a lesson in becoming
She was a woman seeking a way, a form. And now she had what in fact was so much more perfect: it was the great freedom of not having ways or forms.1
i’ve been thinking about time a lot. its passage mostly and how slow/fast i perceive it to be moving. i’m not sure about you but i have felt this pressure in my bones. it feels like i am playdoh being squeezed through a plastic syringe with an opening of indiscernible form. but the process of being squeezed through is happening too slowly. parts of me are being whittled away, and i don’t know to what end. i can’t conceptualize who i’ll be at the end of it.
i get tired of this place betwixt—this period of becoming. i want to rush through it, to be fully formed so i can finally (finally!) start living. but i know now that it is all becoming. what is real now exists in the split second between what has happened and what will. only becoming is real. who i was is no longer, who i will be is not yet here. the only way to really enjoy my time in time is to pause and pay attention to what currently is.
i realize that this relationship i have to the transitional is evident in the number of mutable placements i have in my chart (6 to be exact, 5 of those being major placements). mutable signs function as transitional signs, moving from cardinal signs (the birth and initiation of a season) to fixed signs (embodying the fullness and completion of a season). i have always felt like i exist in the in-between, envying the way others initiate and assert their being, fully formed and declarative, an emphatic “this is me.” but i must be content that that is not my lot in life. i can only attest to my always becoming, and attend to that with all the devotion and care that exists in me.
Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures (New Directions Publishing, 2022), 135.