The Green Blob of Us
My attention and energy recently has been captivated by a creature-kin Christ story. All of creation lives within and has its being in the Christ story, and for the last weeks I've been pondering a small but potent fractal of the Christ story, the chrysalis.
Last Advent I dreamt of a green amoeba-like blob. Accompanying the image was this phrase: We are being recreated.
This dream arrived just a couple days after my husband and I drew a boundary that resulted in our son becoming homeless for a time, a harrowing unfolding for all of us.
While I was comforted by the dream's assurance that we were indeed being recreated, it didn't alter the felt sense of my heart breaking into a thousand pieces, a sensation so strong I wondered if I should see a doctor. It was obvious that breaking through into new life was being preceeded by a breaking apart of my current operating system. How will I endure this, I wondered. This is the single thing I wanted to avoid.
And today, in the weeks since I first started drafting this, there is more life-altering dissolution. My husband's work and income source has suddenly experienced a massive shift and Reality is releasing him from something he had intended to stay with. With no clarity about what comes next. Further, a move we were just inches from making to a new home also suddenly evaporated. Things are not what we thought they were. Life is not headed where we thought it was.
Back in December, the morning after the green blob dream, I painted the image above. What a messy process transformation is, I thought. What nearly complete old-life dissolution it requires. Inside I was falling apart. Outside my son's life was falling apart. Little did we know there was (and is?!) more falling apart to come. And, even so, I was and am being told we were all held, like a caterpillar inside a chrysalis.
Prior to our most recent dissolutions, this dream and image were returned to me as I began Rebecca Solnit's latest book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. In it she describes in much greater detail than I've ever heard before exactly what happens within the sanctuary of a chrysalis.
What I learned has returned me again and again to a state of awe, humility and gratitude.
THE SACRED STORY OF THE CHRYSALIS
After the fat caterpillar has hung itself into its "J" form, after it has shuddered and shook to turn itself inside out, after it's become a slurry of green goo, after it has let go of the only life it's known, the blueprint for a completely new existence is activated.
From within the goo, cells that have lain dormant since the caterpillar was a tiny egg awaken. Scientists, in a poetic turn, call these cells imaginal because they carry all the instructions for the eyes, antennae, wings, and legs of the future butterfly.
Activated and now feeding off the dissolving old life, these imaginal cells begin to reproduce.
Once those imaginal cells start reproducing themselves, the remarkably resilient and still functional immune system of the caterpillar-goo begins to attack these singular imaginal cells. The system designed to keep the organism safe, to keep it "itself," is still doing exactly what is was designed to do: eliminate any threat to the continuation of life as it has been.
Within the chrysalis, the imaginal cells do not fight back but accelerate their reproduction. More and more isolated imaginal cells populate the goo. Predictably, the attacks from the immune system continue.
The imaginal cells respond by taking their response a step further: they begin to band together to form multi-celled organisms. The immune system attacks persist.
Now, intensifying their energy and cooperation, the clusters of imaginal cells congregate and then begin to do something really marvelous and unexpected. They being to resonate together. To resonate means, "to be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound." These cells are sensing one another and then responding with their most in-the-moment authentic vibration, creating a lively chorus!
Eventually, the wearied immune system quiets and backs off.
Finally, as the different clusters of resonating imaginal cells form into the different parts of the emerging butterfly—two groups each forming wings, eyes and antennae, and six groups forming legs— these groups also move to meet up with the surviving systems of the caterpillar, which include the gut, tracheal tubes for breathing and some of the central nervous system.
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Maybe take a moment to just breathe with this sacred story and notice how it has landed, and where it has landed in your own body. Do you sense resonance? What is its sensation?
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What if the chrysalis is a blueprint for our own transformation, for our own individual and collective evolution into an existence more beautiful than we could've imagined?
As Synchronicity would have it, on the day of my green blob dream, a friend wrote to me: I am not what I suppose; a better creature is being made of me, often by events I cannot control, by love and suffering. Can I cooperate?
Her truth and her question are also ours.
Soul Friends, I have never known it more fully, WE are not what we suppose.
A better creature is being made of US, often by events we cannot control, by love and suffering. And by our participation in the midst of all of that in the highest vibrational state of all: joy.
Can we cooperate?
Can we risk releasing old identities and stories? Can we let our old lives go? Can we say "Yes," to the dissolution underway?
Can we let ourselves notice what new life is activating in us? Can we trust our dreams? Our sacred imaginations? Can we move toward new desires or emerging connections wanting to be born?
Can we be authentic with our own inner resistance, trusting it belongs? Can we trust the same with outer resistance?
And can we meet resistance resourcefully? Creatively? Cooperatively? Joyfully?
Can we accept what we are being formed into and what we are not being formed into? Can we honor the new being we're been given?
Can we honor others' formation? Can we see how our differences are part of our union?
If you knew for certain that your losses, your loved one's losses, and our collective losses, were all held in Love's chrysalis of transformation, and that our transformation was assured, what brave risk would you take? What might you release? Or take up?
The Christ story, in all its forms, confirms, there is so much more possible than we can imagine.