Imaginal Cells

“Imagine the shifting seasons,” her voice drifted over us. “Imagine the sprouts poking through damp spring earth, reaching upwards and leafing out. Buds popping and pollinated and swelling into fruits, decaying away, crisp seeds awakened by wind or fire.” It was easy to feel these rhythms move through us: eyes closed, backs rooted to the ground as though a placenta, the warm fall air rustling around us between the straw-brown hills. “Now picture yourself a year ago, and bring to mind all the things that have shifted and been born and fallen away in you. The seasons cycle through the earth, while some things remain the same: the ground and the hills and sky and stars. And the same is true of you. Life moves through you and changes you, but allow yourself to feel what in you remains unaltered.”

A caterpillar crawling along and munching leaves is unaware of flight, and yet it carries within its body imaginal cells that hold the blueprint for wings. And when it has stretched and shed as many skins as it can, a final thick armor encases it and all becomes dark as death as form slips away. Its body liquifies, everything it took itself to be dissolves away except those imaginal cells, those sparks it did not even know existed inside it. And slowly, as the caterpillar approaches utter annihilation, it is reconfigured, beyond its will or even its most feverish dreams into what those buds always intended it to become. And likewise we, if we are fortunate enough to outgrow enough of our own skins, reach the end of our strength and our will – sometimes with a sigh, more often with a howl – for our elders tell us not to go gently into that good night. Instead they beseech us to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

What is it like inside the cocoon? Would you imagine a womb – a gentle drifting in weightless warmth, muffled sounds and dancing lights mingling with dream fragments as you are lulled towards a second birth? Would you imagine being mummified – circumnavigated by layer upon layer of suffocating wrappings and injected with pungent ethers, bones going spongy and tongue slippery as you grasp desperately to any remaining shred of identity? Would you imagine yourself tossed through a hurricane sealed inside a watertight single-occupancy dingy dashed upon a distant shore to emerge among splinters into a strange new land you will never return from?

My cocoon breathes. I feel its walls suck unsettlingly close around me as it inhales and expand on the exhale allowing me to drift freely. Sometimes its skin is delicate and translucent as rice paper. Sometimes it is rigid and dark as the crust of an gnarled and hollowed tree. It is at times fragrantly sweet and at times stale with decay. Sensations alternate between peaceful floating and oppressive weight – melodies of heart-rending melancholy and lilting hope. I howl and claw at my own flesh, and I surrender and become food. My dreams are pungent with hatred and regret, vibrant with shimmering journeys and enticing encounters. I am swaddled by what I have always taken as the best and worst of myself, which I know is destined to split like a husk when I stretch out into the air as something only an invisible part of me can now envision.

I like to think that our soul is found in our imaginal cells. No one knows when we will have stretched as far as we need to into the world and begin to turn inward into ourselves, or what shape we will take on, but we can say it only vaguely resembles what we would choose for ourselves, is seldom convenient, and usually leaves us deeply unsettled if not downright terrified. I had split open the skin of my career, the skin of my marriage, the skin of independent living and then I could stretch no further. I remember beginning to feel as though I were becoming thin and translucent, as though I were ghosting my own life. My mind began to inadvertently drop things I used to remember, withdraw from things that used to engross me, and my dreams became vivid, dark, and strange – encounters with giant beasts that first menaced and then protected, and arriving in shimmering exotic lands or, more often, being delayed in my departure. The more I tried to feed my day life the more it hardened against me. Projects that once had support dried up. My enthusiasm and drive withered. Blooming friendships soured, my health deteriorated, and all the pathways I could see to a viable future faded. All I wanted to do was wander and sleep, put my hands in the soil to harvest and mold the earth and move my body. And so I did.

The past three years have been a stew of confrontations with my deepest, darkest demons embroidered with one, then two, then ten and now dozens of threads of some mysterious tapestry that lies beneath my shifting sense of reality and is slowly being pulled through one strand at a time, rising to the surface for a moment and then settling back into the shadows as this cocoon breathes. Each time this weaving lifts into focus its fabric seems somehow brighter and stronger. I still cannot see the pattern or texture of it clearly, but now when it fades away, I can feel that it is still there. I sing it into being with my adoration, with my gratitude, with my increasingly ardent desire for life. I sing to whatever beloved hands stitched it together from lichen and feathers, mist and sunlight. I know it is ancient. I know it is as delicate and enduring as spider web. Its surface ripples with my song, the one that has kept me alive with its elusive fragrance. It grounds as deep as granite and uplifts as lightly as fire sparks caught by the breath of a warm summer night. And when I see its flame reflected in the eyes that surround me, damp and moved and alive with hope, I know what I am for.

We rose one by one from where we had each laid alone, deep within ourselves between the straw-brown hills, reflecting on what remains the same while everything else changes. Michael Meade’s words were echoing in my ears: “The world doesn’t end. It can’t end. It just goes on and on, and so do we.” Sitting in a circle with these women, strangers a few hours before, now bonded by the journeys we had taken and mirrored, I finally understood how and why my love of myth and nature are interwoven, along with my passion for meaning and service. We are drawn out of our cultivated human world in search of peace and solace in the hills, and there among the life of the trees and rocks, bobcats and crows and beetles and lizards, we find ourselves looking back. Those imaginal cells in us are in all things – our soul is the soul of the world – and we only need to gaze deeply into its face to see that we are all unfolding together. That ancient, enduring journey is what myth nourishes us with in a thousand different guises and why we hunger so much for the Truth that it holds – not a truth that is culturally relative or circumstantial or subjective or time-bound – but the Truth that tells us what it means to be alive, to be human, to be the beautiful terrible trembling thing that we are that nothing else has ever been or will ever be again: the exact medicine we need to survive in this world and that the world itself will die without.

My wish for us all is that we not be too fixated on how the butterfly will look or what it will do or how it will save the world once it has its wings. The world is weary from heroics for the challenges we face are too complex for any one person or idea to reform. My wish is simply that those of us who are called go gently into that good night; that we turn our face from all that once comforted and defined us, let ourselves be torn apart, and allow what remains to be enticed back to life by that fragrant fabric of our being slowly rising, falling, surfacing just in time to clothe us anew as we split down the middle and emerge as what only time will reveal.

Nancy