Last night after a day sitting with one of the most intense and emotional migraines I have ever had, Spirit came to me and showed me the most beautiful story. It was the swan, molting, and letting go of her fears of being seen as a vulnerable and naked soul. 

You see, swans molt, or shed their feathers, every year. This process typically occurs in the summer, during which time they are flightless for about six weeks as they replace all their feathers. During this time, they may look a little scruffy as they shed their old feathers and new ones grow in. But this was something very sacred that Spirit was sharing about timing. If you see a white feather or swan after reading this, it's your sign of the changes that you've made and the connection to the divine lover that you have experienced.  Maybe it was just a season, or maybe it was transformation before the real beginning. Only time will tell for each of you. But those weeks without flight are sacred. 

If we dance with the idea of how they molt, they experience this rush, a shedding of all their feathers at once. It’s not a slow letting go, it’s a surrender. A sudden, vulnerable bareness before the new growth arrives.

And it hit me… that’s how some relationships move through our heart.

There are certain loves that are brief, intense, unmistakably sacred, and that feel like spiritual initiations more than partnerships. They don’t arrive to stay. They arrive to strip. To soften. To awaken.

To molt me. (SPIRIT says)

Although I would prefer to have another scruffy swan staring back at me after such an intensity, it's actually okay to stand there in silence. I don’t think the Divine Feminine grows in perfect conditions. She doesn’t rise because everything went according to plan. She emerges when the soul is cracked open, and when the ache of connection and the fear of loss collide.

I used to think these loves that show up with such intensity were “mistakes” because they didn’t last. Now I see them as sacred messengers. They come to mirror the parts of me still bound in fear. And that fear of abandonment, fear of being too much, or not enough, fear that love must always equal permanence. 

I realized when Spirit came to me in this journey, that my Father was there. He said, "You recognized the safety because it was what I tried to give to you in the short years we had together. But I am sorry that your heart had to recognize the abandonment to finally let me pour out of you. I am sorry that I have been sitting in there for far too long." As he said this, I sobbed. The first real fear of masculine abandonment showing up in presence to let me know that they never fully left me. Only in the physical embodiment. 

The swan doesn’t cling to old feathers. She doesn’t fear the awkwardness of bare skin. She trusts the process. She knows that flight requires a season of shedding. So maybe that’s what these soul-stirring connections are. Not losses, but holy molts.

Each one draws something out of me, a piece of armor, a tired story, a veil I no longer need. And even in the grief, there’s a strange gratitude. Because I can feel her… the truer version of me… growing stronger beneath the ache.

One love at a time, one molt at a time. I’m becoming more whole. More wild. More Divine.

Aho.

Molting Like a Swan

There are seasons when the heart invites a storm, not to break us, but to shed the feathers we've outgrown.

Like the swan, we molt under the weight of grace, white down drifting into the waters of what slowly drifts away.

These short but soul-splitting loves, they arrive like lightning, illuminating the dark lake where fear has long taken root. And in their flash, they stir the waters, disrupting stillness not to harm, but to awaken.

The Divine Feminine does not rise untouched, she is forged in the ache, the yearning, the unbearable beauty of being fully seen, if only for a moment.

Each heart that encounters her, no matter how brief, pulls a thread from the cocoon until her wings of knowing emerge.

And so, she learns,  to be tender and strong, to weep and walk away, to molt her need for permanence in favor of presence. Each molt is not to stand in pain, but to walk into a deeper grace.

The swan does not mourn the feathers it loses.It simply trusts the new ones will come stronger, sleeker, ready for the next flight into love's deeper sky.

- Barbara Christensen xx