Traveller, there is no path. The path is made by walking.
Antonio Machado
ARE YOU COMING? I am the stone, carried and roughly hewn that my forebears placed atop the mountain. I am the foam of their relentless waves of hope, spilling onto farthest shore. I am the rivulet that flowed, as the mists of their first gods, as they descended on the ancient peaks of yesterday. I am the message carried on the wind, which is itself the wind, carrying as dust the undeniable echo of their constitution and the whisper of their song, which resounds as my breath, which I share with every other wind, of every other wingbeat of every other butterfly that had once the mind to surrender to the chrysalis of life to be transformed and emerge as something new, unimagined and long designed. I am the smoke released risen up from lowly cow-dung hearths and holy bonfires under the stars and their prayers for meaning answered even as I recall them as mine own. I am the light I see before me. I am the fire. I am the dream of fire, that holds in the firmament the star of purpose the phoenix follows when it travels the hidden paths of ash. I am that. We are that. I am man. We are the sons and daughters. And I am going home. Are you coming? —Rocco Jarman
The Fate of the caterpillar is Disappearance, its Destiny is Transcendence.
Willingness is not Readiness. Willingness is a theoretical wish or a choice we think we may yet exercise. Readiness is simply a ‘due-ness’, a ripeness that sometimes simply and inexorably, chooses us.
The caterpillar, the larva, enters the chrysalis willingly and even helps construct its walls, without understanding the call it answers when it retreats from the world, knowing nothing of the absolute disappearance it will inevitably face. It does so because it is Ready, even if it is not consciously Willing.
The chrysalis is the way in which the caterpillar closes itself off from the immediate tide and flow of nature so that it can surrender more fully to the process of disappearance and reconstitution, so it can entrain to that faintest of signals, the subtle call of ‘true-self’ which it follows into the utter, eyeless, senseless, dark, and thence into its own inextinguishable inner light.
The word larvae literally meant ‘mask’ in Latin, as in the misleading mask of the future unimagined self, it will become.
The word chrysalis comes from the ancient Greek ‘khrusos’ meaning ‘gold’ because of the golden metallic sheen some pupae have.
The final emergent form of the butterfly is called ‘imago’, which in Latin means image, the root word of Imagination.
From egg to larva, to pupae to imago; a life with two ‘emergences’, two ‘becomings’; the first, mundane, unglamorous and consumed in lowly self-service. The second, elegant, graceful, resplendent and in service to all Life.
What might we yet become, if we would endure our invitations to disappearance, that most radical and transfiguring form of Vulnerability?
My thanks to Michael Meade for the beautiful reminder of this cycle of disappearance and arrival. Check out his work on The Living Myth Podcast.
Myth (Mythos) is a way of exploring the subconscious, and the fertile field of story and imagination, in which many things that are not exactly true and accurate can be told in a way that conspires to shed light on a greater and enduring and pervasive Truth.