Cycles of Living and Change
August 29th, 2025
It’s a late summer morning. Outside, the earth is wet from the rain that blessed all of us below it through the night. In this wetness: my overgrown yard. A wild thicket of sacred datura and trumpet vine, lambs quarters and baby aspens sprouting from the roots of the tall, sweeping mother tree that looks into my window from the edge of my neighbor’s yard. All of this life has grown during a summer of deep and relentless heat. Long stretches of days reaching into the high nineties have made our bodies work hard. I’ve watched the lizards search for water. I’ve watched my roses burn. And yet, life continued to take over. Life, where it could, continued to grow. As we reach the end of August, I feel the season beginning to change. There is a different kind of quiet to the morning. The air is beginning to cool. Autumn is arriving, and with it, an invitation to reflect on our own seasons and cycles, our own growth and arrival and change.
In our humanness, we spend a lot of time, energy, and resource trying to control change. We try to make change stop or happen. We vacillate between thinking we have no control and nothing we do matters and assuming sole responsibility for everything that is happening around us. We forget that life is a collaboration. That we are not a singular moving part. Even our bodies don’t work alone - we need the bacteria in our belly who digest our food, we need the plankton and trees who create the oxygen we breathe. We live, breathe, and change as a part of universal and planetary cycles. Summer to winter. Morning to night. Full moon to new moon to full moon again. From within these universal cycles, we cycle through our own our lifetime, through each unique and individual breath.
We do not live outside of cycles which means we do not live outside of change. We are always changing. Sometimes change is slow and subtle. Sometimes change is instant and acute. Some change is ordinarily, like the growth of our hair or the lengthening of our finger nails. Some change crashes into us, brings us to our edges and tests of our capacity to survive. When change is hard, it’s easy to lose our sense of connection. In our minds, we become singular and alone. But we are always held through change by relationship. By our inherent connection to a vast and infinite system of life growing towards more life. We grow as the trees grow. With the moon, we ebb and flow. At a time when we are facing immense personal and planetary change, may we find solace in remembering that we do not change alone. That we are held by the universal cycles that animate all life, in all of their wisdom and knowing, in all of their creativity and love. May we align with their currents and access their support. And remember that, like the aspen and datura, life continues. That all life changes towards life.
Written and shared with love.
- mai
mai cortez doan is a writer, facilitator, and grief doula living in Albuquerque, NM.
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