I had a wonderful childhood. My mother was an early environmentalist who had a talent for making everything interesting. She had a way of viewing the world that was totally unique. I remember laying stomach-down on an ocean pier with her and examining all the stuff growing on the trash under the wooden deck and on the pilings under the water. She said, “Look how Nature beautifies everything.” And it was true.
She was a great and wonderful teacher. She allowed us to capture animals and keep them on our back porch. We would try to feed them. If they didn’t eat, we would let them go. At any point, we had a real menagerie out there: toads, frogs, snakes, etc. We were taught to be afraid of nothing. We were taught to see the beauty in everything and to see how each creature fit in to the larger natural landscape.
One time she brought in a chrysalis of a Monarch butterfly for us to study. They say that a caterpillar’s body goes through a radical transformation inside the chrysalis: its body actually liquidates in order to reform into a completely different insect. I’ll never forget the moment our Monarch hatched from its shell. It seemed to take forever, because it had to expand and dry its new wings.
In nature there is a time for everything and a process. This process cannot be hurried; if the chrysalis is forced open from the outside, the butterfly will not evolve and it will die half-formed.
I know now that a real personal transformation happens only when we have dissolved our former selves, or rather, we have dissolved what we think of as ourselves. We have to first start with our beliefs, then examine and discard the thoughts that engendered those beliefs, and finally, we can detach our emotions from those thoughts. Once we do this, we are ready to emerge as a different person, expand our new wings and fly away.
Excerpt from Celestial Journey by Aliyah Marr
Infinite Shift 