LIFE IN THE IN-BETWEEN TIMES

The imaginal goop that precedes better days

Leonard Gertz

Right now I know very few people whose hearts are not sore. The stressful dynamics of world events, political corruption, climate emergency, almost ubiquitous economic anxiety, and overall meanness of these times have turned millions of lives into individual reflections of a crumbling world.

I’m reminded of the caterpillar, which in the natural course of events disintegrates into a goop of imaginal cells. I kid you not, that’s what they are called. And from the imaginal soup emerges a butterfly; the ugly wormlike creature that once hugged the ground disappears into nothing, so the most beautiful creature can take flight into the sky.

I think that’s where we are now. We’ve “hugged the ground” - metaphysically, an over-attachment to worldly matters - which has led to inevitable disintegration, the caterpillar literally digesting itself from the inside out. And from our chrysalis will emerge the butterfly. We are dying to who we used to be, all of us, individually and collectively, and while it’s tempting to think only doom awaits us, that which is doom to the caterpillar is the womb of the butterfly. Life doesn’t stop. It doesn’t ever stop. It creates anew when we are willing to, when our exhaustion fades, when our inner work is done, and when we have learned the lessons that were up for us to learn. Digesting the meaning of that which fades away, we become the space of our own imagining.

Years ago when I was a very young woman, I was rushed to the hospital one night in New York City. I was in terrible pain suffering from an acute episode of colitis. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, the people around me looked scared, and in my pain I was panicked. I remember the young female doctor who, having figured out what was wrong with me, handed me a glass of water, told me to keep drinking, and looked at me very intently as though she was transmitting medicine through her gaze.

 “I know you’re in terrible pain,” she said, "but listen to me. You have colitis. It is painful, I know, but it is not serious. You are not in trouble. The pain is very bad right now but it is going to subside. You are going to get through this.”

As she spoke to me, my pain immediately began to ease. I realized at that moment that my panic, more than the colitis, was the source of my continuing pain. That doctor was like an angel the way she dealt with me and I have never forgotten her. She did more than allay my colitis, she allayed my fear.

For those of us feeling hopelessness and an understandable cynicism in this moment - who have watched the world as we knew it fall into serious disrepair, who feel the personal effects of things having gone quite seriously wrong in one way or another - let’s be to one another what that doctor was to me that night. She knew my biggest problem was not the problem itself, but my fear of it. My fear that the pain wouldn’t end. My fear that the problem was more serious than it actually was.

We will emerge whole from these times because that is how nature operates. Faith is not blind, but visionary. The only thing dying here is the caterpillar, whose ending spells nothing but a new beginning - and of something far more beautiful. We will not be the same people we were before, or the same country we were before, or the same world we were before. The option to stave off our karmic debts has expired. We will fall on the sword of our own reckoning, or we will rise to the occasion and take up the task of re-creation that lies before of us. We will have scars but we will also have wings. Both personally and collectively, our disintegrating world is now the imaginal precursor of a world that still yet can be.

“The pain is very bad right now but it is going to subside. You are going to get through this.”

An angel once told me so.