Butterfly Futures
Why did I call my album “Imaginal Discs”?
As with so many things related to this project, it was only after the title volunteered itself that I began to understand what a fractal gem it was. How much was available within it to unpack and explore.
If you don’t know, imaginal discs are epithelial structures found inside the larvae of insects that undergo metamorphosis. Encoded in these structures is the blueprint for what a caterpillar, for instance, will transform into. The caterpillar’s tissues liquify inside the chrysalis; in this slurry, the discs are animated and begin to form the butterfly’s body.
Does this captivate the hell out of you the way it does me?
That in the darkness of the chrysalis, the structure of the caterpillar would be rendered into liquid? And that only through its being rendered thusly could the body of the emergent butterfly be formed? Do you feel the potency of an invitation here as I do? An almost naive call to give yourself over to a serious art of imagining?
As we contemplate the darkness that surrounds us today, what if instead of collapsing we fashioned our own imaginal discs? Blueprints for something not only beautiful, but wildly different, winged, life-giving. What if, in the fertile soil of our imaginations, we created something magical we could reference and build from as this world dissolves?
To that end, try this experiment with me:
Find a quiet place in nature; a back yard or even a stoop will do. Remove your shoes and let your feet rest on the ground. Find your seat and then after a few minutes of quietly breathing, ask your heart to imagine. If your mind wants to wander to a familiar eddy of escape, slow down. This exercise will be more vulnerable than escapist. One way to know you’re doing it right is that it will feel a little like trying to hold a buoy under water at first. That’s okay. Keep going.
Ask your heart to paint a picture of the more lovely world it longs to inhabit. Don’t try to solve the problem of how we’ll get there. Instead, imagine what it’s like to be there. Imagine being the butterfly. As you now know, to become the butterfly is not a matter of acquisition but of dissolution. If cynicism arises—and how couldn’t it in this misbegotten age?—that’s no problem. Just imagine the cynicism like the forlorn protector it is—just doing its job, ma’am—trying to shield you from the vulnerability of the longing and thus spare you what it insists will be an inevitable disappointment.
This is where we must demand the vulnerable longing to win out. Because unless it’s taken compassionately in hand, our cynicism is a prayer for the very thing we do not want. Our thoughts are creative, after all. And fear has its own potentiating resonance. To imagine a butterfly future is no small thing. To give our hearts over to faith in so fine an effect is brave in the extreme, and to love enough to dream in this way is not something we can inhabit if we’re busy being certain.
To imagine the butterfly is to soften, to feel the aching exposure of our longing to be reunited with one another, and with a world that makes sense. We will not inhabit this imagining with our cynical minds, but only with our bodies in their most supple repose. Let us find a meadow or a shallow pool to lie down in. And here, let us begin to dream a different dream.