XIII Transformation

In the world there are two powerful symbols for transformation, the butterfly or moth emerging from the cocoon and the snake shedding its skin. As humans, we are enchanted by these images which depict a natural physical process so unlike anything our bodies go through as part of our development. But from a metaphorical standpoint, we go through this process - or at least we are granted the opportunity to go through this process -  countless times in our adult lives because the butterfly and the snake are, after all, fully developed, each in their own way, before they change. They are adult things that become different.

The snakes version of transformation is very much like what we do when we transform mentally. We shed a skin and slither out into the world looking pretty much the same as we did to everyone who sees us but we are imperceptibly 'larger' in ways that are other than physical. The snake becomes physically larger as a result of its shift while we expand our mentality in some way. It takes a truly perceptive person - or someone who knows you intimately - to see mental change reflected in physicality, but it is there, you can see it. Changing your mind changes how you appear.

The image of the butterfly is an even more far-reaching symbol for change. We spend our lives in a cocoon, closely wrapped, growing, changing, our perceptions of the world limited by the very physicality in which we find ourselves, the world we know is the world we know. And then, death comes to that life, to that phase of being-ness, and we fly free of that particular restriction into another level of being, with it's own restrictions but with what feels like so much more freedom, so much more possibility, so much more to experience and that too will transform into another state of being.

Some folks, either trapped or happy in restrictive lifestyles, opt out of metaphorical, mental transformation, content with the process of aging as their taste of change in the world and aging is indeed a transformative process, one that all of us have the opportunity to experience and, to the degree that we desire, to learn from. All of which is to say that transform, we will. Like it or not, change will have its way with you. It's your choice to dance with it, to let it lead, or to make it drag you around the dance floor.

 If we allow it, we can die each night and awaken as a new being; we can become the transformation we experience, understanding each day as a brand new cocoon, sensing our enforced limitations but knowing that it is all no more than moments, no more important than the dreams we dream in the state we call being asleep, and every bit as interesting. We can release the cocoon each night to fly free for a while, allowing sleeping dreams to turn us into the caterpillars that will awake in the morning wrapped in a brand new day, in brand new cocoons, ready to have another go at day life.

We can yield to the inevitable; we can embrace change; we can dance consciously with death in the interdimensionality of our beingness where we are always and ever coming into and out of being.