navigating the free-falling goo of personal metamorphosis

A dream, a vision, happenstance?
Do you truly believe all is left to chance?
First light shines on, then darkness purged
Then out of time as essence merged,
Who claims to grasp the nature of things
While counting legs, now eyes, now wings
In deconstructed apprehension
It’s This! No, That! Oh! Did I mention
That what I see is all I know?
How dost one explain the rivers flow?
Where is the rational, the justifiable
In beauty, truth, infinity indefinable?

Your holy breath, your beating heart
What data describe these ancient arts?
How can one possibly dare to understand
What drives the fleeting touch of man,
The mental journey wends, now weaves
Sifts miles of sand, measures roots and leaves
We catalog, we pigeonhole in eternal analysis
While we sink deeper still in despirited paralysis –
Your mind, she grasps in fervent reach
And cries: I know! So now I teach!

I tell you this with love: Life is a poem
Sometimes structured, often free form, a symphony of tones
They will carry you over a threshold – not just a doorway you enter –
But a set of conditions that propel you from deep center,
First, an intensity must be exceeded for a certain reaction
Then a result, a phenomenon, will bring forth the attraction
Your act of creation is as you write the book
No one can say how anyone else’s will look,
Except to suggest that as the caterpillar changes
So, too, the matter of your organism rearranges,
You will change one form to another wholly divergent
Through this shape-shifting haze, something new comes emergent

You will sip nectar sweet with new lightness of being
(Regardless of what hellish darkness you feel you are fleeing!)
Relaxation will visit your long-furrowed brow,
The past will morph as you inhabit a rich, abiding Now
And when you arrive, welcome yourself with a kiss,
For have you not labored long and hard for just this?
Find comforts that sustain you as you loosen your knots
As you trailblaze your own way, connect your own dots!
Be patient with yourself; the process will run its course
Allow the slow dissolving; there’s nothing you can force
Find your rhythm, hear your music,
Give yourself every desire that you please
In time, your wings will dry and bear you on a sweet, wafting breeze.