Climacteric: On the Turning Point
A poetic conversation on creating futures while digging down into the past
Be a provenance of something gathered,
a summation of previous intuitions,
let your vulnerabilities walking
on the cracked and sliding limestone
be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty
for understanding what’s about to happen…— David Whyte from the poem, “Seven Streams”
We do not “do” the work of transformation. We simply go to the edge and let the elements we find there work against us, shape us into different, unrecognizable versions of ourselves. The triple pandemic of COVID, social inequality, and environmental crisis has brought us to the edge — the wild rim where mountains meet the sea, the place where our past and future selves meet face to face and the gusting winds, heaving waters, and fractured light we find there work to shape us anew.
This is what it is to be human and to live the Climacteric, to live on the turning point of change.
Climacteric comes from the Greek word klimaktēr, meaning “critical point” or, literally, “rung of a ladder.” The word has long been used to describe inevitable big moments encountered on the metaphorical ladder of life.
