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From cocoon to butterfly
Originally appeared on spirituality.com
Many years had passed since I had really spent time with my now well-grown daughter. We’d each moved and were living on different coasts in the United States. Her travels all over the world with her work, and my limitations on travel for visits, had allowed for almost 15 years to pass with only a very few brief visits.
When her father passed on—though he and I had been divorced since she was very young—I went to help her with some of the basic necessities of his passing and cleaning out his apartment. Perhaps it also occurred to her that she didn’t know many things about her mother, because she soon came for a visit. While visiting, she noticed a file drawer containing some published writings of mine. She commented quietly that she had never known about these, and later remarked again that she wanted to get to know me better.
Shortly after she left, these words came to mind: “metamorphosis, butterfly, and cocoon.” I found myself continuing to contemplate that unexpected phrase, which had so spontaneously come to me. Don’t our relationships pass through cocoon, metamorphosis, and butterfly stages as we grow in our spiritual understanding of ourselves, each other, and our relationship to the world?
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About the author
Sylvia Messner writes from Arizona.
