New Life and Letting Go

The past month has me contemplating endings, deaths and transformations. I am in my own pre-conception journey and approaching marriage. The overwhelming theme as this this moment, contrary to my jubilant expectations, is Death.
At the ocean a couple of weeks ago, as I walked the beach in the early morning, singing to Mama ocean of my intentions for this year and all the movement within me, she made me an offering of this beautiful goddess stone and she told me “It is light and dark both. You will have your prayer, to hold and nurture life, and a part of you must die.”
Shortly after this, I asked a client of mine, a married woman in her 70’s, what advice she might have for me as I approach marriage. She told me that all the ways I have learned to be in the world and in relationships, that all of it would need to change in order for me to meet married life. That the world of marriage and family requires a completely different approach than what may have worked so far. She encouraged me to take the transformation in stride, knowing that this loss of former ways and reconstruction was normal and necessary.
I attended a family blessing for a friend and doula client this week, and again, I welcomed the initiator Death as a mother of a toddler gave her blessing for the mama to be. She said, with tears in her eyes “There is an adage in our culture that when a child is born, a mother is born. But what I didn’t know is how much of me had to die.”
These powerful moments are nurturing my faith in my own process. While it can feel wrong or confusing to be approaching thresholds of new life- experiences and milestones that we have longed for and worked toward for many years- and feel our insides melting, our identities unraveling, these small deaths pulling us toward the mystery, This unraveling is actually the design.
The seed dies in the soil before sprouting new life. We can not keep our protective coatings and shells if we want to bloom.