Healing Starts with Family Series: A Progressive Metamorphosis…For a Family, For a Nation
by Ande Romano Schmitt & The Healing Family Group
Today, the wondrous early signs of spring are tentatively peeking out on our family’s 55 acre farm in upstate New York. The Eastern Red-Spotted Newts (in their totally metamorphosed adult form) are swimming around our pond — fat-back-legged males in search of females. In learning about the astounding transformation these little salamanders undergo — from water dwelling nymphs just starting life, to orangey-red, land-mobile efts on a teenage odyssey to establish a new home, to their final stage (in our pond) as brownish-green adults with a completely new tail for tooling around the water and scoping out the ladies — I felt a philosophical sense of peace that life is ok and as it should be.
Not an easy feeling to come by these days; in fact, the feeling was pretty fleeting. One news story of the latest sycophantic suckling of the Party teat from a Republican lawmaker, one tweet from a self-hating, aggrandized sociopath, one jaw-dropping, eyeballs-on-springs-popping lie, one report of a hypocritically nonsensical action of taking rather than giving, one Facebook post of mangled twisting of truth into something normalized as “alternative fact”, one news story of more obliteration of long-standing institutions and civil liberties formed over decades, centuries of back breaking, often life-threatening, sometimes deadly progressive movement toward equality, justice, truth and national dignity…any one of these accounts (and the horrifyingly many more just like it) is all it takes to bring me back to the sobering, chaotic reality of the nation’s current political state of democracy in peril.
Despite all of this conservative chaos, I can’t help but see this unraveling time in our nation’s social, economic, environmental and political structure as an opportunity for progressive, thoughtful people to really change our society for the better — not to the kind of conservative, Republican-backed, antithetical, back-to-Leave-It-to-Beaver times of injustice bubbling under the carefully-covered pot on the stove of our black and white televisions — but the kind of positive change, the only kind of change, that comes from true, progressive metamorphosis. We, as a nation, in trying to pick up the pieces and to reassemble all of the recently demolished shards of our formerly progressive national structure built over the last century or more, must creatively begin the work of real, progressive and healing change. And not just reassemble the old structure, but create a new, more inclusive, innovative, smart, sustainable, progressive nation. If the conservatives are going to destroy the existing structure, the progressives might as well go ahead and take advantage of this situation and create something even better. Now is the time!
As the mother of my young teenage (both literally and figuratively) family, I certainly can appreciate what it means to undergo the harrowing discomfiture of the complete demolition of the old structure that is an integral part of the metamorphic process in creating the new structure. My family is composed of two teenagers in the midst of physical, emotional and mental life changes, and two adults in the exact same process of changing as well (welcome to mid-life!). Thank God for these little amphibians swimming in my pond who show me that the metamorphic process can be done! If they can do it, so can my family. And if my family can do it, then so can my nation. Eastern Red-Spotted Newts not only completely change their bodies (their color changes red to green, they grow one more chamber in their heart, their tail dramatically flattens and elongates, their gills turn to lungs), but they also change their entire life purpose along the way. Where life for them started out in the water for a few months with the purpose of growing, they then move from water to land for two to five years with the purpose of dispersing the gene pool. Finally, here in my family’s pond, these little wonders have physically and purposefully changed yet again and will live out the rest of their days, perhaps another ten years, in the water with the purpose of procreating.
My teenage family, too, is undergoing the transformation of body and purpose. My kids’ bodies have grown and changed, and now are unrecognizable from when they were just a year or two younger; their minds are capable (and sometimes not capable) of a whole new arrangement of life encounters. My husband is changing as he recognizes the importance of passing the emotional and physical torch of manhood to his son. My own body is changing in ways that have taught me a new humility and have forced me to expand my world of understanding — the entire realm from work to womanhood. Our family’s goals are morphing; our work together is expanding into the creative new world that we are an important part in creating.
And this creative new world is what we — the citizens of this national family — can all become. As we embrace our deconstruction, let us take this opportunity to recreate ourselves into the progressive new “US” that we are meant to be. It’s as natural as instinct; it’s as purposeful as life itself. We heal as a nation from the deconstruction of our new beginnings by seeing the process itself as one of opportunity for real progressive change. In this way, we grow, we change, we become.
Right now as American citizens, in this moment of deconstruction, it can feel as awful as it does to be a teenager. But, we can’t forget that being a teen is also about opening up a window to a universe of creativity in which possibilities are boundless. I love this aspect of teendom! It’s pure joy. It’s part of the same universal consciousness that supports the unbelievable metamorphosis of one creature into something absolutely and entirely different. What are we to change into as a nation? Let’s become — consciously, progressively, creatively, and, above all, a family nation.
