Hidden Wings: Emerging from troubled times with new hope and deeper wisdom - part 3

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 3 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.

 

The imaginal cell continues the story of life in CaterpillarWorld in her own words …

Winding down, or waking up?

As I turn in for the night I reflect on how, personally, I feel that, far from winding down, something inside me is just beginning to wake up. I have a sense that the effect of the juvenile hormone they drenched us with is wearing off. Is it time for the imaginal cells to begin growing into the future? I notice too that there seem to be more of us. More of us are surviving the purges that have attempted to keep us down.

Because our numbers are increasing we are more intentionally in communication with each other too. We keep an eye on what is posted on the Caterpillar Web, of course, but we also tune in more and more to our own special frequency – the frequency on which we resonate. We call it SpiritFM. It inspires and encourages us. We discover to our surprise and joy, that we are not alone, as we had thought, but that many others are also resonating on our frequency. Naturally we are just as concerned as the general population about all that is happening in the forest, where it looks like we are heading towards a complete meltdown. But we also listen to that secret promise within us – the promise of something new, something higher, more beautiful, more pure, more life-giving, already gestating in the core of our being. More than ever there seems to be a crying need to share that message of authentic hope.

The strange thing about SpiritFM is that it also seems to pick up the signals from other parts of creation that are likewise striving to grow beyond the limitations that currently constrain them. I am particularly drawn to the occasional transmissions I pick up from you, our human cousins, where a similar kind of meltdown seems to be threatening your way of life.

I find myself wondering: Do you also have imaginal cells within that are taking you beyond everything you know and understand? Are you also part of this rising consciousness into which our parent butterflies appear to be inviting us? Are such things possible? If so, then we are living in exciting times. I’ve heard it suggested that when a new idea or possibility is coming into being, it appears in many different places, like a new energy welling up through a layer of mud, releasing bubbles of potential. I can’t help wondering whether this is what is happening among us – and among you, our human cousins.

I share my thoughts regularly with other imaginal cells, and recently we are observing that other parts of the caterpillar world and of the wider creation are tuning in to our vibrations, and, even more interestingly, we can tune into something of what they are concerned about. There are quite remarkable similarities between ourselves and other parts of the earth family. Here’s the thing: when we tune into each other’s stories and experience like this, we begin to see the bigger picture. What is happening in our own small circle of life is reflected in the wider circles too.  When you begin to glimpse the bigger picture, you start to see the value of your own fragment of it. Things begin to make some kind of sense.

Just suppose everything – all life forms – are evolving towards something more. Even the humble caterpillar, it seems, has something to contribute to the unfolding of the bigger story – even something unique, that might help every other life form to come a little closer to all that it is destined to be. And, very specially, you human animals with whom we share the planet. I wonder whether that would make a difference to how you see yourselves, and your own part in this great adventure of spiritual evolution.

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Lights Out

The lights are going out all over CaterpillarWorld. I mean it quite literally. The cells I once knew and loved – we shared the same DNA after all, and the same caterpillar body – are disintegrating into some dreadful murky soup here inside our chrysalis. I feel fine myself, in fact I’ve never felt better, if it were not for the scenes of devastation all around me. I feel like the sole survivor in some disaster movie. But I’m not the sole survivor. There are throngs of us. We are the imaginal cells. We know there is life beyond the holocaust. But how will we carry on in this world that is nothing remotely like the world we once knew, and even less like any world that may emerge into the unknown future? How will we even find any food? We have woken up to find ourselves in a seriously alien and desolate landscape, floating in a soup of disintegrating caterpillar cells. Armageddon for them. But – perhaps – a new beginning for the bigger story?

There are, we hear, some mountain birds who, when they hatch and have spent long enough in the nest, and the time comes for them to learn to fly, are more or less pushed off the top of the cliff by their parents. Most survive the catastrophic leap by learning to fly. A few, it has to be admitted, don’t. There seems always to be a degree of collateral damage in nature’s undertakings. Flight, it appears, doesn’t just happen. It involves considerable risk. The flight of the caterpillar is even more hazardous. It comes at the price of total meltdown.

CaterpillarWorld, as we knew it, has just leapt off the edge of a cliff. Circumstances forced us into it, as you have seen. No one is going to do that willingly – least of all in HumanWorld, where some of you will fight to the death to maintain a safe spot for yourselves at the top of the cliff – or the worst among you may well push others over the edge, to make more space for yourselves. But there is no safe space in the evolutionary journey. It’s all about risk and uncertainty, and it is driven by something as flimsy as a dream.

For us, the dream is right there in the hidden wings we carry. But in what kind of dream might you, our human cousins learn to trust? Your religious teachers and gurus have always taught you that ‘the kingdom is within you’, and that there is so much more to being fully human than where you are now. But this wisdom has become tangled up in systems of religious doctrine and legions of rules and regulations, so that it’s really hard to see the simple truth at the heart of it. And like us, you have ‘had enough’ of all this, and many of you are, as you put it, ‘voting with your feet’. But where will those feet take you? Over the cliff edge, or towards the Promised Land – the land where greedy grubs become flying flowers? Maybe the choice is yours.

The first big surprise under the new regime at the bottom of the cliff is that the old caterpillar cells that used to be so opposed to us, and determined to destroy us, are now essential to our survival and growth. They are turning into the soup that will feed us. They provide the essential nutrients to allow us to grow. How’s that for a turnaround? It might encourage us to believe that this pattern applies in other aspects of life on earth – maybe even in the human realm. Impossible to imagine that those who make life so difficult for us might become the very ones we most need. Ancient wisdom suggests that the person who gives us the most grief might be the one most necessary to our salvation. Well that turns out to be exactly true for us imaginal cells. It just goes to show how wrong you can be about things when you can’t see the bigger picture.

What if it were true that we all have something that some other part of creation really needs? It would make a difference to how we relate to each other for sure. I feel very differently now about the other cells. In fact I feel really sorry that they had to go through such a traumatic meltdown, apparently to make it possible for the imaginal cells to thrive and multiply.  And what if, for the bigger story to emerge, some parts of the smaller story have to die?

This train of thought carries me to a very unexpected destination: What if death is never in fact extinction but always transformation? Our caterpillar story certainly suggests this. In fact the whole of the natural world affirms it. Just look at the northern hemisphere in winter, and tell me it isn’t dead. Then look at it again in spring and see how it wasn’t dead at all, but just transforming into a new season of growth. These thoughts keep rising up in my mind, like yeast in a lump of dough. What if transformation is what it’s all about? Not a matter of life and death any more, but a matter of life and then transformation into a higher, purer form of life. If this is true, then change – even unwanted and terrifying change - might be something not to be feared, but to be welcomed.

One thing is sure. Without the nourishment the old cells are giving us, there will be no butterfly. Why am I so sure about this ‘butterfly’? I am sure because I carry her wings hidden deep inside me. I am becoming her wings. It is my whole purpose.

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You could imagine it all in another way. Suppose you have lived all your life in a cosy little cottage on the riverbank. You are really settled there and you have no intention of moving out. But maybe there is an earthquake, and you have to flee for your life. All you have is your cottage, but now that cottage lies all around you in a pile of broken boulders. The future tells you that you have to cross the river and find a new beginning, a different life, on the other shore. The only way to do that is to use the broken boulders of your former security to make stepping stones to cross the river. That takes energy – all the energy you used to spend building up your cottage home is now needed to make a way of crossing the river. The caterpillar body used to be our home. Now that body has disintegrated but it has not been destroyed – it is becoming a new kind of life form, in which we will rise to a new level of existence and consciousness. Why would it be any different for you, our human cousins? Even if your nation, or your world order, or your faith systems fall apart, might it not also be that this is not extinction, but the threshold of transformation?

Talking Points

The imaginal cells are just beginning to discover their new freedom, released from the bondage of the juvenile hormone that kept them infantile. They are tuning into their own unique frequency, and for the first time they are realising that they are not alone. They begin to pick up the resonance of other imaginal cells, vibrating on the same frequency.

Right now it feels as though human life is winding down almost to a standstill. My daughter’s take on it is that Nature has had enough of our bad behaviour and sent us all to our rooms to think about our conduct.

But might humankind also be waking up, to a new reality that none of us can imagine. The coronavirus is a wake-up call that no-one expected. How does this wake-up call feel to you? Is it frightening, or maybe exhilarating? Threatening, or full of promise, or may a bit of both?

Like the imaginal cells we are learning to resonate together on a new frequency – even the techie dinosaurs are learning to use twenty-first-century technology to help us connect. In just a few weeks we have hugely expanded our ways of connecting together, precisely in a period of enforced isolation. We have already found remarkable new expressions of our creativity.

How are you experiencing the changing level of human connection? How might we shape a more inter-connected future for us all?

Something is dying now on planet Earth and something is just stirring into life. What might we be asked to let go, and what new possibilities might be waiting to be embraced? Can the debris of what is disintegrating become the stepping stones to a new chapter of human life?

The best of times, the worst of times?

Breaking news, March 27th

·       How’s this for ‘working from home’? In Italy a virtual choir performs the chorus ‘Va pensiero’ from Verdi’s Nabucco from their various widely separated places of isolation. Project manager Raffaella Baioni and Conductor Giovanni Mirabile bring about this achievement by arranging for each chorister to engrave his/her contribution on a base which had been prepared by another chorister who was also a sound technician, using a mobile phone. The files with the recordings were then assembled and edited, to produce this spectacular virtual performance. These particular imaginal cells have discovered their shared frequency. What appear to be separate units can become a whole so much greater than the sum of the parts. Check it out by searching for Virtual Choir ‘Va pensiero’ (Nabucco by G. Verdi) International Opera Choir, Rom. The YouTube clip shows the individual choristers contributing from within their own homes, and is dedicated to all the health care workers who are working round the clock to mitigate the effects of the virus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTVXEGIS3LE .

·       Some suppliers of key components for medical equipment hike their prices to exploit the virus situation. One Scottish company refuses to continue doing business with them, either for the duration of the crisis … or ever again.

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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