Hidden Wings: Emerging from troubled times with new hope and deeper wisdom - part 2

Hello, and welcome to the latest instalment of the DLT eBook Club, a virtual book study group from Darton, Longman and Todd designed to help us connect, interact, read and reflect together during this time of social distancing and self-isolation.

Each week on this blog, one of our brilliant authors will present five extracts from one of their DLT books, followed by some prompts for reflection and online discussion. We will post a link to the blog on Facebook (@dltbooks) and Twitter (@dlt_books); if you use either of those platforms, please follow us and feel free to post your thoughts there in response to each day’s reading. Not all of our authors use social media, but when they do they will drop into the discussion from time to time to add some further thoughts or answer any questions.

It is not essential to have read the full book in order to take part in the DLT eBook Club, but we hope it might make you want to do so. Please look out for links to our new eBook site, www.dltebooks.com, from where you can buy that week’s featured book and many others, all at half price until further notice.

The first title to be studied in the DLT eBook Club is Hidden Wings: Emerging from troubled times with new hope and deeper wisdom by the wonderful writer and spiritual explorer, Margaret Silf. You can find Day 2 below. Margaret started writing Hidden Wings at a point of deep concern for our world, not long after the result of the UK’s Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. She anticipated some of the chaos and deep social division that would follow and, through the analogy of a caterpillar entering the devastating, world-altering stage of the chrysalis, before emerging – transformed – as a butterfly, considered what it might mean for us, spiritually, to enter a similar phase of chaotic transformation. How might we emerge at the end of it all?

Now, her book seems even more prophetic than we thought at the time..

If you wish, you can buy an eBook copy of the book here, or a physical copy (supply chains allowing) here. We hope you enjoy the DLT eBook Club.

 

Today the imaginal cell takes up the story in her own words,  to show us what is happening in CaterpillarWorld …

The world is our takeaway

The next stage of our journey begins with a bite and a nibble. When the time is right we bite a hole in our egg and then nibble at it until we can clamber out.

We start as we mean to go on. From now on the agenda is ‘Nibble and Grow’. We are ready to establish a whole new world, and take over the forest. We are ready to Make CaterpillarWorld Great Again. And as with all such megalomania, we take no account of the needs of the rest of creation. It’s all about us.

Remember that the cells that are in charge at this stage are not the imaginal cells. Their time has not yet come.  The cells-in-charge of this caterpillar empire are much the same, in many ways, as those of the human family. You might recognise the profile in the mirror. The colonisation. The exploitation. The relentless expansion. And ultimately the destruction of the world we have colonised.

For now, it’s on with the nibble. Our first meal is our own egg.  From then on we will eat everything that comes our way, including the leaf we are sitting on.

Such is our consuming fervour that for our last meal we will consume our very selves.

But that particular meltdown still lies in the future. I’m crawling ahead of myself.

A caterpillar’s scope for making choices is limited. For you, the human family, things are very different. Every choice each one of you ever makes will either enhance and expand the bigger picture or diminish and damage it. It’s your call! For us, in this stage of our story, our call is just to keep on consuming and growing. That sounds pretty self-centred, and indeed it is. It has little regard for the wider world. In fact it can be devastating for the wider world, which in practice might be the bushes in your own back garden. We are regarded as pests by many. They may revise their opinion when we emerge as butterflies, but that is a while away. For now we are just pests.

Sometimes I try to imagine how our planet and its residents would appear from outer space (I am, after all, an imaginal cell and that’s what we do). You have had the experience in human living memory of seeing that delicate blue-green orb hanging in the blackness of space, as seen by astronauts, and it changed something in the human psyche for ever. If we could take that experience further and reflect on how a greater consciousness than our own might view the way things are done on planet Earth, what might we pick up?

From such a perspective, it might well appear that human beings regard our planet (yes, we are residents too!) as one vast open-all-hours takeaway. You certainly seem to take away more than you give, if you’ll forgive my boldness in mentioning it. You certainly seem to be out of control in your growth and expansion tendencies. You are squeezing out so many of the rest of us. Some species have even been forced out of existence altogether, and others have no room to move. You have even endangered the very conditions of life on our planet, through your reckless use of natural resources. The polar icecaps are melting. The sea levels are rising. Soon Washington and Westminster will be lakes again, in which fact lies a certain irony. You know all this of course. You have heard it too often, and you are doing what you can to stem the tide of destruction, I know that. Yet the human family especially in the affluent parts of the world, is still thoroughly embroiled in the global takeaway mentality.

How do you feel about this yourself? Is this all you are, or is there a new chapter to come in your story too? Do you think humanity is evolving? The alternative, I humbly, from my forest leaf, suggest, is stagnation, followed by extinction, with no butterfly emerging. That would be rather a tragedy, don’t you think?

A disenchanted forest

There’s trouble in paradise today. The rumblings are everywhere. I feel the unrest too, even though I know that there is more of our story still concealed inside us. It’s a bit like riding out a storm at sea with only a vague inner trust that there is another land beyond the gale-battered horizon. Frankly, even for me, an imaginal cell, it’s a real test of faith in an unfolding future.

A turbulent tide is rolling through the forest. Every so often it breaks on the shores of our certainties like a tsunami, and another section of our defences is breached. We keep trying to work out what exactly is causing the turmoil, but as soon as we have identified a culprit, the next great wave arrives. But we can be sure that it is about trust. And about fear. We have good reason to distrust those who claim to be our leaders in CaterpillarWorld because many of them are clearly not interested in what serves the common good, but only in what serves their own interest. The same is true of those who manage our forest economy, for they are lining their own pockets at our expense. We are even beginning to distrust the Caterpillar Web, because certain insects who like to see themselves as the (cater)pillars of our society have taken it over and are infiltrating it with dangerous propaganda, inciting fear and hatred and setting one part of our forest against another. We are not stupid, even though we may be a bit over-the-top when it comes to feeding. We can see what is happening, but we feel helpless to do anything about it. What can one grub achieve against all these invisible forces?

Meanwhile the system is collapsing. How long will it be before our forest kingdom falls apart? What will happen to our grandchildren? They are not prepared for this kind of disaster. This is no longer the forest we knew and loved, and grew up in. It is becoming alien to us. Fear is taking over.  Fear is sapping all our energy, draining us of all hope. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion …

I hear all these desperate conversations. I feel helpless too, for what can one solitary imaginal cell achieve? We will need to combine our energies, and even then we can’t reverse this decline. There is an inevitability about it. But what we carry inside us knows another story. We can only reveal this new story when we come together, each bringing one segment of that story to the conversation. But at this point in our evolution, the hidden wings we hold are merely a dream. And dreams only exist in the darkness until their moment of awakening arrives.

Right now, night is falling like a pall over a grey rainy day in the forest. But no one wants to face the darkness.

All in this together

You have, I hope, gained a little insight into how things work in CaterpillarWorld and how things are looking right now. That might be the whole story, and the book would end here, if it were all about caterpillars. Just another species inhabiting the forest, foraging for food, fending off predators, imagining themselves, as many species probably do, to be the peak of creation, but seen by others, especially human beings, as unwelcome pests to be eliminated from the garden.

Meanwhile, as you have seen, we imaginal cells sit there quietly, biding our time, saturated in the debilitating hormone that will keep us quiet until the caterpillar has finished its feeding frenzy and grown out of its five skins. It looks as though a classic ‘them and us’ situation is developing, but that isn’t the way matters move on, and such an adversarial situation would in itself run counter to the evolutionary principle, as we shall see.

It’s completely natural for creatures with the same genes to hang out together. We are all more immediately concerned with the welfare of those who share our genetic inheritance than with those who don’t. Life on earth can be tough. Most can’t handle it alone. We need solidarity. There is safety in numbers and the main challenge of adolescence is finding your peers and making sure you stay in tune with them. To be excluded from the tribe is our greatest fear. Back on the savannah, the animal that was excluded from the pack would most surely die. That’s why family and tribal groups tend to stick together. That’s why migrants and refugees seek solace in social enclaves with people with the same background or experience. The driving motivation for all this is really fear – the fear of isolation and aggression - but does it have to stay that way as we evolve into the future? That is the imaginal question.

While the imaginal cells do share the general caterpillar genes, they have this additional characteristic of resonating on a different frequency from their peers, which is what tends to lead them into trouble. You probably know a few human beings in your circle of acquaintances who do the same. They are the ones who ask the awkward questions. They are the people who hold politicians, economists, clerics and all manner of ‘authorities’ to account. They are there on the internet, energising protest movements. They are downtown, organising food banks, and asking why rich countries need food banks. They are on the streets, campaigning for ceasefires in war-torn regions, and claiming that no problem is ever resolved by violence. They are prophetic voices, but the big news is: deep down there is a prophetic voice in each of you, just as there are imaginal cells in every caterpillar. The music that is resonating through these cells is the music of a future yet unborn. But it is everyone’s future, and everyone, every single one, every single cell, is a part of that embryonic future. What kind of future do we want that to be?

For the caterpillar, the future is already right there, sleeping inside the imaginal cells. What if such a future is already being dreamed in you?

For now, however, it looks more like civil war. The caterpillar’s immune system fights off the awakening of the imaginal cells, because it regards us as a threat. It was ever thus, with prophets. Ancient scripture tells of one who declared ‘You have killed off all the prophets before me, and you will kill me too.’ He could have gone on remind us: ‘You can kill the dreamer but never the dream.’

But for everything there is a reason, even if the average cell doesn’t understand that reason. Yet the time will come, as we shall discover, and it will not be long in coming, when the same cells that conspired to keep the dream asleep will play a vital part in its awakening. The age of tribalism will pass. Competition will be transformed into co-operation. Adversarial aggression will become constructive alliance. Fear will metamorphose into love. Ancient wisdom knows and articulates this future as surely as the imaginal cells know and embody the butterfly. It knows that swords will transform into ploughshares, just as we know that gluttonous grubs will one day fly.

A distant dream, you think? Not so! For you, the human family, the times are telling you, with an urgency that increases with every newscast: ‘Your time is now.’ A dream is meaningless until you wake up and make it a reality. Are you ready for such an awakening? Maybe the caterpillar story can give you hope, and even guidance. Transformation is what we do best.

Talking points

The caterpillars choose a congenial location where they can live, feed and multiply. They become so greedy that eventually they destroy the host location, and die themselves.

A virus chooses a congenial location where it can feed and spread (for example, human lungs), and eventually destroys the very place it has colonized.

Human beings find Earth a congenial place where they can feed and spread, and eventually they destroy the place they have colonized – except that this doesn’t have to be the inevitable outcome. We still have choices.

We complain about the virus. The Earth is complaining about us. What are we going to do about it?

***

·       At the time of writing the book, the disintegration experienced in CaterpillarWorld reflected some aspects of the disintegration being experienced in HumanWorld, through political, geo-physical and economic turmoil. This has since been magnified dramatically with the advent of the coronavirus. The caterpillar story reminds us that something visionary and new can emerge out of what seems to be a disaster. The imaginal cell holds within itself the possibility and the promise of a new and transformed future. What hope and promise do we hold within ourselves, and dare we trust it? Could it be a hidden tender seed deep inside the tough ego-shell of humanity? If that outer shell is cracking now under pressure from the present circumstances, how might we facilitate the hatching of something new and much more fully human?

·       ‘Your time is now’. This is no longer a piece of empty rhetoric. It is the clarion call to humanity here and now, this week, in our own homes, towns and nations, as together we face the crumbling of so many of our imagined securities. Globally we can truly say ‘we are all in this together’. How do you feel about this urgent, insistent, yet deeply inspiring call? How will you respond?

The best of times, the worst of times?

Breaking news, March 26th

·       Two fraught medics, with a rare few hours off duty, spend the afternoon with their two small children creating a huge rainbow and placing it in their window as a message of hope for everyone who passes by. The caption reads: Andrà tutto bene (Everything will be all right) – the symbol and message originating in stricken Italy and shared with a frightened world.

·       The UK government rejects an invitation from the EU to participate in the sharing of ventilators and other medical equipment across borders in a joint effort to combat the pandemic, on the grounds that it prefers to rely on its own efforts. It is accused of ‘putting Brexit before breathing’.

What can we learn from these news items to help us reflect on how we would want humanity to evolve in the future?

Margaret Silf, March 2020

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