metamorphosis

“Dear God, please change this person/place/thing so that I can feel better.”

What kind of prayer is that? If you said disempowering, you get a pony!

We all know that change is an inside job, goddamnit! 

The patron saint of that prayer is the caterpillar, but can you blame her? She has eaten herself silly only to find herself inside of the equivalent of a deprivation tank. You can call it a chrysalis if it makes you feel better. That’s such a pretty word for a device of torture. Or a coffin. Or the box magicians use to cut ladies in half or turn rabbits into a Maserati’s.

Metamorphosis — A change in form or nature of a thing or person onto a completely different one, by natural or supernatural means.

That sounds magical, right? Death…rebirth…

(Screech) Not so fast.

Let’s check back with the caterpillar.
The guy on the corner in the dark glasses and the trench coat, otherwise known as The Big Guy—or God—he promised her wings. To fly and shit.
But first she had to part with all of her worldly possessions; her BMW, her westside condo— her ravenous appetite—and her wallet.

It all sounded too good to be true to her. No more black back fuzz. No more Spanx. Just color and beauty and flight.
What could go wrong?

What she wasn’t aware of, what no one had told her, what wasn’t even listed in the small print—was the goo part.

In between caterpillar and butterfly, the poor thing is…simply put…well, she is goo. A gelatinous mixture of arms and legs, fuzz and butt cheeks, heart, soul, hopes and dreams. It’s ugly AF but this stage cannot be skipped. This is where the magic happens. The change.
And where the fervent prayers began.
The bargaining.
The begging.
The looking for every loophole.

The nearest exit. The thingy to break the glass on the fire alarm. The cord that stops this runaway train of pain.

If you had the ability (which, thank god you don’t) to hear her muffled cries for help and you, in all of your misguided frenzy to free her, cut the chrysalis open at this stage to hand her a lifeline or her cell phone—she would ooze all over the place like so much snot.

The goo stage. We’ve all been there and unfortunately, there is no short cut.
If there was I’d have found it and sold the patent to some twenty-two-year-old silicon valley wunderkind for a bazillion dollars. I would be sipping a Pina Colada, sucking the toes of the cabana boy on my own private island and I most certainly would NOT be writing to you about goo.

Anyway… back to metamorphosis.
If there was a handbook it would be titled “On Your Way to Better—Via Hell.”
Using alchemy. And magic. All of that eye of Knut and horn of toad kind of stuff.

Who said this was going to be fun? Oh, that’s right. no one!

Listen, nobody wants to be goo. We may want change but we sure as hell don’t want to go through the really messy part in the middle. The part where we’re not quite a butterfly but we can’t go back to being a caterpillar. The point of no return.
In other words the goo part.

I have written more goo related notes to myself and my friends these past few months than I have my entire life.

Everyone seems a little gelatinous lately. It appears we all prayed to feel better and now we’re stuck between a rock and a wet place.

If you can relate take solace in the fact that you are not hanging upside down from that branch alone. There are a whole bunch of us here and you know the old saying “Goo loves company”, well it’s true. We do.

Here’s my theory and I’m convinced it’s true. Only the bravest of caterpillars take the dare to metamorphose into butterflies. The others opt for the cash and free passes to the all-you-can-eat buffet and never look back.

Wings don’t come cheap y’all. There’s always some sacrifice involved.

“If you were born without wings do nothing to prevent them from growing” ~ Coco Chanel

Hang in there (pun intended) you courageous ones.
And
Carry on,
xox

You guys! I wanted to let you know that we did it! As per my post on Tuesday, my dear friend got her test results back and lo and behold, she’s fine! The cat was alive you guys! Thank you to everyone who helped us out with this thought experiment. We are SO fing powerful!  She is out of the goo and has her wings!

xox Love you!

*This is a post from last spring but it still applies. Happy Sunday!
xox

“I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in my dictionary, however, I found that the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means “to endure.” Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives false. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.”
~Sue Monk Kidd~

Sue Monk Kidd was on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday a couple of weeks ago. I’ve loved her for almost 25 years.

Her most famous book is “The Secret Life of Bees”, but I became familiar with her after reading her spiritual memoir “When The Heart Waits” in 1990. That was a time when not too many people were brave enough to write about their spiritual journey of transformation. My copy is water stained from reading in the bath, highlighted with a yellow marker, has my insights written in the margins and is dog-eared almost beyond recognition. I ate it up with a spoon when she wrote that waiting for your purpose is a sacred endeavor.

Waiting is not always passive. It can be a passageway from one way of being to another. She gave me permission to wait for the reveal.

These days, even more so than 25 years ago, waiting, being still, has gotten a bad rap. Inactivity is THE cardinal sin of the 21st century.

She used the analogy of the caterpillar in the chrysalis. If you poke a hole to check on its progress, the butterfly’s wings will be underdeveloped, and it will be unable to fly. The same thing happens if you try to help it break through. Every second, every step of the process is critically important to the transformation…and the survival of the butterfly.

Just let that one sink in……All the way down to your toes.

This quote from “When The Heart Waits” is one of my favorites.
I need to add it to the list.

“When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the Spirit laughs for what it has found” 

That makes my heart stop every time.

When Sue had her chat with O, she relayed an insight she had around 50.
She realized she had been a seeker all of her 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. In that respect we are kindred souls. But recently she’d admonished herself.

Enough seeking, she needed to “find” something.

It was time to become A Finder.

That just about made my head explode. Now I get it.
That’s what happens in your 50’s. The energy you expended as a seeker is replaced with the energy of “finding” and sharing. You’ve sought, delved and explored. You’ve attend countless retreats, seminars, conferences and sweat lodges. You’ve discovered along the way you DID get some answers. You have found nuggets of truth. Things you KNOW FOR SURE. All your seeking has borne fruit. That fruit is deliciously ripe and ready to share.

It’s the reason I write this blog.
I used to spend hour upon hour, day after day reading everything spiritual I could get my hands on. At one time I had over three hundred spiritual and self-help books. I have given half of them away.
Now I spend hours writing what I’ve learned.

I will always be on a journey of asking WHY? I’m hard-wired for it. But I’m also hard-wired to share anything and everything I know.
THAT is the payoff, the pay-it-forward of the seeker. We get to say: Hey, you wanna know what helped me? Have you read this or seen that?

I feel like in our second acts we are now Finders.
Things start to make some sense. Not everything, I still can’t wrap my brain around vows of chastity and silence.
What I HAVE found is that I am much more willing to wait and see how things work out.
I’m not perfect, some days I still want to see the progress inside the chrysalis.
I am forever a work in progress. I will always be asking questions. But I’m embracing my inner Finder.

I feel like she has a lot to share.

Tell me what you know about waiting. How comfortable are you with being passively passionate or passionately passive? Lol.

Xox

Hi Loves,
Holy Moly…
Transformation is messy, and difficult and at times infuriating! Don’t loose hope. Don’t throw in the towel at the 11th hour.

Remember, before the caterpillar’s transformation into the beautiful butterfly is complete – it is literally soup.

Don’t open the chrysalis before you’re cooked.
Don’t take score too soon.

We are ALL in the process of transformation, the journey from one point to the next spanning our entire lives. You WILL get to your destination – you WILL metamorphose, of that I am sure.

The grander, more ambitious and fantastical the transformation – the more hellacious it seems during the process.

Don’t listen to the soup. The soup is well…soup. It’s uncomfortable and ugly and incomplete. The soup does’t know shit and it doesn’t give good advice.

Soon you’ll take flight,
Love you!
xox