I didn’t notice them at first. Just the soft rustle of my footsteps on the trail, the golden sunlight filtered through green, and the rhythm of breath in my chest as I walked. But as my gaze sharpened, I began to see them: tiny brown husks clinging to every stalk and stem, scattered like delicate reliquaries along the trail. Translucent, hollow, their backs split open as if the bodies within had simply vanished into light.

They were everywhere. Clinging to the plants on the side of the path, half-buried in the dirt, curled around branches like frozen ghosts. Cicada shells—evidence of a hidden transformation I hadn’t witnessed but could still feel echoing in the air.

Cicadas spend most of their lives underground, feeding quietly on the roots of trees for many years. Then, in a synchrony we don’t fully understand, they emerge from the soil—pushing up through small holes that pock the earth like breath marks from below. They climb whatever they can find, and once safely anchored, their exoskeleton begins to crack. From within, a soft, pale creature pulls itself free, wings curled and wet, body shimmering with vulnerability. It waits. It hardens. And then it flies.

To grow, they must rupture. The shell that once protected them must split open to make room for a new form. The husk is not failure—it is the evidence of growth.

Recently, my snake shed her skin, too. I’ve watched this process enough times to know the signs: her eyes grow cloudy, and for days, she becomes moody, reclusive, unwilling to be touched. Her vision blurs and she becomes more sensitive, unsure if any movement is a threat. She is there, but not fully. And then, quietly, the old skin peels away. I find it stretched along her enclosure like a scroll: a perfect imprint of who she used to be. And she emerges, radiant and sharp-eyed.

She retreats before she renews. Her body knows what is coming, even when her senses go dim.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a similar process unfolding in me. My inner eyes— the way I perceive the world and my place in it—have grown cloudy. The structures I once built to hold my life no longer fit. And something in me, too, is preparing to rupture, to split, to fall away.

It’s an awfully uncomfortable place to be.

I’m in a moment of stepping into power. The past few weeks have stirred a deep current, calling me into something new. A ceremony —an invocation and reclamation of feminine spiritual power. A vision — glimpses of my future as a mother, artist, healer, leader. And with that glimpse came a sudden pressure, a bodily awakening of voltage, an electric current that whispered: “To carry this power, you must become stronger.” Not just physically or mentally, but in the entire structure of how I relate to life.

There is a higher level of integrity that power requires.

I am reminded of one of Jesus’ parables: “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will spill, and both will be lost. New wine must be poured into fresh wineskins.”

And that’s what this moment feels like.

What’s calling me is too alive for the old container. I can feel it stretching me, asking me to become something new to hold what’s emerging.

Not a collapse, exactly. But a slow rupture. A splitting at the seams of everything that once held me: theological ideas, identities, survival strategies. The old skin is no longer viable. But the new one hasn’t yet formed.

This in-between is not romantic. It’s not luminous. It’s not poetic in real time. It’s confusing. It’s exhausting. It’s full of questions that don’t resolve.

There are layers to this disorientation.

There’s the ontological layer—questions about God, Jesus, salvation, truth. What it means to hold multiple frameworks in the same body. Whether truth is absolute or relational. What faith means when the rational scaffoldings of religion no longer hold, but something real still pulses beneath.

There’s the vocational layer—what does it mean to be a healer in a world so visibly broken? Where pain seems not like a glitch in the system, but a built-in feature of embodiment. Where personal suffering is inseparable from collective wounding, and individual healing can feel like a mere drop in an ocean. Parts of me used to think my job was to fix the problem of suffering. I’m realizing that’s impossible, and perhaps not even desirable.

And then there’s the identity layer—this raw question of who I am without the story that I must do it all alone.

So much of my life has been shaped by that core belief. I’ve built spiritual practice around it. Built a business around it. Lived on farms and learned to grow food because I thought self-sufficiency was salvation. I thought if I could just get good enough at being alone, I wouldn’t harm anyone and wouldn’t need anything.

That belief is shedding, too. And with it, my sense of self. It’s as though the deep tectonic plates of my being are shifting, and I haven’t yet found the next place to stand.

Beneath it all, woven through every layer, is grief.

Losing my father a few months ago cracked open my world. There is a wellspring of sorrow that continues to move through me, rearranging everything. The veil feels thin. This intimacy with death has changed the texture of everything. It’s made the questions sharper, the mystery deeper, the ground less stable and somehow more sacred.

Grief is fundamentally disorientating. It humbles every thought. It deepens every breath.

There have been days when I pull it together as needed—show up for clients, hold space, speak clearly, serve well — then in between, I unravel. I cry on the floor. I wander the house aimlessly, unsure of what to do next or how to even make decisions. I feel my compass dissolve. I am not completely falling apart —but I am not holding it all together either. I’m somewhere in between old skin and what comes after.

And I don’t think I’m alone.

Collectively, we are in a time between skins.

Modernity gave us order and progress.
Postmodernity gave us critique and complexity.
But neither offers enough integrity to meet what we’re facing now.

Even many of our religious frameworks—once rooted in shared story and collective practice—have become either hollow or polarized. In their place, we’ve reached for political ideologies, self-care and wellness, consumer identities, and an amorphous “spirituality without religion,” but none offer the coherence, reverence, or relationality we truly need.

All the while, technology accelerates. Our influence expands. We hold more power than we know how to wield. But our frameworks are cloudy. Insufficient. We don’t know who we are, what work we’re meant to do, or how to properly discern good from harm.

So of course we feel anxious.
Of course our shoulders are tight, our breath shallow.
Of course we find ourselves lonely, depressed, reaching for distraction.

We are outgrowing ourselves—individually and collectively—while the shape of what’s next remains uncertain. The frameworks we were given can no longer metabolize the complexity we’re living inside. It’s not just a crisis of systems. It’s a crisis of coherence — a rupture in the felt continuity of reality.

Our bodies are trying to reconcile what our minds can’t hold.

Under it all, there is grief.
Grief for the world as it has been and all that is lost.
Grief as we are asked to witness, again and again, violence we cannot stop, suffering we cannot make sense of, injustice that feels both ancient and unrelenting.

We are watching power turn reckless—chaotic, cruel, untethered.
Grief is the undercurrent beneath our outrage, our numbness, our confusion.
We are not just disoriented.
We are heartbroken.

Personal and collective, it all arrives in breath and bone—asking not to be solved, but to be felt.

We don’t just need new systems — we need a different way of being, one in integrity with the living complexity of sacred reality. The skin of the old world is splitting. And we have not yet grown the new one.

So, here I am.
Still disoriented, but at least able to write again.

The disorientation hasn’t disappeared, but I’ve become more oriented to my disorientation. I feel more grounded in faith, more surrendered to this process. I am okay with having more questions than answers. I trust it.

What’s helped has been giving myself immense space and permission. Outside of necessary obligations I’ve taken time to wander, to be confused, to lie on the floor and cry. I’ve offered my grief and lostness to the river, to the woods, to God. I pray out loud, often, desperately. I’ve stopped trying to fix myself or understand everything.

I’ve let my confusion be witnessed—by mentors, by friends, by my partner, by the divine. And I’ve begun to feel faint glimmers of a new framework. Still blurry, still forming, but more true. A framework that isn’t rigid, but relational. A clarity that doesn’t demand certainty. A faith that is soft and spacious enough to meet a time full of the unknown.

I’m still in the fog, but I am learning how to walk.
I am remembering I can trust each next step as it comes.

If you’re here too—blurry-eyed, unraveling, unsure of what comes next—
I want you to know: there is nothing wrong with you.
This is what transformation looks like before clarity comes.
This is waiting. Discomfort. Confusion. Cloudy eyes.

You may not yet know what’s emerging.
But you are not regressing. You are not lost.
You are preparing to shed.

The in-between doesn’t last forever.
Even now, something new is forming under the surface.
You are still here, still breathing, still pulsing with life.
Still connected to something bigger and more beautiful than you may ever understand.

The discomfort you feel is not failure.
It’s the unavoidable truth of growth.