Easter's "hymnody" realization hit me hard. It didn't surprise me, but it had a finality to it. It doesn't change my passion for English church music or choral evensong (indeed I'm travelling next week to attend a few services in New York) and I even had the opportunity to play some Easter hymns on the organ, which was surprisingly thrilling once I literally pulled out all the stops. But spiritually, I've moved well on from traditional Christianity, and probably did decades ago. It was crucial for me to run back and pick up this lost thread of my life, and I will not drop it again. But my 60's, 70's and 80's simply will not find me playing the kind of church musician (or related scholarly) role that I guess I thought I might eventually be able to reclaim. Period. Monday and Tuesday, I felt like Sisyphus, back at the bottom of the hill staring with complete discouragement at the boulder.
So it was a relief to watch a great Martha Beck video referencing an Eckhart Tolle story about caterpillars and butterflies. Basically, it was a reminder that caterpillars don't just suddenly fly into the sky -- their life as a caterpillar first comes to a screeching halt. Caterpillar-ness absolutely no longer works. They hang upside down, lose the use of their feet, and slough off the caterpillar skin. Within minutes, they have ceased being a caterpillar. The butterfly is simply revealed. I looked up what I think must be the Tolle quote, and it's great: "What a caterpillar calls the end of the world we call a butterfly."
Around the same time, I got stuck on another much smaller decision, and seemed to be faced with an impossibility. Fortunately, I remembered a great piece of advice in Mike Dooley's Manifesting Change (chapter six, "Opening the Floodgates"). I've used this advice many times: when you are faced with a handful of options, and you are unenthused by all of them, choose the "least unattractive" one. In this instance, I also tried to bring love into the picture. Where was there even an iota of love for a place, person or situation? Once I couched my dilemma that way, "way opened up" to paraphrase the Quakers.
Things often happen in threes, and my final epiphany of the week came quite unexpectedly, essentially out of the blue. Basically, my "mission statement" (which I've been agonizing over for decades and which has been the behind-the-scenes topic of most of my blog posts) wrote itself. It was kind of like, "Duh!" Obvious. It is what 60 years of being this particular caterpillar has to have been leading to. It's going to sound like I'm creating false suspense if I don't write about it yet, but there is still a little processing to do -- over the next week or so on the train and on the bus, I'm going to look out the window with pen and journal in hand, and make sure I'm right. As soon as I can, I'll share it with you, I promise.
At the beginning of the week, this caterpillar had ground to a halt and was hanging upside down. At week's end, the skin is splitting, revealing what had been under the surface all along. In the end, Easter was the catalyst, and I am thankful for it.
