December 16, 2022
Rites of Passage
Brands are profound and complex by nature. They spring from the hearts of everyday people who do something extraordinary: they say Yes to creating something from their heart, mind, and hands and then courageously bring their creation to the world. Like their people, brands are deep and wide. They possess multi-dimensions: stories, voices, feelings, truths, sensitivities, superpowers, preferences, and personalities. They develop and evolve in constant interrelationship with the past, present, and future. The auspicious origins and profound complexities of brands imbue them with a superpower. It is that power we work with clients to discover, honor, illuminate, and amplify.
The past few years whipped up a wild and arduous human ride. We’ve been doing the work of hyper-adaptation in response to unprecedented challenges and threats: a fatal shape-shifting virus, societal ruptures, climate volatilities, inequalities and oppression laid bare, and real-time digital footage that repeatedly imprints on our hearts and minds. I try to leave space for gratitude amidst it all, knowing that as hard as this time has been and how high the recovery climb may look, I’m one of the lucky ones to be here for it. Still, the effects have been intense and dramatic. Ongoing stress and change requires people to optimize their chances for survival. What is being called “The Great Resignation” for work and businesses feels like merely one chapter in the larger human story of our time: “The Great Reckoning.”
What is being called “The Great Resignation” for work and businesses feels like merely one chapter in the larger human story of our time: “The Great Reckoning.”
Times of such massive shifts and stress are disorienting, and the work of finding one’s footing over and over can be draining. Becca Piastrelli, the author of the beautifully crafted and illustrated Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self, is one of the writers whose voice has companioned me through this time and offered me solid ground. Lately, Becca’s thoughts and insights about life’s rites of passage have given me a new way of making sense of these times:
“In the arc of a rite of passage, there are three stages. The separation begins with a catalyzing moment that sets off a chain reaction of awareness – or awakening. The return is the space on the other side – where you are seen by yourself and your community as changed, You have the wisdom and the stories in this new phase of life to carry on down the path. In the very messy middle of the separation and the return lies the liminal – the space where you cannot go back to life “before” and you are not yet able to move to life “after.” It is often disorienting and sometimes painful in a culture that does not have spaces and process around it. And yet – we all naturally experience this phase as we progress through life.”
The separation. The liminal. Then the return. My entire self – body, mind, and spirit – soaked up these words as a deep inhale and exhale. “Ah. Yes. That is what is happening!”
I try to remember that we have the tools for survival and adaptation coded into us because they are ancient design elements in nature. In a 2020 interview with the New York Times, the writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams shared that lodgepole pines respond to the arrival of the heat of forest fires by opening their tight pinecones and releasing their seeds onto the earth beneath them before the trees are consumed by the flames. In her exquisite piece “A Burning Testament,” which she wrote as an obituary to the land as the fires burned in California in September 2020, Williams wrote:
“…even as you burn, you are throwing down seeds that will sprout and flower, trees will grow, and forests will rise again as living testaments to how one survives change.”
Learning this flipped a switch in my mind at a time I really needed it. Those words, that imagery, and the physiological experience of that truth landing in my mind resolved a longing for hope and strength I had been trying to hold on to despite the slings and arrows of daily despair. I got inspired to focus on how I, as a person, a woman, a mother, a friend, a family member, a business owner, and a colleague, can learn to respond to the threats and destruction in my life passages by releasing seeds for survival and regeneration. A writer and trees came through to show me new pathways forward, once again.
Those words, that imagery, and the physiological experience of that truth landing in my mind resolved a longing for hope and strength I had been trying to hold on to despite the slings and arrows of daily despair. I got inspired to focus on how I, as a person, a woman, a mother, a friend, a family member, a business owner, and a colleague, can learn to respond to the threats and destruction in my life passages by releasing seeds for survival and regeneration.
As summer gave way to fall this year, I detected a shift in myself and around me. It was an energy of reset and rising. Regeneration! It felt new, strange, surprising, and equally refreshing and welcome. I wonder if we are starting to emerge out of the liminal time and enter our time of return. Do the wise and mysterious evolutionary forces at play now deem us equipped to carry forward all that we have endured in this passage with arms and steps that feel lighter, hopeful, and ready in a new way to venture into the uncharted territory ahead together?
Brands and the marketing systems that communicate them go through life passages, too. They get jolted into rupture; they stumble and trudge and wander around aimlessly through the subsequent limbo and mess until they have adapted and learned enough to reemerge in a new state of a higher wholeness. Our clients are brand creators and brand keepers who come to us at a point of new awareness that something is not working in their branding and marketing. The messaging has veered off course or lost its vibrancy, the mission and voice feel outdated, things just aren’t flowing anymore. These are signs that a brand is in a state of separation, and clients come to us seeking a marketing partner that knows how to create a space and provide a process to support them through this passage.
Leading brands and their people from separation through the messy middle and into brand return is the business we are in and the work we love to do.
Leading brands and their people from separation through the messy middle and into brand return is the business we are in and the work we love to do. The values of Love, Integrity, Attunement, Inclusion, Wholeness, and Uplift shape our brand, our services, and our place in the world of marketing.
If your brand or business is at a rite of passage moment and you’re looking for our brand of marketing support, it’s the perfect time to have a virtual cup of coffee with Nancy. Book a time
Nancy is a Baltimore native who came to communications and marketing through her work in public health. In 2014 she took an entrepreneurial leap of faith to start Asana Consulting and she found her wings.
