True Success is the Transformation Process

My father used to call it filling the pipeline.

“You just keep putting things into the pipeline, eventually it will come out the other end,” he would say.

Somehow he forgot to tell me that sometimes it takes a lifetime to fill up that pipeline… at least, that’s how it was for me.

I guess I just wasn’t satisfied to keep putting in the same things.

It seemed quite boring to put in toy boats in, day after day.

How about putting in some cast iron horses? And what about tiny acorns and dandelion puffs and an occasional star … and guitar picks, pure silver dimes, buffalo nickels and even some time travel dreams?

Eventually I began to move deeper into the process with kite string, poems on slips of paper all rolled up like Pooh-sticks and a few assorted feathers.

Then there were the pottery shards and the leather lacings, hand made silver jewelry, a wedding ring and a vial of tears.

There were miles of prayers, all lined up and placed onto the wings of morning.

I just kept putting it all into that pipeline. Sometimes I would try to stand at the other end to see if anything was coming out.

It was such a long pipeline and because the hole at the other end was blocked by all the assorted offerings, all I could see was blackness.

Sometimes I didn’t believe anything would come out. Maybe I put in the wrong things, I’d think.

Maybe everything was supposed to be the same, like working at the same job, day after day, for all of my life.

Maybe everything was supposed to fit perfectly, so there wasn’t any way things could be jammed inside.

At some point I stopped watching.
Then I noticed that the pipeline began to eek out with stored up offerings.

The parts of me which I had placed into the long tube of “supposed success” broke down and merged together, forming new items.

The toy boats came out as purple magical animals, the feathers became winged prayer and the cast iron horses came out breathing, alive, ready to gallop.

The combination of things emerged in an unconventional form but I recognized their sources.

I stand at the end of the pipeline, greeting these strange and wonderful opportunities as they emerge.

This is the transformation process.

To me this is true success.