The Cocoon (or How Initiation Works) Part 2: The First Meeting - AIR
“She’s telling us that our belief is too simple.
She’s telling us that the truth that sets us free is beyond the tidy theological beliefs that make us feel safe”
Once you enter into the human-cocoon which has since time out of mind been called ‘initiation’, there are a few ground rules.
First of all, nothing is allowed to stay the same anymore. You have to go quiet, go inside, curl up into a tight little ball and let Divine suspend you from your own little twig. You hold on to your trust that your own imaginal discs will do their job with all the strength you have left to hold anything, and you let the process take you under.
This happens differently for everyone; there are six billion variations on how this can play out. This is how it happened for me:
I was invited to meet my higher self; the part of myself who is always in communion with God. The self that I will be after my body dies. I understand now that I was invited into this meeting in order to face my own mortality and fear of death; as we all must at one point or another. Once I met who I am going to be when my soul leaves my body, death no longer held any fear for me. And so this was my first stop. Because all initiations can end in death.
I was invited into this first experience of initiation arising from the cocoon through prayer one night while cradling my son’s body as he slept. I knew my body was there with him still, I could feel him breathing. But at the same time I found myself in what can best be described as an embodied vision; standing in the middle of the pitch black moonless night on the summit of a huge mountain in the freezing cold air. In the alpine atmosphere I could taste granite, pine, ash, snow and wild-flowers as the stars swirled above me. I felt the rush of dizziness that comes at that altitude, and had to catch my breath. Several things happened next, all at once.
The metals buried deep in the heart of the mountain began to sing the wisdom of the song of the mountain, and encoded into the song were their own true Names. I heard this song in an ancient language, one I had not heard before. The frozen ground began to resonate with the song, reflecting out light and language codes and ancient wisdom, cascading around and through me and awakening a whole new sensory system. I experienced it as a long-forgotten call and response of the Beloved and the Lover in divine conversation, and in that moment I felt this ancient truth of my own belonging and belovedness return to my soul, where it had long been lying in its dormant form. It came to me like a connection through time and space, anchoring me deeply where I stood to both the present, past and future all in one sacred, geometrical pattern.
“In the whipping wind, at the summit, I begin to understand that my own DNA, the strands swirling through my body, and through the warm and soft body of my slumbering son which I am still spooning, was made from the same stuff as this mountain under my feet.”
The wisdom of the Song taught me that this is why I have always felt at home in the mountains, because I was the blueprint for them before time began. Or they were the blueprint for me. It doesn’t matter which end of time I grasp to observe this mystery, because it turns out it is all fluid anyway. I am shown that I am simply, the most recent iteration of the mountain. Like a set of Babushka dolls, I am just the baby mountain within the mountain within the mountain within the mountain. This first mountain, the one I stand on now, is my creation self, the genesis point of my humanity in created order.
And the way my mind has been cracked open into soft pliability by the cocoon to expand and collapse in on itself to unlearn and relearn allows room for this powerful mystery to settle into who I am becoming, and so suddenly it all makes sense and I laugh as I realize I am my own home.
That I was birthed from the heart of the mountain and have nothing to fear from the whipping wind and the brutal force of the icicle-sharp air at its pinnacle, because the mountain fears nothing.
Because it is a goddamn mountain.
This is my first homecoming, but it won’t be my last.
The vision ends and I return to my body and whisper to my sleeping boy the names of the precious metals inside the mountain that I learned in the ancient tongue and I remind him that his DNA sings with it too. He stirs and snuggles deeply in, farting quietly and mumbling. And I smile in the dark room, reminded of the goodness and beauty in human bodies that I see with fresh eyes since my voyage down from the mountain.
There are things I learn from this experience that I will never be able to translate into language. They are Knowings that go deeper than language, and as such, are the fingerprints of Divine.
They are planted in me, like a series of internal way-showers, map-markers, energetic signposts. They cannot be explained or described, they are simply Known, where once they were Not-Known. They are the first gift from the cocoon, and I experience them as a sharpening of intuition. A honing of senses, embodied wisdom. They speak to me in dreams and become like discernment tools, teaching me how to divide between the bone and marrow of energy and matter.
This point marked the start of the caterpillar-goop phase in the cocoon, and as everything around me started to liquefy and fall apart, I heard the voice of Divine whisper to me over and over and over again in the days and weeks to come:
“You, my Dear, are the mountain that sits within the mountain. You already have everything you need. The mountain has nothing to fear, the mountain forms the shape and contour of the landscape for miles around. And so it is with you. You are a landscape-shifter. Stay in your power. As you move, so will the landscape. We’ve got this.”
I notice that Divine is speaking to me more these days. I notice that every morning upon waking I either have a message, a question or an instruction. I start writing them down. Scribbling on post its. Texting them to friends. Wondering aloud.
I understand now, they are love-notes.