Self-less, Self-ish, Self-full

The money is leaking away. I have to go back to teaching. But when I imagine myself in front of the classroom, I feel empty, wordless. How will I do it?

My stepfather was a born-again Christian. But he didn’t buy the new-age platitude that one could simply wait for God to provide. No, he went to work every day for 40 years, a clerk in the US Post Office. Did he love his job? You wouldn’t think so. He was intelligent, well-read, capable. But he had a “servant’s heart.” He did whatever God told him to, he said. And he did it with joy and humility. When they wanted to promote him to supervisor, he refused. I want to stay with the men, he answered.

Is this an answer for me? To do whatever God asks, with joy and humility? Today I simply don’t know. I only know that the thought of having to do any work that distracts from my writing and art feels like a punch to the gut.

Writing, Not-Writing

Today writing feels like peering into a Magic Eight Ball: words and phrases appear and disappear. None of them stick.

Surviving the Soup

I never saw myself as a visual artist … but drawing has been the teacher that returned me to writing. It taught me to be a beginner again, to embrace not-knowing, non-competence, risk, foolishness, play, unconcern for outcome.

It also taught me to see the shapes and colors of the world with a new sensitivity to their exquisite beauty. It taught me to understand that what we think we see is only a pattern of light and shadow that we read as face or ball or box.

Maybe our other senses--like touch--trick us into experiencing a solid world that doesn’t exist.
You’d think this idea would be profoundly disturbing. But when I no longer insist that the world I perceive is “real”—when I choose to simply observe the play of images and thoughts and feelings and sensations moving across the screen of my mind, my focus shifts ever deeper, into a place of perfect joy.

Metamorphosis

The monarch butterfly is the classic symbol of transformation. But there’s more to the story than what we’ve been told. First, the caterpillar doesn’t just hang itself upside down and wait for metamorphosis to begin. It hangs, but curls its head upward, wriggles, heaves, pulsates with fierce muscular contractions. Its outer skin peels away from the newly forming shell of the chrysalis, like the spirit peeling off from a dying body.

Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar literally digests itself. It dissolves into a soup of its component molecules and atoms. Then, says the old story, it miraculously rearranges those disparate atoms into a newborn, fully functioning butterfly.

The reality isn’t quite so simple. Long before the caterpillar glues itself upside down to a twig, it begins life inside an egg. It’s already equipped with the information that will guide its later restructuring, stored in clusters of cells called “imaginal discs.” I love this term. It refers to the “imago,” the final, adult form in the life cycle of certain insects. But the term also suggests “imagination,” that capacity to envision something that does not yet exist.

These imaginal discs do not succumb to the soup—they persist through it and feed on it to sustain rapid and prolific cell replication. Each disc develops into a specific organ or structure, and these link to form the new butterfly body. Even more amazing: the new butterfly “remembers” its past. Scientists have designed experiments in which they teach a caterpillar an aversion to a specific stimulus—for example, attaching a mild electrical shock to the color red. They are able to demonstrate that the newly formed butterfly retains that aversion—that some parts of the caterpillar’s neural network appear to persist through the soup.

I like the idea of the persistence of memory. It’s reassuring, when I’m in the soup. I hope I too have tucked away imaginal discs, capable of building a self that does not yet exist, yet holds the memory of its former life.