New Moon
Transmutation is the path less traveled
What carries me through a personal crisis? Those moments, in which I am loosing familiar faces, places – really, loosing my home in the world. With no idea what’s next and how to move on. Disruptive moments can be scary, gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching.
Yet hidden in them lies, albeit often invisible, already this new life of mine. While everything inside of me wants to cling to my old ways, through a personal crisis life is asking me very unapologetically to come to it differently. As I turn towards this dark that has come upon me, there is a chance to discover something in this gloomy doom, a hidden treasure. Diamonds are made in intense pressure. And this moment of dark will pass, too. After all, new moon is the beginning of a new cycle. This is what transmutation is all about.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 Intro
- 00:00:26 New Moon – Solo
- 00:03:23 Transmutation is the path less traveled
- 00:12:40 New Moon (Remix)
- 00:16:46 Outro
Jaw’s harp for the remix was played by Karin Gal-Oz-Naveh.
Transcript
New Moon
New moon, darkness
Out in the West again
Out in the wild
Taunting illusions of shape
Every tree has a face
Squirrels laughing at me
Compass needle points in no direction
Voices talking gibberish
Everything
Nothing
Until
Until I give in
Surrender to the dark
Behold the darkness
Breathe it in
Nowhere to hide
No place to go
No thing to do
No word to say
As pain becomes a tide
On which my tiny nutshell sails
Salty ridges
Fearsomely
Crushing depths
Scary heights
So vast an ocean
So small am I
Yet here I am
And carried
By what so fierce I feared
I let myself be cradled
I let myself
Let go of me
And in the course of everything
Up there’s a star
I see
©️ Laughing Brook/Peter Müller 2024
Transmutation is the path less traveled
For almost two decades I’m dancing tango now. It’s a fantastic dance, but mastering it is not a casual challenge. Many years into my tango life I took lessons with a really good tango teacher who made me feel my way into the dance. More than once her way of teaching lead me to a point where I felt like a complete idiot, all confused and even forgetting the simplest of moves, like doing an ocho. As I exhaled my embarrassment of not even being able to do something as basic as an ocho anymore, to my surprise she replied with an assured, happy comment: „Great! This means you’re really learning something new here!“
Mind you, I couldn’t share her excitement in that moment and simply felt, to use a Frank Zappa song title, like a dancing fool. Or not even dancing, that was, because I couldn’t do any moves anymore. To me it felt like this was going nowhere, or, worse, I was even losing the little I knew. Not exactly a definition of success.
That moment passed, I paid for my lesson, and came back again. Not all lessons were that rough, but as time went by I shifted into a way of dancing that was so much more present in my moment, present in my body and present with whoever I was dancing with. Her lessons deconstructed much of what tango had been for me up to that point and by doing so opened me up for a different way of coming to the dance.
This moment of in-between can feel horrible. Being between this old way that no longer works, is gone, and that new way – if such a way should exist at all, as doubt whispers in my ear – is very disorienting, disconcerting, disturbing, distressing, disintegrating, disheartening. There is this term transmutation, which initially stems from the field of alchemy and means, according to Meriam-Webster „the conversion of one element or nuclide into another“. Most famously the conversion of metal into gold or silver is noted in that context, and normally is commented with the remark how superstitious and unscientific those alchemists were with their naive attempts of trying to do something like this.
There is, though, a more, shall we say, philosophical side to this idea of transmutation. Whereas a transformation changes the form of something, transmutation changes the essence, the very fabric of which something is being made of. In order to do so, it requires a death. The old character of an element, or in a figurative sense, a person, ceases to exist and something new emerges. Which, by the way, also works for turning metal into gold. Metal has been turned into gold, over and over and over again. All you need for it to happen is a supernova, meaning the super-explosion that involves the death of star with an incredible amount of energy – which is, by the way, where every ounce of gold on our planet comes from – the ring on your finger, your necklace, your gold tooth. Deceased stars. Star corpses. Stardust.
Life brings this alchemical quality of transmutation to us in a thousand and one forms, like for example in the form of a tango lesson. Or a personal crisis. This moment in-between things, no longer being what I was and having no grasp of what or who I will be, this is the alchemical moment of transmutation. After death comes resurrection, me no longer the me I was, but being a changed, and possibly expanded version of myself.
As for me, those confusing tango lessons have helped making me into the decent tango dancer I am today. And all the many crises I went through have done it in so many ways, making me into who I am as human being now. They still feel horrible when they come upon me; no matter how smooth and eloquently I am describing it here, believe me, once I’m in it, every death feels like the first time, and I’m pissing my pants all over again. I keep learning, though – and I know this may sound all cheesy and preachy, but believe me, as I speak this I’ve just so made it through another quite abhorring and extremely painful and dark transmutation – so, I keep learning to follow that tiniest of lights in what possibly might be not an abyss that devours me, but a tunnel with the proverbial light that might actually lead me into a new life, even though I find it hard to imagine and almost impossible to believe at the time. I wouldn’t call it hope, or faith, as we normally use the term. I’d rather call it trust. I trust in life, and that love carries me. It did and does get me to places, in most unbelievable ways.
Outro:
If you’re listening to this and life is weighing hard on you, I’m sending you my love and compassion. Follow your intuition, and maybe leave a comment on my website, laughingbrook.net. I read all those comments – I’m making this podcast for people like you.
The Remix of this poem was done while I was still in the middle of this crisis I mentioned, and you might hear it. Expression is one way of giving the energy of intense pain a direction. A big thank you to Karin Gal-Oz-Naveh for helping me out with playing the jaw’s harp for this remix.
My name is Laughing Brook, I am a poet, dancer, mystic, nature coach and man whisperer.
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