cocoon moments

Today I have been thinking, feeling and seeing cocoons – with an acute awareness of the butterfly possibility within but feeling the ever tightening wrapping of the cocoon

Begins with a pupa – some are uglier than others, some are quite fascinating, some fat, some thin, some short, some long, some with hair and some without. Sort of like us?

The pupa crawls around for a season and then attaches itself to something –
And starts to wrap itself up, one strand at a time, until it is completely encased and no longer bears any resemblance to what it was – and can no longer move at all.

A new season arrives and a tiny little opening starts to appear at one end of this sarcophagus. Almost imperceptibly, this tiny little opening enlarges and when the time is right, something starts to emerge. This something also bears absolutely no resemblance to the pupa, the creator of the cocoon. It is a painful, slow emerging, one wriggle at a time, until the escape is complete and a damp, tightly folded multicolored something is seen. During the passing of moments a stretching and unfolding occurs – wings are identified, a body is evident, heads, eyes and colors that take your breath away – there is an acute awareness of the fragility of this thing of beauty – an elegant exquisiteness. Any touch at this moment, damages so intensly that death is the result. Eventually what we see and know as a butterfly shakes itself free of any cocoon residue and flies off, doing exactly what it was designed and created to do, in the shortness of the life it has been given.

And I have been thinking about myself–

Am I in danger of attaching myself to something only to eventually begin wrapping myself up, with strands of religion, legalism, deferred hope, shattered dreams, words given that have been broken, denominationalism, compromise, tolerance, rejection, fear of man (to name a few) – winding each strand around myself so slowly, so carefully that, although I am the wrapper, I am not even aware of the wrapping, until eventually I am completely encased, not recognizable and not able to see.

And then when the season changes and I dare to begin to emerge, will hands touch, trying to shape – or trying to quicken the emerging before the right time – and in this assisted emerging, I die.

I do not want to spend my life as a pupa not fully allowed to develop into what I was created to be.

I do not want to spend my life in a cocoon, wrapped in the dark, imprisoned.

I do not want to have hands shape me in their “assisting”

You see, I have been the pupa, I have barely existed in the cocoon and for very, very brief moments from time to time I have flown free in the shape and colors of my destiny.

But I do feel it all beginning again ……….

A pupa, being asked to attach myself to something ……..