I am Change that is still Becoming

The inner life of a girl becoming a woman, spirals downward like roots feeling their way through dark soil, and upward like sap rising in a tree.

In the language of author, and Jungian Psychoanalyst, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the girl enters the forest of story—where wolves speak, and the bones of instinct remember. Author and psychologist Sharon Blackie would call it the rooted remembering—an awakening of self, and ancestry carried in blood and the land.

Something within the girl begins to split— into awareness. Author, Sue Monk Kidd names this the moment when the life she has been living no longer fits the life that is quietly arriving. Estés would call it the silencing of instinct; Blackie, the ache of exile from belonging.

And yet author, Melinda Reidinger Ph.D. reminds us that voice is often returned through witnessing—through story shared, through being seen by another. In that fragile moment something ancient stirs. Whether understood as ancestral memory, carried through generations like hidden code, or as the deeper mystery of a soul that has crossed many forms of existence, the feeling is the same: recognition without explanation.

The girl becoming a woman is remembering a self she has never fully met.

Cathy Skipper (Educator and Life Coach) listens to this language—the intelligence of cycles, plants, decay, and sees it as a preparation. Hildegard von Bingen sang of viriditas, the greening force moving through all living things. “The soul is in the body as sap is in the tree,” she wrote—an image of quiet, persistent rising. In this light, it becomes a sacred and devotional moment.

All of this gathers in the story of White Deer: Rites of Passage, where the white deer appears as both question and answer, both guide and threshold. Does it represent instinct born of myth; or a call to descend; or the whisper of inner authority?

Blackie would recognize in it the presence of land itself—alive, listening, responding.

Skipper would feel it in the body’s subtle knowing, while Reidinger would insist that it functions as a messenger of re-enchantment, seen or felt when perception shifts. While the deer moves between worlds without hesitation, the girl is fearful, yet compelled to trust this guide, because something in her already does.

And so the journey deepens.

What begins as a disorientating woodland, becomes a path of initiation; what feels like loss of innocence reveals itself as intuitive power. The girl begins to listen inward, around, and behind—where memory, ancestry, and something like eternity hums beneath her skin. Across these woven voices, she is being gathered back into what she has always been—layer by layer, story by story, life by life.

Her inner light leads the way.

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés — Women Who Run With the Wolves

• Sharon Blackie — If Women Rose Rooted

• Sue Monk Kidd — The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

• Cathy Skipper — The Alchemy of Menopause

• Melinda Reidinger — The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic

• Hildegard von Bingen — Sciviasa