This past year has been such a time of letting go and breaking down, disintegration and inner depths, that as spring approaches I feel sometimes I’m not sure who I am anymore—if a new me will emerge. I had an interesting synchronicity around that theme the night of spring equinox and the following morning. I”d been reading a book, and I knocked it off the back of my bed. It being late and me not feeling like climbing under bed or moving it I decided to just start a new book. Early along in the book was a lovely image of a dragonfly emerging from a nymph that had just emerged from the water.

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“The ugly head went back, as if in pain…all at once there were two bodies there on the stem, the split shell that had been the nymph, and, climbing from the empty helmet of the head, another body, newly born, supple and alive, a slimmer , bigger version of the first. It clung there, above the wrinkled discard of its muddy skin, while the sunlight stroked it, plumped it with liquid life, drew the crumpled silk of wings out of its humped shoulders and slowly pulled them straight, taut and shining and webbed with veins as delicate as hairs, while from somewhere, it seemed from the air itself, colour pulsed into the drab body till it gleamed blue as a splinter of sky. The wings stretched, feeling the air. The insect’s body lifted, straightened. Then into the light, like light, it was gone.” (from Thornyhold, Mary Stewart).

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I thought it was fitting to have picked such a book up and read this the first day of spring. Then the next morning I opened my new Sun magazine and read an article about a woman who watched stoneflies as a child, wanting to see one at the moment of metamorphosis, but never doing so. Then one day as an adult, she is on a walk thinking it is time to quit her current job and lifestyle. She sits to drink from her canteen and notices,

“a moist yellow creature rocking back and forth on a stone…and realized I was looking at a stonefly. Patiently, rhythmically, the adult seesawed back and forth until it began to emerge from its own skin…on its back were two bluish balls that stuck out like crumpled laundry…wings riddled with creases…the stonefly made one final effort, rose out of its shell and stepped delicately to one side. Soon it pumped fluid into those wrinkled bundles, smoothed them into stiff flattened wings, and folded them across the back. …it dashed to the top of the rock, lifted its wings and fluttered off. Drifting off into a weak patch of evening sun, the stonefly seemed to catch fire…” (Sun magazine, Ellery Akers)

There are days lately when I feel the hard shell still around me confining me, feel my rhythmic pushing at it, it chafing me, not sure how to get free, not having any idea how to fly or what flying would be for me. But there are also days I feel all too permeable and not sure how one can be so in the world—if the old armor is not in fact something all too necessary. I see how many aspects of my old self were not really “me” but something I constructed to protect me, a false self. Someone a bit hard and superficial.

A small example of this was an experience this week that made me wonder about the need for that shell that the nymph had while in the water. I went to a swimming pool that has a therapy pool, meaning one that has warmer water than a lap pool. I like warm water, and my muscles are very sore from all the inactivity after surgery. So this sounded really good. What I hadn’t counted on was that there would be so many people in pain there, and not just in pain, but pretty invested in everyone knowing it and hearing about it. I got a lot of weird looks for actually swimming, when most people were in clumps, hanging there on Styrofoam supports and talking about their symptoms. One lady said in an extremely disapproving tone, as I was hanging on the side of the pool just paddling with my legs, “Well, don’t you look like YOU”RE having fun”. When I went into the locker room, one very large lady was grunting and groaning as she sat there taking her suit off, and looking at me regularly to make sure I was hearing it. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to offer to help or what. Later in the day as I was doing some breathwork, I felt the effects of this, kind of like I’d been invaded a bit—had a lot of energy pushed at me that I let in. And it didn’t feel good. In the olden days I think my shell would have mostly kept it out or I wouldn’t have been aware of what I was feeling==would have brushed it off or had a drink or something.

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So I’m left wondering how to stay soft and porous, open to the world and experience, but also not to get invaded or icked by others’ energies. I don’t want to go back to the shell, but as I said, I don’t yet have the hang of flying.

But spring is only begun, I guess I have time to learn, and I look to the pansies as a model too—they seem so incredibly delicate, and so porous to the drops of rain which bead on them like jewels. Yet when I come out on mornings that are freezing, they have sturdily made it through the night. And by mid-day the sun’s warmth has brought them back to wide open lushness.

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