The mythical phoenix, the bird that rises from the ashes. Cliche, trope, a useful image and idea.

Most people in the world will experience various moments where the world changes, it might be as simple as graduating from their highest educational qualification. Or as tragic as the most dramatic blockbuster movies.

These moments, events and transitions - chosen or forced, are the wonderfully character building experiences of life.

For some there’s childhood tragedy, others the trials of coming to age, still further through life, we are faced with these moments that are too dramatic and real to even write into a movie - truth is much wilder, much more raw and much stranger than fiction.

The Phoenix project is a vision about reaching out to people who are in phoenix phases of life, telling their story and sharing with their family or important others. Some too will share this with the world, honestly, openly with the raw reality of truth splattered in that marvellously messy way that cannot be ignored.

One of the core ideas that emerged during the inspiration for the project is that everyone in the cataclysmic change process is a person. Often we hear such labels of junkie, druggie, addict etc. Then see the people through these glasses, these filters that distort the most essential reality - the person.

Phoenix isn’t limited to this class of event, as there are many who experience accidents and unavoidable consequences of life. While the cycle of dependency is a spider's web through so many lives in the world.

There’s a person in LA wandering around shattered by the recurring image of their significant other without breath. The escape was substance, a single step of hopeful distraction, a way to escape that tragic instant. But it was walking on the thin ice of first freeze, and they feel through into the abyss of dependency. She walks the streets and reaches for the cure to the pain, a cycle far too many people know.

This person is a phoenix if we choose to believe.

There is another teenager a decade on. Fallen through that same thinnest of ice - lured by the delusion, perhaps encouraged by someone who had ulterior motives, ravaged by events that occurred far too young, or like others mauled by someone in sheep's clothing. Then trapped in the need to escape cycle, fed the same poison magical water with all the promises.

A professional in the biggest of cities, stepping onto the thin surface, through and caught by the abyss, not only themselves but all who are near, shattered by that same simple and perhaps well meaning mistake.

The cycle repeats like seasons and the abyss calls beyond the individual touching families and ricocheting beyond - the shrapnel is more real that that in a war zone.

Families caught by the dependency become dependent on the patterns of interaction, the rescuer and the rescued, they invent their own script for the dramas they are forced to live. Rinse and repeat, let’s not do that again - but it happens every time.

Stop stop stop - don’t do that… and they imagine only the ‘do that’ of what they want to avoid.

Pause and step back, see this play on the stage, a thousand thousand times - the names and appearance are different. The script and the roles are too similar to be coincidence.

What do you want instead?

Step into the future and believe in your phoenix - give them the trust, open to them and let them write their own rising from the ashes.

Because, you know - it's only the phoenix themselves that may rise from those ashes.

Did you know too, that each phoenix has a family too? Yet in the family dynamics, as varied and complex as they may be. The trap has sprung in a different way. The cycle is now self fulfilling and self perpetuating - a dependency of a different class. Can those who see the phoenix see themselves in the mirror and know they too need to rise from the ashes of that old cycle.

Jump headlong into a new decade and look back to see how you arrived at your new life.

Throw out all the labels, throw out all the don'ts, the stops and the cannots.

See the person.

Believe the new life.

Choose to rise and fly free.

If you told the story of your phoenix clan rising to fly free - what did you change to make that happen?