“Who are you?” said the caterpillar
A suburban only child, I had an insatiable passion for the company of nature. At school, the Nature Study table consumed all my attention, soon replicated in every negotiable space at home. My caterpillar collection, in ranks of musty muslin-fronted shoeboxes, resided in my bedroom for maximum observation. Born of them was my first profoundly big word, proudly lisped through missing front teeth: metamorphosis.
Soon, one of the cornerstone experiences of my life was to be reflected in my dressing table mirror. Having stolen a forbidden razor blade from the bathroom cabinet, I planned to surprise my best butterfly chrysalis in mid-change. I had nurtured and closely observed young Doris all the way to her private transformation, from the loss of her voracious appetite, through the brief squirming to the final hardening of her sleep capsule. As I sliced into the secret chamber, my guilty ambush revealed neither caterfly nor butterpillar. Just a green grainy gelatinous gloop: the Cinderella greenprint to transform Doris the humdrum hairy consumer into the belle of the butterfly ball. I vividly recall looking up at the mirror and observing my first slack-jawed wide-eyed moment of Awe & Wonder.
So many questions: had caterpillar Doris ever had a flying dream? Would butterfly Doris ever recall her crawly days?
A century ago Rudolph Steiner postulated that we humans undergo seven-year development cycles physically, emotionally and mentally. The mystics teach of seven-year spiritual chakra cycles. Modern science now proves that, apart from brain cells, human body cells continually renew themselves every seven to ten years. Ours, therefore, would appear to be a journey of continuous inner metamorphosis.
So, with seven decades of morphing under my weekly renewed skin, it’s not that easy to define my self, or my life. I look back with vague bemusement on a reckless and insatiable youth, pick through the vaults of fragmented memories of places and people, achievements and failures, crossroads and choices, loves and losses, fingers burnt, lessons learnt. The harvest of my life constantly reducing to my personal essence, my own ultimate cosmic soup.
The Now finds me in a state of gently pupating retirement. I dwell on the banks of a river just a short distance from the sea, in a rambly home filled with memorabiliac treasures, whilst I potter in the joyous oblivion of my garden. For the second time in my life I have free time to turn away from an incomprehensible outside world - to just tiddle about with my inner child, ever-curious, to observe and wonder, to absorb and reflect. And as my five senses deteriorate, it seems my sixth burgeons, making it so much easier to just Be Here in the wonder of Now.