This is the exact concept, in my opinion, of my most meaningful lyrics from "Low Flying Clouds". The protagonist, with constantly fluctuating resolve, is trapped in the all too common (yet mostly unnoticed) existential tug of war between the human spirit's tendency to dream, and the cynical fears that convincingly preach safety, ease, and mere survival as end goals. I love the ironic prayer offered Wherein the protagonist begs his diety to allow him to shrink...to have his dream of never needing to explore his bounds. "I'll sink low, fly under the radar, I'll give up my my potential, because the thought of having to look at myself, and actually find what my limits may or may not be, obviously is more frightening than never growing. I don't want to know how high I can fly." Stretching a bit, it reminds me of a caterpillar never committing to the cocoon for fear of leaving caterpillarhood.
This leads to another thought, the fact that AIMING at all, leads to an unforseen potential, and at least moving in the direction of my dreams has often opened my eyes to new dreams that trump the originals. The person i became in pursuit of the original goals differs from the person who MADE the original goals in that he now cares about new goals as a result of changes that pursuing the original goals provided. Keeping in mind that I am no biologist, and would never claim to be an expert on any species, and therefore using only some allegorical qualities of the latter to serve my point...Since we're on the topic of Caterpillars and Butterflies, consider the following story, the king of the caterpillars:
I think of the caterpillar world in all it's crawling glory...a community of monarch larvae, hornworms, swallowtails and other such creatures living the culture of the caterpillar. Suppose they have no Idea of the sweetness of their potential to have wings...to fly, and to be beautiful. After all, they're chubby, segmented, often furry, irritating plugs, useful to the eyes of many a dirty-faced boy as good for nothing but fodder for the practical joking of a sister. To boot, they're abandoned orphans anyway...for all they know, their mothers crawled off with the local grub worm, or pimp daddy stink beetle.
Regardless, these crawling critters work through their abandonment issues, build an entire society based upon the caterpillar culture, currency, and just like any gang color-identified "side of the tracks", their world tempts a limited, myopic view. In fact such a small world it is that the top of the totem pole for these slightly mobile crawling corks, is to eat as many leaves, milkweed, and foliage as possible...Whomever dies with the most leaves having been eaten wins. Therefore there is a scrambling amongst the caterpillars for the square foot of foliage within which they were born. The universe contained in a square foot of green, is the extent of the King of the caterpillar's domain.
Let's speak of King Danaus, King of the caterpillars. He's spent his whole life from an abandoned, orphan egg on a milkweed, accumulating as much food and followers as he possibly can. It's taken a lot of time, but he's learned through much molting, and many life trials how to be a caterpillar, expending his many energies learning how to exploit the caterpillar hierarchy. Having worked his way up the ladder of the hierarchy to the most covetable positions as possible, the king, he's used all his means to store up food to ensure a long life, and subjects, thereby defying the coffin cocoon, which marks the end of life.
It is every young grub's ambition to become as the King, who fights away the urge of sinking into his Chrysalis as long as he can...he loathes the thought of growing aged and dying in the self made coffin, a collection of unending sustenance to his discretion...the symbol of eternal life and security. So comsumed in his own, sluggish reality, of the maximum potential of a caterpillar's existence, Danaus rarely even notices the flying creatures about his head, occasionally dropping for a drink of nectar, but never daring confront the great King to try eating any of his domain. Oh yes, He's full of himself in the fact that these winged, skinny bodied pansies don't dare touch his kingdom's food source, and rarely dare to land on the ground itself, but only occasionally land on the flowers to remove the very drops of useless nectar...beggars! What's more, in the little discoveries he's had of these flying foreigners, he discovers that they seem to be ignorant of the WAY THINGS WORK. They don't understand hierarchy, and value of things, nothing in store for future needs. "Starving gargoyles, longing for what I have, but they'll never get it!"...they're ignorant, foolish, and are apparently well below the understanding of even the simplest of monarchial standards. Even in his rare encounters, trying to communicate, however violently, with these crude flying creatures, they don't even speak the same language, and are far too primitive to comprehend the greatness of the magnificent KING DANAUS.
Alas, finally, even the attemptively immortal King of the caterpillars, having lived nearly 3 weeks (an unheard of age for the oldest of caterpillars), must one day lay his head down. As an aged, tired caterpillar, still in denial concerning the need to retire forever, Danaus, seeks solitude. Perhaps, he thinks, just for a nap and a molt, but inadvertently fading into the wakeless coffin, dangling lifelessly from the ghost town branches of His kingdom...asleep, dreaming, dangling for eternity, unable to resist the anticipated, yet avoided death into the coffin chrysalis he's spent more than an average lifetime trying to avoid.
Thus ends the life of the great king caterpillar, Danaus, a legacy to be only spun into legend by admiring subjects, who likewise seek the goal of status, immortality, and endless security. But what Danaus' limited paradigm did not include is that after inadvertently subjecting himself to the endless sleep, he will learn that it is a lot less endless than he previously imagined.
In an unanticipated wakening, the King, frantic, scrambles gradually, and painfully out of this strange, hard shell. Blurred vision, achy limbs. WHAT? LIMBS? It's like a dream of lucid abstraction. "Wake up!" the pompous king screams to himself, as he realizes what morbid thoughts his loathing for the primitive winged creatures yields. All too soon, as he anxiously scrambles for strength, he realizes that this is indeed no dream at all...it's a lucid nightmare of inescapable horror. However with the resourcefulness of his instincts, coupled with his arrogant denial, he eventually defaults into an incident of flapping his wings. What used to be segments attached to segments,is now attachments to legs and wings, nothing in his anatomy matching with itself anymore. He attempts to inch along as usual, only feeling the terror of wing spasms launching him sideways and upward, with no foundation of earth nor shrub...NOTHING but the foreign inertial thrusts of panic, yeilding more panic, and twitches of perpetuation bringing him higher and higher until he abandons his prior schemas into a cognitive rock bottom of hopelessness.
Welcoming death, and the eventually inevitable plummet, this time with much more accepting awareness, Danaus relaxes his wings, frees himself from the terror and embraces his fate. It is just at that moment of acceptance and embracing abandon, that all is still...all is calm as the flowing breeze of sweet air catches his wings, humming softly in his head...whispering soft melodies of unprecedented newness sending a rush of euphoria through his thorax. The more He relaxes and lets his unfamiliar wings relax, the more of a parachute effect they have. For the first time in the whole awakening, he realizes the beauty of the view, taking in the vast forests of green, and experimenting calmly with his new body, learning the mechanisms of inertia and constraints. Eventually these new instincts shadow the old, and although envigorated, his new trust for instinctual tendencies leads him to a flowerbed, to drink the sweet nectar he once thought as useless fool fodder. He feels the new strength in his limbs, gaining yet another discovery of life, as the new creature he is presents an unending array of possibilities yet to be determined.
As his energized body is again taken to flight, he flies over his domain, and views as though a speck, his previous kingdom, far below. In a rush of panic, the new potential overshadowed by the resonance of his prior life as a caterpillar, he thinks "MY KINGDOM! What is to happen to my kingdom, my foliage, my ownership?" With residual instincts still remaining, he dives frantically to see what plundering has taken place, projecting his new identity upon his old system of rules. With what will could be either final purging of schema, and the completion of his rebirth, or his ultimate shrinkage below what he has now seen as possible.
He lands...He lands hesitantly, bracing himself for the worst, holding dogmatically to the stystem of kingdomhood and superiority still poisoning his mind. He finally allows himself to open his eyes, to what turns out to be the place of familiar echoes...the ghost town of meaningless anchors. In the silence, the landed Magestic Monarch, struggles with the dissonance of habitual holding and the logic of newness battling within him. Peering through the drone wasteland of self indulged crawlers, ignorant to all outside the margins of their finite vision, the pompous grubs live in ignorant preoccupation, Complete misunderstanding of the apparant gargoyles. The Monarch finds himself apathetic toward what he once loved, realizing the emptiness of the previous ultimates.
Strangely, the clear vision of future possiblities, endless exploration in flight, and undiscovered creation, are imprisoned in latency by the lurking of sadness from time that the Monarch can't seem to accept as having been useless to his current existence. After a comparative eternity of meandering, comes the decision; the decision of thought into action; the decision to mourn the once heavily valued dross clinging thereto, or rejoice in new comprehensions. Harbouring a breath deep into his abdomen, the winged creature glances at the haunted, green riches representing his protected, vaulted doman, and fights the thought that in his quest to return to his kingdom, the key element, himself, is no longer there. His mental terror again returns as he seeks to relapse into a vestigal system. His fear cripples his majestic wings as he attempts to cognitively cram them into the slug shaped constraint about which he's fully knowledgable, and in which he's fully comfortable. Trying to convince himself he still fits, he shrugs off admitting the decision he has to simply open his eyes...simply breath in the fear and possibilities of the flight he recently tasted. Attempts to align his infinitely expanded horizon back into the comfortability of his finite prior existence, meet with ultimate frustration and despair. The realization upon the journey back to one's self, that one's self will never again exist, resonates hard...banging upon the barricades of his stubborn consciousness...He waits, he weeps.
With the hurricane's eye of timestopping silence, the Monarch sheds his final tear, releasing the dead ashes of once shiny riches, and simply stares upward. No more thoughts, no more arguments, all of a sudden just welcoming "being"...Just being what he is. He lifts off lightly, with the only simple thought of, "let go". He lets go the leaf upon which he has been perched, and flaps into new heights, new life, new self. Opening the floodgates of his consciousness, embracing the time spent as a primitive pompous crawler, and also embracing the stepping stones of infathomability. The Monarch flies.
May we embrace our newness, releasing the vestigal moltings of our prior lives into the oblivion where they belong. Move forward, move upward, move into not only new horizons, but into new creatures fitting those horizons. Even if 90 years of molting yeilds one year of enlightenment, embrace that one year as the meaning for the meaningless, rather than sifting through past ashes for the refined.
That - was beauty. Thank you for writing
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