perfect brilliant and curious nephew is now obsessed with cocoons, caterpillars and butterflies. last week it was pollinators and stamen. with each discovery I raise a hand up wildly – me too, me too!

perhaps my sabbatical was a cocoon. i certainly feel like I’m seeing the world in a thoroughly different way. the mystery is when I entered it – I thought I was wrapping my self up and out of my life when I flew away from work and detroit. now I am beginning to wonder if that was actually the process of me beginning to push my way out of the cocoon I had entered to survive my life, a life where I had lots of hands to the ground, but could not do what I most wanted to do, my equivalents of flight – write, sing, create, heal.

the more I listen to people, the more i see that we all have a capacity within us which is greater than mediocrity. we are each a raw force which, given time and attention, can coalesce into something magnificent and utterly unique.

I have been moving through layers of soft and/or loving places: sister family, new friends, somatic healing, parent family, and heading towards ny family tomorrow. I have been basking in the built-up love of people who have just been so happy to see me, and feeling what it means to be present and centered and me now.

it feels good.
(yeah)

in some ways I feel like a new creature. much of the difference still feels so internal, deep inside myself, for myself. now is an exciting vast time of seeing how that feels in external interactions. one observation: when I am with people I love, I feel a palpable energy, a heat, growing between us. I sense throughout my body how i am opened up, if not yet in the air flying or falling.

regardless, I think moving forward I will keep a cocoon handy. I want to have permission to transform again, to let go of the responsibility to hold myself together if life ever feels mundane in a post-divine sense, to see what new self is longing to form from my essential miraculous content.

and most of all, i will let the people I love be my sweet cocoons, the spaces where I am so true to myself that my very form is free to change, to emerge in ways I cannot comprehend right now.

as I write this a human creation has left our home solar system. this, too, feels like the first pressing up out of a cocoon, tearing at the diaphanous border of self and not self, ours and not ours. it is exciting on any scale, this poking out and looking around and preparing to take flight.

so hello universe. I fly into you.