Some of my biggest “aha” moments come when I’m driving my car. I like to drive; it relaxes me and allows my mind to play a bit. Thus, images, words, and ideas often come to me when I should be concentrating on the road.

So I was driving along a couple of years ago, not thinking of anything in particular, when the image of a chrysalis appeared in my mind. I began to wonder what it was like for the caterpillar-turned-to-soup. Did it know, somehow, what it was embarking upon as it created the tiny shell? Did it have any inkling that it was about to go through an incredible transformation? Was it frightened?

I began to identify so closely with the insect that I had to pull the car over so that I could weep.

When I described this experience later to my friend Kathleen, I remarked that I had no idea why I had cried. She looked puzzled at my cluelessness, but then she said kindly, “I think you are identifying with the butterfly. You’re also going through incredible changes, and you have compassion for it—I think that means that you want to show that compassion to yourself.”

Man, I love it when my friends are more perceptive than I am! I was identifying completely with the chrysalis, as I was also in a time of liminality (which I wrote about last time). So when I heard that there was to be a poetry slam with the theme of “Change,”* although I’ve written only a handful of poems, I decided to write a poem about the experience of “being inside” the chrysalis.

The poem came to me in large chunks over a few days. I dreamt of butterflies and caterpillars, and I’d awaken with a line that needed to be woven into the poem. While doing body, mind, spirit work, several large pieces appeared, and I had to ask to have them written down before they eluded me. I didn’t so much write the poem, then, as record it, arranging the images that had insisted upon being included.