blast, in the language of growth

When I was first learning about cellular biology and physiology, I would frequently get tripped up by the idea that “blast” cells are the ones that grow new cells, such as the osteoblasts that grow new bone cells, from the Greek osteo, bone, and blastano, meaning “germinate”. Blast, to my English-speaking mind, does not generate images of growth. In learning that the word means germination, I thought about what happens to a seed when it germinates. The protective casing of the seed has to blast open to make room for growth. Blast, in the language of machines and industry, is destructive. In the language of living and growth, it is a process of making necessary room for what is to come.

from chapter 7: the somatics of trees in Returning Home to Our Bodies: Reimagining the Relationship Between Our Bodies and the World by Abigail Rose Clarke

I am back in the now somewhat familiar waters of creating a new project. This one will be published in 2026, meaning it’s due in about 8 months. I am currently in the stage of oscillating between excitement - this project will be something very different from anything else I’ve created, it will be beautiful, and it already has a release date - and significant terror - I’ve never done anything like this before, can I even pull this off, and every day is one day closer to when it needs to be done.

So I’m thinking about the work of creativity, about what it takes to grow new ideas. Not just the sort of ideas that turn into books. It seems like anything we create of any real significance makes us into a different version of ourselves. Which means something in us germinates. Which means something in us has to blast open.

In the language of machines and industry, blast means destruction. And in the language of machines and industry, creativity is only worthwhile if it leads to dividends. Some sort of product, some sort of success marker. But the process of creating anything means we are creating ourselves. A little trite, I know. Certainly said often enough on the internet, a pile of inspirational quotes littering the cloud with the same sentiment. But if creation is a process of becoming, then it is also a process of un-becoming. We can’t be who we were if we are also becoming something else. And a process of un-becoming…well. It’s right there. It’s unbecoming. It certainly isn’t aesthetic.

When I was in the process of writing Returning Home to Our Bodies - a very intense unbecoming process - I didn’t share any of the many times I cried at my desk. My closest friends didn’t know how often I walked into the woods to throw any stick or rock I could find because the fear and frustration was so thick it pressed down my bones. Weighted from the inside like that I wanted to break something. People say that writing a book was the hardest thing they’d ever done, I knew that, but I thought that it couldn’t have been this hard for them. Surely, it being this hard for me meant I wasn’t cut out for it. Clearly a person who deserved to be writing a book about relating to our bodies and the world in a different way wouldn’t be crying so much about it.

I don’t know exactly what your algorithm feeds you - that’s part of the chaos of these times, we don’t know what others are seeing - but along with 15 months of livestreamed genocide, mine has been full of urging to be authentic for years now. Which makes its own irony, as people strive to make their authentic breakdowns more aesthetic, turning authenticity into a branding strategy. So when I write this next part, I am trying to take the grain of truth that has been lost in the piles of programs selling authenticity and bring it back into focus: I think we need to be a bit braver in sharing our unbecoming. I think we might need to be a little braver in the actual process of unbecoming. I think we might need to be ready to germinate, which means blast open, and become unrecognizable.

I am in the process of creating my next project, but this creative unbecoming isn’t just relegated to books or art or music, those things regularly deemed “creative.” This sort of unbecoming accompanies the practice of living.

When I wrote that as a note in my phone, I meant to write loving. I meant to write about how our protective layers have to become blasted open to be able to be in the vulnerable process of loving anything, certainly in the messy and unpredictable process of loving a messy and unpredictable human, especially ourselves. But my phone, as it often does, corrected “loving” to “living.” It does the opposite too - I mean to write “live”, my phone writes “love.” I guess that is also a clue, that living is loving, loving is living. Anything alive is growing - the osteoblast cells in your bones are right now developing new bone tissue, blasting and germinating there in the center of you. Anything alive in growing, and growth is only rarely aesthetic, and much of it happens in the dark.

In my early 20s I did a birth doula training, and the midwife taught the stages the birthing parent would go through: anger, frustration, fear, and an abject belief that it was too hard and they couldn’t do it. Before I went to the hospital to assist my first birth I asked a friend with 3 children what she wished someone had said to her when she was laboring with her first baby, and she said she wished someone had told her that they knew she felt like she was dying. Everyone telling her she was doing great only made her feel like she was dying in front of them, unnoticed. When it was time to push, I told this new mother that I knew it felt like she was dying, and the relief in her eyes was sudden and rushing, a literal flood.

So perhaps this can help you: I know it might feel like you are drowning, dying, like what you hope to create is impossible. It might be. But you are becoming someone different, quite literally. Cells in your body are in a constant state of being born, which means you are also always dying, just a little. You are unbecoming. And it’s beautiful.