Deeper Love Gestating – Reflections on Being Between Worlds

We laughed, too, at the familiarity of the season we were both in: each of us had just finished the long, demanding process of writing and publishing a book, launching a website, and arriving at that tender, disorienting question that often follows a major creative effort: What now?

Periodically, I find myself in seasons like this—what I have come to call the nothingness, or the void. Great swirls of activity may be unfolding around me, yet inwardly I feel a pause, a slowing of creative current, an inability to grasp a clear sense of purpose or direction. I used to fear these seasons, judging myself and assuming I had drifted off course. Because the ambiguity of the void is so uncomfortable, I would often try to force answers, reaching for some perceived—and often false—sense of certainty.

The uncertainty had already been following me for weeks. I had been trying to build a social media presence around the theme Art of Convergence—leadership at the intersection of self, soul, and society. At first, the project felt electric because it seemed to gather all of my worlds into one place: my history in leadership and social justice, alongside my newer creative life in art and spirituality. But over time, something in it began to lose its vitality. What had once felt expansive started to feel flat, and I found myself once again searching for the deeper source of meaning that might call me fully back into creation.

My first instinct was to do what I had always done: reach for strategy. I tried familiar approaches to marketing, hoping that more clarity, more consistency, or more engagement might somehow resolve the unease I was feeling inside. Yet every attempt felt dull and strangely lifeless. Even the way I was promoting my heartfelt performances—blending storytelling, poetry, and dance—began to feel misaligned with what was actually happening within me. After circling the same efforts again and again, I finally stopped trying to force an answer and surrendered instead to the emptiness itself.

In that quieter space, the same questions kept rising to the surface: Who am I? Why am I here? How can I best be of service?

Over time, I have come to believe that the value of these questions lies not in answering them too quickly, but in learning to live inside them. Rainer Maria Rilke names this beautifully in Letters to a Young Poet, when he writes about “loving the questions themselves”. For weeks, I loved those questions fiercely. I journaled, sketched, and paid close attention to the patterns that kept recurring in my life. I cried. I withdrew from noise. I listened for something quieter than certainty. And from that dark, unstructured space, a small sense of wonder began to emerge—one that is reflected in the poem below, “Deeper Love Gestating.”

Deeper Love Gestating

Receiving this time of nothingness
demanding attention and space

Sensing within this vast unknown
the next opuscule slowly gestating

The muse whispers faintly for now
words simmer lightly on the surface

Potential of depths yet to be revealed
of immense love yet to be expressed

-Tejal Tarro

I felt called to move away from the question of what best showcased my experience or artistic identity and toward more honest questions:

What human threshold am I most deeply meant to serve?

Where in my work was deeper love gestating?

Again and again, I returned to the experience of being between worlds—no longer who I had been, and not yet who I felt called to become. I began to recognize that much of my life and creative work had taken shape inside that threshold.

There is a particular texture to living between identities. It can feel like moving through the world without the language for who you are becoming. The old shape of self no longer fits, yet the new one has not fully formed. Even ordinary choices can begin to carry a strange weight: how to introduce yourself, what to call your work, which parts of your voice feel true, and which feel inherited. In that space, I have often felt both raw and alert, as if my body knew I was crossing a threshold before my mind could explain it. The uncertainty is not only psychological; it is physical, relational, spiritual. And yet, when I stop resisting it, that in-between space becomes less like a void and more like a living terrain—uncharted, but quietly alive.

I could see, with more clarity, that my life has been an extended deep exploration of my relationship to these unknown spaces between identities. Again and again, my journey has asked me to soften—to let my body and mind enter vulnerability and uncertainty without immediately trying to resolve them. It has asked me to meet emotional darkness not as a problem to be fixed, but as something to hold, inhabit, and even learn from.

Writing has become one of the primary ways I learn to recognize what is true before I can explain it. Often, insight does not arrive for me first as thought, but as sensation: a tightening in the throat, warmth in the chest, a sudden stillness, a phrase that lands in the body before it makes sense in the mind. When I am willing to stay with those signals rather than override them, something deeper begins to speak. The page becomes less a place to perform and more a place to encounter what is still forming. I have felt something similar in dance and performance, where movement can reveal what language cannot yet hold. In that sense, creative practice has not simply helped me express who I am becoming; it has been one of the very ways I become.

I want to support the kind of listening that helps people trust what is unfolding within them—the slow deep work of intuition, reflection, creative expression, and becoming. That feels, to me, like a more honest measure of purpose than whether my efforts appear successful by outward standards.

I do not shame myself for not having seen this sooner. I can recognize now that my desire to be perceived in a certain way as an artist was part of the path that brought me here. This current evolution, too, is imperfect—but it feels more grounded, more honest, and more enduring.

This reorientation is still unfolding. As the poem states, “potential of depths yet to be revealed”.

I am beginning to sense new possibilities taking shape, including a return to my conversation with Randy. Together, we have started imagining an immersive retreat that would bring his authentic story and framework for transformation into dialogue with my own work in facilitation, creativity, and the vulnerable space between worlds. Other ideas are surfacing too—collaborations, discussion groups, new offerings, a newsletter. I do not yet know exactly what form any of it will take. But perhaps that is the point. More and more, I am learning to trust that what is emerging does not need to arrive all at once. It only needs to be met with honesty, attention, and care.

The more I have reflected on this, the more I have realized that this threshold is not unique to me. Many of us find ourselves in these spaces between identities—after a loss, after a success, after leaving a role, a relationship, a belief system, or a version of ourselves that once seemed permanent. We may look functional from the outside while internally feeling unraveled. Because our culture prizes clarity, momentum, and self-assuredness, these in-between seasons can feel like failure. But I am beginning to wonder if they are not failures at all. Perhaps they are the very places where a deeper honesty becomes possible, where our life sheds what no longer fits and makes room for something more real to emerge.