Butterflies are unquestionably beautiful, and yet they evolve from a gooey substance within a cocoon in which they literally digest themselves in the process of reconstituting into a new life form. From caterpillar to sticky goo to delicate beauty, and then within less than four weeks they perish.
We humans are a unique lot. We have intelligence and the capacity for rational thought. We create advanced math to explain the nature of the Universe and even consciousness. We rip apart the molecule responsible for how life progresses and recombine it to produce different physical characteristics.
We create institutions of higher learning to hand down and progress a body of knowledge upon which we continually add to in an infinite quest for more knowledge.
We even create algorithms so complex that we don’t even understand our own creations. And then we unleash those algorithms on ourselves all at once without much debate or consideration as to the potential long-term effects.
We seek higher spiritual understandings, and yet we give ourselves over to static interpretations of such things as Spirit, Soul, and consciousness.
We are highly intelligent and simultaneously ignorant and naïve.
And while the caterpillar willingly enters its period of gestation, we resist all manner of fundamental change because of just one thing: fear.
Change scares us.
Max Planck once said, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
We have a whole (and rather sophisticated) industry dedicated to maintaining the status quo called Public Relations. Language has been designed to resist change. False debates are carefully crafted to entrap us in arguments over such things that are non-existent.
And yet our souls yearn for gestation, transformation, evolution.
Thus, fundamental change feels like insanity, or at least eccentricity. We question ourselves at every step on the journey from gestation to recombination and evolution into a new life form.
I’m using the words “new life form” intentionally.
Epigenetics is the proof that our thoughts, emotions, resentments, traumas, and even cultural values affect the DNA code that structures our physical bodies.
Consciousness is not separate from the physical — they are interrelated expressions. Just as our emotions swirl and mix and ebb and flow, so too do our physical frequencies shift subtly and constantly in response.
The frog in the slowly heating pot of water is not an entirely accurate metaphor, but a powerful message for how we gradually adapt and come to accept unpleasant and unhealthy changes. We accept the unacceptable because the pain of fundamental change is greater than the discomfort of accepting small unpleasant changes.
In response we create an infinite array of distractions from the deep, quiet, persistent voice within that calls for fundamental change. Take another drink, another toke, another movie, another piece of pie, down a Red Bull and enter another online match, or any number of things. Keep working. Keep going. Keep making money. Accumulate more. Do more.
Two years and two months ago Maria and I moved to a remote unincorporated region of Western New Mexico — high desert and miles of dirt and gravel roads to reach our new abode. We fancied ourselves new homesteaders and endeavored to build on a piece of secluded land.
The plan was quietude — seclusion and reclusion from the frantic pace of humanity.
For a time it was blissful. It was like we were on sabbatical from humanity. On the heels of COVID shutdown we felt like our move was a natural progression on our evolving journey within.
But then things changed.
We found ourselves lessening and eventually releasing our resistance to the frantic energy of the human machine. Instead of feeling drained from our monthly journeys to the big city, we found some measure of enjoyment. And we learned to observe the frantic pace of human movement around us without participating in it, and without resistance to it.
The result? We no longer felt drained by the pace of human movement.
Albuquerque is known for crazy drivers. Zipping and dashing in an about. Modified exhaust systems that engender a certain masculine egoic feeling of power when one depresses the pedal further than necessary to locomote a vehicle from one traffic signal to the next.
It’s easy to fall into judgement, and from judgement to resistance, and from resistance to feeling drained. It’s hard to be in a sea of moving tides while fighting the current. It’s much easier to be as a leaf floating on the water, initiating small efforts to both move with the current and navigate to the promised land of inner serenity.
Two years and two months later and we’re feeling called to a different kind of life. I’m feeling called to a different kind of service, as is Maria. Not separate from humanity, but one with — floating and navigating, expressing and invoking a different kind of energy.
The loud muscle car may scream by in an effort for attention, its driver accepting the Public Relations story of division and status. The impersonal nature of commerce. The paving over of Mother Earth. The false arguments and static interpretations of life and Spirit. We are a part of it all. And we are here to help the change, to enter the gestation stage that will transport us from the stubborn caterpillar to the free flying butterfly.
It's been a process for us. You could say our time in remoteness has been our gooey highly uncomfortable gestation stage, and now we’re emerging from the cocoon ready to take flight.
We’re having open, honest, and deeply revealing conversations about what is emerging from within, what brings us alive, what we love, and what we miss about city living. Living in nature, solar powered, gray water, composting, gentle on Earth, growing food in a regenerative environment is beautiful. But if it’s just the two of us and a small armada of courageous homesteaders braving a physically demanding life for more balance with the great Mother, then we are not assisting the human gestation from stubborn refusal to evolve, to emerging flight.
The Dances with Wolves days are long gone. Little House on the Prairie, Bonanza, Kung Fu, and The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams sharing stories of simple people striving to do the right thing. The more recent Yellowstone series is closer to the reality of modern times in which simple living in harmony with nature is nearly impossible in the context of a massive machine driven by the false PR stories of division and status.
We cannot return to idyllic simple living other than through our own grit and perseverance living separate from the human machine. For those that do, they are to be commended and honored for their sacrifice. For those who drive the loud muscle cars and corporate behemoths, and who run the concrete plants and oil wells they are but the caterpillars resisting the call to gestate.
And then there is the growing army of foot soldiers gladly entering the cocoon to embrace a fundamental kind of change that leads us to an idyllic collective flight of the butterfly. What that new flight will look like is yet to be fully envisioned. What the next physical life change will look like for Maria and I is yet to be ironed out, but it’s emerging and it feels exciting.
If you’ve enjoyed this post please like, share, and subscribe. And thank you for your support.
Can't wait to hear where you land in this new stage of your transformative life!
Such good perspectives & writing! 100% with you. Spirit guides us to go left, not because we're supposed be there forever, but to EXPERIENCE what the LEFT FIELD of energetics is like. Then, when the time is right (lessons learned), Spirit points in a different direction. And so on. It's an amazingly wonderful dance. What I just learned from reading Ervin Laszlo in "Holomovement.." Watch for the "attractors."! Pay close attention to what is drawing, attracting you, eliciting joy. David Bohm had a wonderful metaphor—if I can remember, to paraphrase it correctly—the train doesn't go from point A to point B for not good reason. Point B (the destination) "attracted" point A in the fires place. (the point A folks were attracted to point B and so they laid the rails to get there. Ever since, lots of folks see point B as a destination. SO, point B is the implicate order, initially unseen, but has the energy of attraction. That energy doesn't change, it is the unmanifest—until time and space "unfold" (Bohm's term). In "collapses" the wave function and becomes manifest. You and Maria are at Point A now. Point B already exists. For you now, it exists as pure potential. So (this is me now) keep an eye out for the synchronicities that will be coming your way (as the lessons of Point A diminish and the attractors of Point B begin to unfold. HAPPY TRAVELS! I'm out of pocket for a week or so of Point A's CIVID manifestation. But when I'm a new person (having arrived at Point B (health), I'll be so eager to hear how the journey is going. While we may think we're the one's doing the traveling, it's actually Spirit (Great Spirit acting as Soul) following THE PATH home. Masterful writing, Glenn!