Mod. 3.1 - My Metamorphosis

Listen to/watch: Metara (Metamorphosis) by Kailash Kokopelli, a ~11 min. music + spoken-word piece that offers a butterfly's-eye-view of this period of great, global transformation. If you like, you can re-watch/listen while reading along to the text by Darpan.

Share your reflections on what is dying and what is being born within you at this time. What aspects of yourself resemble a caterpillar dissolving into an amorphous genetic soup? And what aspects feel more like imaginary cells preparing to turn the blueprint of a butterfly into manifest reality?

If each of us is a fractal of the cosmic whole, what windows does your self-reflection open to the processes of global transformation?

Feel free to explore correspondences between your 2-curve-view of yourself and that of the world-at-large, and connect your reflections on metamorphosis to themes surfaced through prior reflections and activities.

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What is dying for me right now is focused less on the "what" but the "how" something dies. For example, I was raised in a very religious and fundamentalist Christian home in which the doctrine of "Total Depravity" and "All men are sinners" was not only attached to my brain as a sticky note, but reapplied with gorilla glue about 1,000 times. For years I tried to prove the validity of that doctrine and when that failed, I began a painful process of unlearning it. Unlearning such an extreme doctrine in some ways required an equally extreme overcorrection in order to find some semblance of balance, which meant that I basically presumed a certain "amorality" to my personal lens. In the process, I discovered that the idea of "sin" had fused with my personal moral compass's sense of "wrong". Once I was able to separate those two, I realized that I don't believe in sin, at least not in the way it was taught to me growing up. Which is to say that I believe a person can commit a "sin" against another person, but that action don't have damning eternal consequences.

This is what I mean by focusing more on the "how" rather than the "what". It was vitally important for me to realize how sin and wrong had become synonymous in my mind and begin to separate them. Rather than eliminate one or the other, I learned that the "how" sin is understood is more important than the "what" sin may or may not be.

It is this process that has become continual in my mind over the last few years. To look inward and ask, "Am I focused on the 'what' or the 'how' in this moment and why?" This idea speaks to some of what the other Mackerels have shared in their reflections in terms of learning and giving greater importance to slowing down. It allows for the emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual time and space to look at the views we may have inherited from our youths, or even revisited and refined on occasion since that time, and ask if those definitions still hold true. I find as I get older, the "how" is a reflection of a nuanced understanding of certain "what's".