I had already felt that this could not go on like this.
For a very long time I had been crawling, stubbornly, painfully inching through the dust, clutching from branch to branch, from leaf to leaf.
At times I gave in, almost accepted this state, knowing that this is not my form of being, that I am not whole.
I was not myself.
How much I suffered from this, how many times I recoiled in horror at the sight of my low, earthbound condition…
All in vain.
There was no way out.
But where is my place?
Where is the sky, where with colorful wings I could fly freely, lightly hovering, dancing above the world?
I was not like this. I had no wings.
Heavy, slow, self-serving—I was, dragging my amorphous existence in the circulation of metabolism, inching, chewing, clinging. I was a mistake.
I did not know why, or for how long. I went on, with a desire in my heart that was unreachable from the dust where I lived.
When I began weaving a cocoon around myself, I finally stopped.
I did not crawl, I did not chew.
I was preparing for metamorphosis.
The cocoon closed and I was inside it: safe and trapped.
Until then I had only acted.
Heavy and slow sequences of action and decision.
Now came the time of stillness. I had to let everything go.
The structure I identified with, and despised, which was so unworthy of my soaring soul.
The form and the color that accompanied me in an earthbound existence.
The identity I always had to identify with, but never could.
Only my soul remained of me.
My bare, naked, bodiless soul in the center of a swirling, amorphous mass.
My burning, shining, eternal, wild soul,
which even while crawling in the dust still longed upward,
and even in heavy movement thought of flight as the only familiar state.
My persistent, gentle soul, which is whole even in stillness and beautiful even when open.
And which no one has ever seen.
It whispered to me all along: hold on, move toward the goal, there is no meaningless or aimless moment or movement.
How pitifully empty my life was while crawling in the dust—and how much emptier and more isolated it is now, in the captivity of the cocoon. If I had a body, extension, I would resist and try to break out of this state, but I no longer even have willpower;
it has dissolved in this all-pervasive rearrangement.
Only my desire remained, which has carried me until now. This familiar friend, silent companion, who is there even when there is no one left to turn to.
Waiting. Only this remained.
What is outside?
I do not know, and it is not important.
What is inside?
Nothing.
Nothing that can be named, nothing familiar.
Only fragments, threads of feeling, crumbs of thought that drift past me, impossible to grasp.
I wait.
I wait.
I wait to be born.
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