Serpentine Transformation

In the western world, our dominant image of transformation is that of the caterpillar emerging from the cocoon as a butterfly. I am reminded of that as I scroll through pages of new age books which feature the fluttery, airy bug on their covers. Why do we never see the caterpillar? I wonder.

I would like to challenge this image of transformation, along with its contemporary—the tale of the ugly duckling.  There is something insidious about both stories in the way that the small, ugly creatures that star as the protagonists are only validated by their wholesale transformation into beauty and their abandonment of what they once were. It is as if these tales tell us: “Do not worry if you are imperfect and unwanted now, someday you will overcome yourself.”

I resent the insinuation that there is anything so wrong within me that it would require me to become someone I am not in order that I might fix it.

 And how often have I seen a friend begin some new lifestyle with the claim that her old self is dead and that her new self now lives forever…and how quickly I see the peculiar necromancy of the soul as the façade breaks and the truth reveals itself: we cannot escape the persons we are. We can become better versions of ourselves but we cannot become something entirely other.

I have never aspired to be a butterfly, for I realized some time ago that I am not a caterpillar, but a snake. My transformation is of a different kind:

To Become as a Snake Becomes

My skin slowly dies around me and makes me aware of my double.
 I did not know until now that I was two things.
That I, for a moment, lay at the horizon like that doubled lion—made of yesterday and tomorrow,
With no concept of the moment between them.
Now I move beneath myself.
I find no fault in this old skin but for its being old.
 It is dusty and dry and fragile.
I am sleek and moist and sinuous.
This skin can no longer contain the stronger, larger version of me that awakens within.
It is my ghost, a nostalgic echo of what I was once proud to be.
It is paper, and like paper, it can only hold so much of the essence of life.
I rip and tear it on the thorns and brambles and rough edged rocks of wisdom.
It splits.
And where it breaks, something flashes at the sun.
I assert myself as my colors turn vibrant and the pattern of my being is seen again by the sky.
That bright air strikes fresh scales and I remember the power of self.
I am new again.
I am alive again.
It is once more my moment,
My thousandth first time in the world begins.
For I am no longer the double one of yesterday and tomorrow,
I am whole once more.
I am once more the moment in which I dwell.

~Aeshna