Shedding My Skin

Shedding My Skin
A Mission Statement
Joel Hunter Borrelli
09.28.20

Spring is the time we associate with regeneration and renewal. It births new life right in from of our eyes. We watch nature bloom and flower using the full palette of its color.

It’s hard not to be introspective. It’s hard not to want to take that time to do the same for ourselves. After all, we, as much as the stars, as much as the mountains and the flowers, the fish and the forest, are part of nature.

I’ve always found Spring a time for new commitments and reinvention. The arc of my own journey includes major shifts I’ve made and obligations I undertook in the Springs of my life

This Spring was absent of much of its splendor as the world faced a pandemic. The new limitations and suspension of activities and behavior we took for granted became a thief to our Summer as well. Now, all of a sudden, we fell into Fall.

I’m not the most educated or enlightened student of Buddhism, but when I began to feel the anger, resentment and the loss of life’s most precious commodity, time, I also felt a need to reframe my perspective.

I realized that nature in Fall also offers us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. In the same way that the leaves on trees get painted in the most brilliant palette of colors before they shed themselves from their host, is a representation we can translate for our own life.

At least me for mine.

So that’s my plan, to shed my skin with the Autumn season. I want to experience the cycle of nature in my soul.

To make myself, my soul, naked in the nothingness of Winter so that I might be reborn anew in the lushness of the Spring.

Joel Hunter Borrelli
09.28.20
Shedding My Skin
A Mission Statement