When the Self Takes Root Between Worlds
An artistic meditation of survival, liminality, and the moment the soul learns how to grow instead of disappear.
image ©️ VennieKocsis.com
I was raised inside an end-times cult during the 1970s and 80s; a closed world entangled with government contracts, where harm was systemic and the experiences were profoundly traumatic. I told that story in my memoir, Cult Child. This cult still exists.
In the Arms of Transformation speaks to what comes after survival of a life that tortorous, and the ongoing, often painful metamorphosis of becoming. It is a reflection on how a life shaped by tragedy continues to change, rooting, shedding, and remaking itself again and again.
She stands where the world splits. She is not quite woman, not quite tall tree, occuping the thin seam between states of being, as if the earth itself has paused mid-breath to hold her close. Her body is made of what was left behind, mossed memories, bark-thickened grief, the quiet carbon of old decisions. Her arms branch outward, fingers unraveling into nerve and twig, reaching to listen and understand the impending fall. This is not a place one arrives by just walking. This is a place she reachesd after clawing herself through miles of wooded thicket.
The air around her is heavy with an ether thick with the residue of transformation. Some call it liminal consciousness, the state where identity loosens its grip and perception widens beyond the nervous system. Mystics would say she is between incarnations. Trauma experiencers may recognize her instantly: the moment when the self splits just enough and the psyche sends roots down into the dark to keep the body alive. She is not dissociated here; she is expanded. She has learned to exist across planes.
The trees bow inward in recognition. They know her. They remember when she was smaller, softer, and easily broken. They remember the storms that taught her how to grow bark around her heart without sealing it shut.
The fog is not hiding her. It carries the frequency of desperate, old prayers, unanswered, the static chaos of lives lived in survival mode. Somewhere inside that mist exists the core of who she was before she was forced to brace.
There is power in the way she stands now, balanced, exposed, and unafraid of falling. Her posture is a declaration: I did not disappear. I adapted. If you look closely, you can feel the subtle vibration around her form, the telltale sign of a consciousness no longer confined to the body alone. She has crossed thresholds most never see. She has touched the place where fear dissolves into information, where pain becomes data, where the soul learns to move without being held back from the past.
This is not a story about becoming something new. It is about remembering and giving life to the ancient. The human nervous system, when non-consencually pushed beyond its limits, opens doors. Some call it psychic awakening. Others call it breakdown. She knows the truth: it is both. The tree does not apologize for continuing to grow around the wounds where the hatchet struck. Neither does she.
And so she stands rooted in what tried to destroy her, crowned by a sky that no longer frightens her. Not waiting to be saved. Not asking to be understood. Simply present, radiant in her otherness, holding the quiet authority of someone who has died many times, and learned how to come back carrying light.
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