I am writing this on paper with a pen at the Century Lounge on Cortez Street in Prescott, Arizona in late February of 2025.
It is a cafe I visit from time to time, but I had to get up and go look at the door to recall the name. This is what it's like when you make your metamorphosis without a cocoon.
The cocoon, as I understand it from friend Brenda Lin, who says she heard it from her mother at a young age, is spun by silk worms out of themselves as one long strand of wrapping up into the cocoon.
She talks about strands and wrappers and umbilical cords in an engaging essay on connectedness in family that is filled with texture, textiles, and the baby's shove of shoulders in the womb. Across four generations.
That's why I'm writing with a pen on paper -- there is a feel and a drag to it. Tactile. The sort of thing that links and connects in small ways that are important in large ways not usually seen, which is what Brenda writes about.
Thinking about my own links and connections, I see that I am more like the Monarch flutterby. Not in the way of regal, of course, but for sure in the way of the imaginal.
That's the name the lepidopterists give to the mysterious soup the caterpillar dissolves into after it hangs itself up on a milkweed somewhere and grows its hard-shell chrysalis. Inside that womb, the caterpillar dissolves into a soup of good stuff and its imaginal cells, who figure out just what butterfly they want to make out of this stuff, and then after some shoulder pushing, out they come as the Monarch.
The tricky part for me, all wrapped up in this metaphor, is to get back home again. We know that the butterfly has a pretty tough time of it, traveling for three or four months as much as three thousand miles down to its great-grandmother's home tree in Mexico, a place she left half a year ago, but where it's never been before.
My dissolution came in the Great Depression, in 1936 or '37, when I was a year old and my father's still persisting ice-cream shop in Joplin, Missouri dissolved into nothing he owned anymore, and he and my mother decided to head out for Phoenix to look for work. They left me in the care of my mother's mother, whose husband had just passed away, over the state line in Galena, Kansas. This left me without imaginals and I had to make do with my imagination.
That's me, not long out of the cocoon. My mother and the ice-cream store are in the background, and my life lies all before me, where to find my place of rest.
