Change is often slow and barely perceptible, unfolding beneath the surface long before it announces itself. It moves quietly, like wintertime, when the land appears frozen and still, everything covered in snow, giving the impression that nothing is happening at all. Yet beneath that stillness, pressures are building, waters are gathering, and life is preparing itself.'
Then, seemingly all at once, spring arrives. A storm breaks. The thaw releases what has been held back, and the rivers surge with force and direction. What appeared static begins to move rapidly. Or, like the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, a long, hidden transformation suddenly becomes visible.
The form changes in an instant, but the work was done over time. These moments feel abrupt only because we did not witness the long preparation that made them inevitable.
The seeds were already germinating beneath the snow, quietly strengthening themselves in the dark. And when they emerge, even if they find themselves confined to the slightest crack in stone, they do not retreat. They grow. They press outward. Over time, they split the rock itself, not through force, but through persistence and life insisting on becoming.'
With that rhythm in mind, the long season of quiet accumulation followed by sudden, unmistakable movement, the following story can be read not as a single turning point, but as one moment of visibility in a much longer process of transformation.
I have learned over the years that the moments that change us most are rarely announced by drama. They arrive quietly, almost unnoticed at the time, and only later do we realize that something fundamental shifted in the way we understand the world.
One such moment came in the Spring of 1985 when I invited Joseph Chilton Pearce to the University of Lethbridge, where I was teaching at the time.
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