Change is a Portal Towards Possibilities

December 19, 2024

“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”

– Octavia Butler 

How do you resource yourself to be adaptable in transition? Through their creative medium of choice, our staff members Rosie Aquila, Neriel David Ponce, and Monica Biswas reflect on this question and share their practices to ground through change. We invite folks to consider how you might transmute fear, uncertainty, and change into portals towards possibilities.

Constructing New Worlds

By Rosie Aquila (medium: collage)

Collage is my preferred form of art-making, but it’s also a reflection and self-embodiment practice for me. In my process, I typically arrange and layer shapes, colors, and words, until the image feels complete. Then, I ‘un-layer’ everything in order to glue the pieces back down. The process of deconstructing and reconstructing my collage always results in slight variations from my original design. Every time, I am convinced that my memory will be able to recreate the image. And, every time, I forget where pieces were, or inevitably shift them around again during the gluing process. I will stumble upon a completely different scrap of material that I want to include, or discover a piece in the material that should be discarded because it no longer serves the overall image. I’m sure there are better or easier ways for this process. I have sometimes, in moments of frustration, even thought to myself, ‘why didn’t I take a photo of how this was arranged!?!’ With a different mindset, however, I can also honor this process as an intentional practice of engaging with adaptability directly. Change is a portal towards possibilities, if we allow it to be.

For reflection:

• What constellations do we need to deconstruct and reconstruct to flow with transition?
• How might the reconstruction unlock new possibilities? 
• Where do you see opportunities in your life to play, weave, collage, or otherwise tell your story of transitions from 2024 and into 2025? 
• What might you need to shed or let go of to move into 2025 more free? 

History Illuminates a Way Forward

By Neriel David Ponce (medium: video)

2024 has been an abundant year of in-person connection, creativity, innovation, and transformative work for our team with our clients. I’m grateful for the new places across the Midwest and Deep South that our work has taken us, and the cultural learnings that I got to take back with me. In each city, a lot new and some familiar, we had the chance to support local businesses and visit cultural sites to do some active learning and unlearning of our own. Across museums displaying different characters and frozen points of time, I got to slow down and reckon deeper with our shared history, the struggle, the wins, and the infinite in-betweens.

American history is a reflection of all of our cities, our people, and experiences – and vice versa. That connection spoke deeper to me in the people and places I saw in St. Louis, Detroit, Montgomery, Seattle, and DC. Yes, there is a reckoning we will always need to do with this country’s ugly history, but I am also reminded of how marginalized communities have always been resilient and found ways to thrive against the deliberate odds. And that power to transform and thrive, is our history, too.

I am inspired by the work we are doing with our clients across the country and believe that the shifts and changes we can make for individuals, their teams, and across organizations will have transformative reverberations. I hope you can take the time to slow down, lean into creativity, and take a closer look at our history, too – to find hope and power even in the most challenging times.

Rooted and Free on Repeat

By Monica Biswas (medium: playlist)

I have been in states of transition for the last 5 to 7 years. One of the things I’ve learned through that process is that at times it feels like everything, every single thing, is changing. It’s almost like we’re plummeting through the air. You don’t know which way is up.

In those moments, what I found to be grounding for me are a number of things, especially the breath and the beating of my heart. Another is really knowing who I am–knowing my values and what’s important to me. While there was so much changing and shifting and evolving and transforming, there were these things that were relatively steady. Though not always constant, these were things I could lean on.

I did a vision board earlier this year, and some of the words that came to me were that what I was moving into was a state of being both rooted and free. The freedom part is about being nimble enough to make changes and choices that are different from what happened in the past, realigning relationships and transforming, all aspects. It could be social, family, geography, work, professional, or vocation.

For me, that is a sense of freedom. The ability to change and evolve. Through having both those states–feeling rooted and feeling free–it feels like such a limitless source of power to have both of those things at the same time.

Are you ready to co-create the conditions of thriving for your team and organization? Reach out to inquire about working with us!