I used to brush them away. Gossamer threads which, once entangled in the fine hairs on my face or hands, tickled and became annoying, so I would brush them away. Uninvited distractions to the pleasantness of my walk through the trees. I don’t now. Passing through the low-hanging spindly fingers of tree limbs that line the muddy “off the beaten track” trails of my forest walks, I feel them attach themselves to me and I just let them lie.
In my mind’s eye, and with each new step, I see myself being gently wrapped in the weave spun by so many night-owl, needle-limbed spiders until finally, all of me has been tightly draped. All that is left is a silvery cocoon suspended in the forest, glinting like a drop of water dangling precariously from one of autumn’s last leaves as the day’s final shards of sunlight pierce the canopy.
Invisible, bound by silk and bereft of all movement, I surrender to the rich cuddliness of nature’s bedding and sleep a deep sleep; not death, but neither fully alive. Light and shade come and go like ticks of a clock from another place. When I am sleeping there is no time, there is only before and that fades the longer I sleep. Everything I am, everything I have ever been, is here and now. I’m asleep and waiting to be born anew.
But what if there is no rebirth? What if there is no pupa of perfection, no new and improved self capable of scratching its way through its bindings, no Butterfly, not a cocoon but rather some ornate shroud, what then? Will it eventually fall to the mossy floor of the forest where the night needles will busily tether me to the earth allowing the demolition order granted at the moment of my conception, to be finally concluded?
Can I choose a cocoon over a shroud? If I could, I would choose Butterfly just for those few moments of perfection and harmony and light, held aloft in a woody sunbeam. I would. And if I can’t choose, what then? Am I just a dusty shadow of a Butterfly, a dull moth idiotically drawn to and bashing my head against all that is bright or shiny, imagining a silvery moon where there is only a dirty light bulb or a mindless flickering TV show? My existence is a thumb smudge away leaving nothing but a dry smear to signify my passing. I’d rather be nothing. I’d rather just be very still and very quiet and very unnoticeable until nature finds another use for me.
I can’t be a Butterfly. I don’t think I can choose anything other than what I have already chosen. Neither a cocoon nor a shroud, I have knit myself a straight jacket, the spiders will do the rest. But maybe an ember will. Escaping from an “almost-out” flame, engorged on the oxygen of new thinking, maybe one of these embers will become a fire that will warm and grow and illuminate everything. Wouldn’t that be something?
