“When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.” ~Meister Eckhart
For most of my life, something in me felt off—misaligned, too much, not enough. I moved through the world trying to fix a thing I couldn’t name.
Then, a beautiful chapter emerged where I no longer questioned myself. I met my husband—and through his love, I experienced the life-changing magic of being seen. His presence felt like sunlight. I softened. I bloomed. For the first time, I felt safe.
Losing him to young-onset colorectal cancer was like watching that sunlight disappear. With his last breath, the safety I had finally found evaporated. And in the long, aching months that followed, I began to reflect on all the environments I’d moved through—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, relationships—as gardens. And myself as a plant, either nurtured or wilting depending on the conditions and my individual constitution.
His absence clarified the kind of care I had—and hadn’t—known.
I was never defective. I am a being with specific needs for thriving—just the right light, language, and nourishment required for blooming.
When I look back, I can see that while my basic needs—shelter and food—were met, I didn’t understand what it meant to feel emotionally safe or deeply seen. I cycled through endless loops of What’s wrong with me?—never realizing I wasn’t broken. I was just trying. Surviving.
Presence. Attunement. Emotional safety.
These aren’t things you can name as missing when you’ve never known them. Not because anyone was overtly cruel but because no one had ever been taught to ask, What kind of care does this particular being require?
Humans don’t come with cue cards. No tags that say, “partial sun, low stimulation, daily emotional attunement.” We enter this world as mysteries.
My mom carries a sixth sense with her plants. As if she can smell it, she knows when they need water or tending without even looking at them. She is attuned to her garden in ways I only experienced years later with my husband.
After he died, I longed for the kind of care we cultivated together—the way he could sense what I was feeling without looking at my face. The way my heart used to sing when he looked at me. The way he listened.
My relationship with my mother has been tenuous at best in adulthood. But after my husband passed, I saw her try—in the ways she knew how. Fixing. Filling space. Masking the pain with doing. On our occasional phone calls, she’d talk about her plants: who was dry, who needed new soil, who was ready for a bigger pot. No performance. No expectation. Just attention.
I recognized in those moments that she couldn’t offer me the kind of gaze she gave her plants—and for the first time, I understood why. Her care was real. She’d just never encountered a plant like me before.
Before I met my husband, I’d already been living in survival mode for years—self-medicating in the wake of emotional upheaval and familial crisis, eroding what little trust I had in myself. His love opened something in me I hadn’t known was possible: safety. And after he died, I had to learn what safety meant in my body at this stage of my journey.
Most of us are raised in environments shaped by inherited urgency, unexamined patterns, and a generational lack of curiosity. There is no fault here, but there is consequence.
The body, in its wisdom, keeps score. It holds unmet needs and unspoken truths like a second skin.
And it’s often when we encounter a metaphor—one that mirrors our inner experience—that something in us exhales.
That metaphor becomes a form of attunement. Not a solution, but a shift. A felt sense that maybe nothing is wrong—only unrecognized. It doesn’t fix the past, but through meaning-making, the body is able to rest. To breathe.
We speak of regulation like it’s a technique. Breathe like this. Move like that. But often, the truest form of regulation is recognition.
Something outside of us that echoes what lives within. A melody in our favorite song. A story. A metaphor that reminds us: You are not alone in this shape.
And in that moment, the body softens. The charge lifts. We are seen.
This is why metaphor matters. Not just as art, but as medicine. As orientation. As survival.
When we are mirrored—by a song, a painting, a stretch of sky that looks exactly how grief feels—we are granted a kind of coherence. Our experience, once scattered or silenced, is gathered into form. And form is something we can hold.
Often, it’s not the literal circumstances that make us feel safe. It’s the resonance. The reassurance that someone, somewhere, has known a similar ache.
Even if the path is different, the terrain feels familiar. And that familiarity becomes a nervous system offering—a tether back to self when the ground feels too far away.
The metaphors that make us human are often subtle. Soldiers of our intuition: they arrive as gut feelings, patterns, images, or melodies we keep returning to. The ocean. The desert. A cracked shell. A single tree that blooms late every season.
They take root in us slowly. And then one day, without even realizing it, we see ourselves reflected back in the world—and a sense of belonging begins to ripple through our internal landscape.
Viktor Frankl once wrote that “those who have a why to live can bear almost any how.” He understood what trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté have continued to illuminate: that suffering, when given meaning, becomes bearable.
Not erased or justified but metabolized. Held. Breathed into.
Meaning doesn’t change what happened. It changes how what happened lives in us.
This is where metaphor becomes more than language. It becomes a vessel—for pain to move through. A frame sturdy enough to hold the unnamable.
Frankl found this truth in a concentration camp. Van der Kolk found it in bodies that refused to forget. Maté found it in the tender ache beneath addiction and illness.
I found it in my mom’s garden.
And I keep finding it—in metaphors that arrive like lifelines when I don’t know how to explain what I’m feeling.
These metaphors don’t heal the wound, but they give it form. And form allows grief to become something we can live beside, something we can integrate instead of suppressing.
Metaphor isn’t something we create in isolation. It’s something we receive—through dreams, through symbols, through the quiet choreography of the natural world.
A bird showing up at your window. Song lyrics that name exactly what you needed to hear. The shape of a tree that mirrors your own posture in grief.
These aren’t just coincidences. They are collaborations. The world, whispering back: I see you. I’m in this with you. In that echo, we find compassion—for the pain, for the path, for ourselves.
We like to think of ourselves as the authors of our stories, but more often, we’re co-writing them with something larger. With the landscape. With our ancestors. With the energy of what’s unresolved and aching to be tended.
Metaphors arrive from this conversation—between the inner and outer, the seen and unseen. They root us in the relational fabric of existence.
This is what it means to be human. Not just to feel, but to recognize. To witness ourselves mirrored in a leaf, a line of poetry, a stranger’s eyes. To belong—not because we fit a mold, but because something in the world has shaped itself to meet us exactly where we are.
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Perhaps the more honest question isn’t “What’s wrong with me?”
It’s “What shaped me?”
“What conditions was I sprouted within?”
“And what have I learned about the kind of soil, sunlight, and care that allow me to bloom?”
What symbols found me along the way?
We are beings of pattern and story.
Metaphor is how the soul speaks back.
And meaning is the thread that carries us home.
About Ayla Casey
Ayla Casey is a writer, grief guide, and integrative health advocate exploring what it means to self-resource through loss and hardship. Her work centers the body as a portal to wholeness, memory, and belonging. She is the creator of Alchemy for Human Hearts, a storytelling platform for grievers, caregivers, and creatives, and author of The Little Book to Remember, a free companion for grief tending and voice work. Her offerings live at www.alchemyforhumanhearts.com.
