The Metamorphosis of the Butterfly
Let’s begin with the caterpillar. It’s
an eating machine in order to grow, grow, grow. Think about your soul as a caterpillar eating up life...all the events, stories, sense perceptions, ideas, feelings, desires...throughout the year in order to grow more personal meaning.
A caterpillar
suddenly stops eating. Enough! time to transform. It then builds its chrysalis and spins its cocoon. In the chrysalis, the digestive juices of the caterpillar, once so devoted to taking in food, now start digesting itself. It becomes liquid, caterpillar soup. This soup is made up of imaginal cells...cells that can become anything...wings, eyes, legs.
Some wonderful creative invisible force then imagines the butterfly and the imaginal cells actually bring that imagination to life. The butterfly is slowly formed inside the chrysalis until it bursts forth in all its glory. Wings unfold, it takes flight. The butterfly, doesn’t exist to eat and grow. Its purpose is to illuminate
remarkable beauty and generate the eggs for the future.
The Soul as a Spiritual Butterfly
If we bring the cycle of the life of butterflies as a metaphor for the yearly cycle of the life of our souls we can imagine the diminishing
light of late November to signal a time to stop growing through our experiences and begin to inwardly digest our soul life. Advent then becomes the soul’s chrysalis and all that was defined through stories, identities, thoughts, feelings and deeds we dissolve. By Christmas, we are pure possibility, innocent like the Holy Child.
During the Holy Nights we allow 12 new imaginations to form in our soul preparing us to emerge at Epiphany, unfold our wings and take flight into the coming year.
I find this metaphor exquisitely fitting for the Imagine Self guidance found in Inner Advent (the dissolving of the caterpillar), Inner Christmas (the forming of the butterfly), and Inner Epiphany (the emergence of the butterfly).
Imagine your soul as the part of your being that is continually metamorphosing...every hour, every day, every week, every year but for most of us it is an unconscious and uncertain process. Begin the metamorphosis of this year consciously with Inner Advent. Digest your memories and let your soul rest in its own juice of creative possibility, then you can truly resonate with the sacred imaginations of the Holy Nights.
If you have felt an inner connection to the butterfly all your life, begin your metamorphosis this weekend, knowing a part of your soul will emerge in early January as a winged beauty shaping your new year.
