Prima Materia: The Alchemy of Presence

Song: Cross My Mind by Olivia Dean

When you know someone no longer has access to you, something shifts. You stop rehearsing conversations in your head. You stop shrinking your truth in case they reappear. You no longer withhold your emotions out of fear — fear that they will come back just as you begin to heal. When you're permanently done, you no longer perform to keep that fantasy alive.

You stop living in anticipation, no longer waiting for their return, finally choosing not to romanticize the almost.

When someone no longer has the power to do anything to you, or to vanish at the first sight of your humanity, you reclaim yourself completely. You take back your emotional safety, and slowly, you start walking into places you once shared with them, not because you expect to find them there, and not because you're trying to relive anything, but because what once felt shared now feels like something you're learning to hold on your own.

You begin to separate the place from the person. Your brain learns a new association: the café exists without them, and the song can be heard again without them. Not in a way that erases what they once meant, but in a way that gives those things back to you.

Healing — especially when it involves a past that still reaches for you — requires undivided attention. When someone else is there, your awareness can split. Part of you is with the memory, trying to name it, understand it, stay present with it. Another part of you is tracking them — how they're reacting, whether they understand, whether you're being too much, whether you need to explain, soften, or translate your experience into something more digestible.

When another person is present, there is often an unconscious pull to resolve things more quickly. You might reach for reassurance instead of sitting with the discomfort, letting the truth exist in its unrefined form. But transformation often requires solitude — not as isolation, but as containment. A space where nothing needs to be explained. A space where you can let the past rise exactly as it is — messy and unresolved — and meet it without interruption.

This becomes even more important when you're in the in-between — when the past is still holding on, even as you're learning to let go. If someone steps too far into that process, even with care, it can blur the boundary between what belongs to you and what belongs to them.

Sometimes, you have to turn inward and do the work yourself.

Not because your partner and people are not important, or because the relationship lacks depth, but because this part of the journey is yours.

When you return, you're no longer searching for external resolution. You bring something that has already begun to transform within you. That allows your partner to meet you more clearly — not as someone responsible for fixing your past, but as someone who can witness who you are becoming beyond it.

As a former teacher and a mother who taught my children in their early years, I've always held a deep love for Where the Wild Things Are. If you look at it through the lens of alchemy, it becomes less a children's book and more a map of emotional transformation. Max doesn't just leave his room, he enters a psychological realm made of his unprocessed emotions. His anger, his defiance, his desire to be powerful and seen all take form.

These creatures aren't random; they're the untamed parts of himself — the prima materia, the chaotic parts of himself that have to be confronted before it can be transformed.

When Max declares himself king, he doesn't suppress his passion, he joins it. He lets it expand, lets it dance, lets it roar. This mirrors a crucial stage: you don't transcend something by avoiding it; you enter it fully.

In the middle of that chaos, Max begins to feel something deeper — loneliness. A longing not just for attention, but to be where someone loved him best of all. He realizes that intensity, power, and control never fills that emptiness.

At the end of the story, Max returns home, leaving behind the kingdom he once ruled. He doesn't destroy his passion, he integrates it. The sailboat becomes a symbol of this journey, carrying him from chaos back to connection. He learns that home is not just a place, but a space where he can be fully himself.

Max teaches that presence is more than just a feeling. Presence is the ability to notice what is happening within and around you without being consumed by it. It teaches you how to love someone without losing yourself.

And this is the deeper lesson: life doesn't owe you anything. It moves, changes, and sometimes takes things with it. You stop waiting for people. And then comes the harder truth: some people don't go deeper.

Perhaps that's the deepest form of love we learn, not just how to come home to ourselves, but how to let go of who we used to be and what we have carried for so long. Perhaps that is where love deepens when we let go.

I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. — Revelation 3:18

Revelation 3:18 deals with inner transformation through refining processes.

• Spiritual purification through trials. Transforming inner obstacles into higher awareness.

• Righteousness and spiritual integrity by living authentically and shedding false identities.

• Gaining spiritual insight, awakening to present-moment awareness and understanding by His word.

• Becoming rich spiritually by becoming fully present and spiritually alive.