The shoot doesn't need to be told to grow

This weekend, we celebrate my son's 13th birthday. Thirteen years of being his mom and a welcoming of the Wood energetic into our home. This past year it has been ebbing and flowing into our awareness with hormones, the occasional moodiness and a want for more autonomy.

The shoot that pushes through and says "Here I am, this is me."

And what has surprised me, is that in the emergence of his individualism and beginning to find his way I am mirroring his self discovery. I’m being asked similar questions. Except not from the perspective of Wood, but instead holding the tension within the Metal phase of my life, in preparation for what will eventually be my second spring.

This is the beauty of the Five Elements.

They don't move through us just once. Wood arrives in childhood and adolescence, urgent, directional, reaching. Fire carries us into early adulthood, all passion, connection and possibility. Earth settles us into being, with great nourishment and tending. While Metal refines us, strips away what no longer belongs, asks us what we're willing to release. And Water returns us to stillness, to the deep knowing beneath everything. Before the whole cycle begins again.

A second spring. A second evolution of the Wood Element.

So here we are,  my son and I, standing at opposite edges of the same element. Him arriving into his first Wood expression. Me composting the old in Metal, feeling the distant pull of the new growth that waits on the other side of this release.

Two people in the same house. Two very different kinds of becoming.

This threshold is providing me with a unique opportunity. To not only release my grip on how I hope my own unfolding looks, but also to relinquish my need to push or mold him. To become the soil instead of the trellis. To stop directing the growth and start trusting it.

To acknowledge where well-intentioned intervening has layered identities and roles that aren't really mine.

And that is the quieter work of Metal. Not the dramatic letting go, the bonfire, the grand release. But the slow, honest sorting. Picking up each thing and asking: is this mine? Did I choose this, or did I inherit it? Does it still belong?

My son doesn't need me to know who he's becoming. He needs me to stay curious about it.

And maybe that's true of myself too.

Wood pushes through. Metal makes space. These are not opposites, they are in conversation. His reaching is teaching me to release. My releasing is, perhaps without him knowing it, showing him that becoming is allowed to be messy and nonlinear and entirely your own.

We are, in our own ways, both finding the way through.

I don't know who he will be at 14, or 24, or 40. I don't know who I will be when Metal has finished its refining and Wood eventually arrives in me again for the second time.

I'm not supposed to know.

What I'm learning. Slowly, imperfectly, in the particular way that Metal teaches,  is that love is not the same as control. That presence is not the same as direction. That the most profound thing I can offer my son, and myself, is the radical trust that we are both already moving toward something true.

The shoot doesn't need to be told to grow.

It just needs soil that believes in it.

Writing Prompt:

Find a quiet moment with your journal and sit with this question:

Where in your life have you been acting as a trellis (directing, shaping, managing an outcome) when what you and those you love actually need is soil?

It might be a relationship. A creative dream you keep trying to force into a particular shape. A version of yourself you've been holding too tightly.

What would it feel like to loosen your grip, not in resignation, but in trust?

Write without editing. Let it find its own way through.

P.S. This month's Elemental Print Club print is The Way Through — a pastel landscape holding exactly this energy. The path that reveals itself only as you walk it. If you're not yet a member, the door is open at the link below.

Enrolment for March is open now. 

XX Ashley