It feels like I am in a cycle of transformation. The plant and animal worlds provide examples, but it is the journey of the butterfly that resonates with me as I develop my first book. Metamorphosis, in the Greek “meta”, or change, and “morphe” or form, is a biological process in which a body’s structure changes through cell growth and differentiation.  The butterfly experiences a complete metamorphosis because it looks different in each of its four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult.  

The pupa stage of a butterfly is called the chrysalis and while the outside looks like a hard shell, inside the body of the caterpillar is “digesting itself from the inside out”. The body is breaking down into imaginal cells, a soup of liquid goop, which like stem cells can become any type of cell. These imaginal cells can put themselves back together again into new shapes. It is not destruction because some of the old will pass onto the creation of the new body. The DNA is the same, the form is different.  

I am in the soup. 

I am in a chrysalis period of transformation.  

I experienced a writing workshop called: “Embodying the Aging Body”. In March 2022, Gayle Brandeis and Laraine Herring presented this hands on writing and soul retreat for women. In one of the first experiences, Laraine asked us to draw a picture and start with: “Draw an ‘X’ to mark where you are” and without prompting I labeled my X with the eighteen month age range of 58-59 years old.  The exercise asked me to look forward to “Where Do You Want to Go?” and backward to “Where Have You Been?” Then it concluded with asking me where I can no longer go or where I no longer want to go.

Later in the workshop, Gayle presented the two words that for weeks continue to sing to my soul: Imaginal Cells. I can live comfortably in this time period and enjoy the creative space to become what I was born to be. I can write from this place. I can move in and out of metamorphosis over the years to come, just as I have morphed and changed over the past five decades. 

I have heard the call to write a book. With the knowledge of imaginal cells, I am able to release the need to have a formal outline of this project. It does not need my direction. The book KNOWS. It is in the goop phase. The spine will develop. The antennae will emerge and receive and transmit. The wings and legs will grow and transport to places that I do not have to determine today. 

Gayle shares the words of Ranier Maria Rilke, “Be conversant with transformation”.