The Metamorphosis of Growth (Part 1 of 3)

miracle, metaphor, myth, and magic ~ growth rings 1 – 4

We don’t grow old.

When we cease to grow we become old.

〰 Ralph Waldo Emerson 〰

original photo Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Growing is Personal

Inside me, strong questions gathered.

I planted them in me like garlic cloves.

Every gardener knows how cold

only accelerates their growth.

〰 Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer 〰

As long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with growing ~ the magic, the myth, the miracle. Growing up (in retrospective), the events of my early life read like a children’s story played in an exotic setting of a bygone era. And as with all charmed lives, we are meant to grow out of them.

The Palestine of my childhood memories has been ripped up and burnt like unwanted evidence ~ taboo, classified, haram. A little better than the memories of my elders who felt guilty for having grown up where they did. But not much. Coming of age in Nazi Germany was a memory best erased.

Adolescence came and went with the myth that growing up is a ticket to freedom. A school system perceived as a prison sentence with teenage angst to boot is high-octane fuel to speed up the stretch between minion and grownup independence.

Stumbling into adulthood coincided with the promises of personal growth going viral. Although online sources now claim that self-help literature started with the Stoics of Mediterranean Antiquity ~ or ‘The 7 Habits of Successful Dictators’ inspired by Henry VIII of Tudor Britain ~ or that ‘the first self-help book was the Bible’ (why not the Talmud…?) ~ the type of books and courses we now take for granted as a bestselling genre were few and far between before the 1980s.

Side note: to graft new shoots onto ancient roots is a popular method to make contemporary ideas sound more established and legitimate, as well as helping them take hold in the collective mind. The term personal growth itself didn’t exist until Abraham Maslow, American psychologist (1908–1970), thought and wrote about the topic.

The first ‘personal growth’ title on my bedside table was The Prophet by Lebanese writer and poet Khalil Gibran. Or was it ‘spiritual growth’?

Boundaries between personal, professional, and spiritual growth emerged in a blur from thin air. All three genres grew so fast! While making bold promises for unprecedented success, expectations associated with personal and spiritual growth put an enormous pressure on the minds of individuals living in that force field.

“Growing up a perfectionist in the new age self-improvement community, I learned very quickly that I needed to constantly be improving myself, or on some growth paradigm, in order to be worthy of anything.” Kimberly Warner, author of the memoir Unfixed shares in her recent interview with Mary Tabor on substack.

Growth ~ translated into self-improvement ~ became a precondition to prove your self-worth as a person. Unless constantly growing/ improving you were hardly worthy to be alive!

These subliminal messages sown into the minds of individuals, swept up in the collective global hunger, need, and greed, followed a matching exponential curve of economic and financial growth of wealthy countries, boldly sold as ‘progress’.

1st growth ring

Growth is not a fairy tale with a happy ending.

Jared Rice on Unsplash

From the Dark Side of Growth

Growth can solve some problems, but it creates others.

〰 Donella Meadows et al. 〰

In 1972, an international team of scientists published a book with the title The Limits to Growth. Commissioned by the Club of Rome, researchers had calculated and predicted the implications of growth for the future of human life and our planet.

Exponential growth of world population, food production, economy, pollution, industrialisation, and non-renewable resources predicted an ‘overshoot and collapse’ of the global system within one century or less.

By 2024 the contents have been updated, the bestselling book republished every decade under new titles, the same essential predictions and warnings growing more urgent each time.

Almost a century earlier, the German satirist and children’s book author Erich Kästner hit the same nail on its head with his black-humorous poem Kennst du das Land (= Do you Know the Land)

Do you know the land where guns and cannons bloom?
You don’t know it yet?
You’re bound to meet it soon!

Kästner wrote this in 1928, about halfway between WWI and WWII. The poem tells of uniform buttons growing on civilian’s shirts, and the child in every other man’s heart, wanting to play with tin soldiers.

There, the freedom won’t mature.
There, she* stays forever green. 
Whatever they build
– it's always barracks for troops and marine.
You know the land where guns and cannons bloom?
You don’t know it yet?
You’re bound to meet it soon!

(* freedom is a feminine noun in German)

The meaning of Kästner’s lines is fairly clear. The message, eerily timely today, comes from the dark side of growth. It can catch everyone out, at the political, economic, financial emotional, and physical level.

Despite all these associations and connotations, growth remains a positive word, for me. Listening to an interview with Stephen Jenkinson recently, I was startled to hear him growl “Growth?! I can’t stand the word!”

Stephen Jenkinson… the ‘spiritual growth guru’… Really?!!

If you were to look for his books, you’d most likely find them in the self-help / personal / spiritual growth shelves of your local bookshop.

“Growth is increase,” Jenkinson barked, “like a tumor. It ultimately outgrows itself. If I look at increase for its own sake, I’m brought back to tumor. It is a kind of life, but it draws heavily on your capacity to live. That’s what increase is.”

2nd growth ring

Growth is neither good nor bad by nature, neither fortunate nor evil.

Growth can be benign and malignant.

Omer Haktan on Unsplash

Grow Green Grass

Growth is the only evidence of life.

〰 John Henry Newman 〰

Grow [from Old English grōwan = to flourish, increase in size or volume, develop, get bigger] has been used since c. 1300. Initially the verb only applied to humans developing and increasing in size.

“Do you know who made you?” Miss Ophelia asks Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

“Nobody, as I knows on,” Topsy replies “I spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me.”

By the time Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the well known American novel (1850s), the application of the verb to grow had not only extended to animals, plants and phenomena. It had also been adopted in the transitive sense to make something grow, to cause an increase.

Growth [from Old English grownes = increase] is recorded since the 1550s in the sense of stage of growing. Further meanings were attached to the noun later ~ that which has grown (1570s) process of growing (1580s)

Grow and growth can be traced back to the same etymological rootstock as grass (= herb, plant, grass) and green (= the colour of living plants; growing, living, vigorous; freshly cut, unripe, immature; of tender age, young, inexperienced).

Green (v) is also used as a verb in the sense to become green, flourish, and later to make green.

The association of green with environmentalism was introduced in 1971.

Green light in the sense of having permission to move forward, is from 1937.

In 1965 the American song writer Curly Putman wrote a song with the title Green Green Grass of Home. A year later it became a worldwide No 1 hit delivered by the ‘full throated robust baritone’ voice of Welsh singer Tom Jones.

The song describes the final moments of a man on death row. The story teller returns to the ‘green green grass of home’ to be with his parents, hold hands with his sweetheart, and sit in the shade of the old oak tree of his childhood once again, before a rude awakening in a prison cell, and the reminder that he will be executed at dawn.

Then I awake and look around me
At the four grey walls that surround me
And I realise, yes, I was only dreaming
For there’s a guard and there’s a sad old padre –
Arm in arm we’ll walk at daybreak
…
Yes, they’ll all come to see me in the shade
Of that old oak tree
As they lay me neath the green green grass of home.

3rd growth ring

Growth is a matter of life, and death.

Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

Liquid Gold into Wax

You know that old trees just grow stronger,

and old rivers grow wilder every day

〰 John Prine 〰

Before grow and growth became the common English words for the action, process and result of a living organism increasing in size by means of regenerating and reproducing itself our English speaking ancestors had a different word.

Wax (v) [from Old Saxon/Germanic wahsan = to grow, prosper] to grow bigger or greater, to increase is older than the records of etymological history. The verb has survived to describe the growing part of the moon cycle; as a synonym for grow in certain context, and in poetic language.

In a parallel definition, the verb to wax is used to describe the application of wax (= the substance secreted by bees or a manmade composition to imitate the properties of beeswax).

At first glance it looks as if beeswax and the waxing of the moon have nothing in common. The same word used for different things, phenomena, actions ~ worlds apart… it happens in languages, all the time.

Wax, however, has its own unique story, and it starts with the bees. Wild bees have produced wax for millions of years for the purpose of growing their hives. Honeybees evolved as master architects long before humans came along, appropriated their precious product, and gave it this name. The word wax for the cellular structure of the hive is unlikely a random choice.

Wax ~ the original natural stuff ~ is literally a substance bees produce and use for their own growth, protection, and survival of the colony.

Bees are alchemists. They transmute nectar into honey, and the liquid gold into wax. With the wax they build and restore ~ one cell at a time ~ the sustainable architecture which gives home and shelter for a whole population, provides storage for honey, and ensures the survival of the hive.

4th growth ring

Growth is an alchemical symbiogenic process.

to be continued…