A few reflections, affirmations, and thoughts in this transformation
Reflecting on the past few years of my time with FCCAN, I am filled with immense gratitude and awe for the amazing people I’ve gotten to learn from. Straight out of school, I was thrown into a beautiful mess of growth and change that is FCCAN. I also have been reflecting on the portal of motherhood that has been transformatory in the wildest sense. It feels like the best way to describe it is with story…
For several years, there was a volunteer wild fennel plant pushing through a crack in the concrete in front of our apartment in Chicago. I didn’t think much of it, until I began to notice an increased population of caterpillars. They started out small, black and orange, but as they grew they became a gorgeous green, spotted and iridescent. They gnawed through the fennel strands with their voracious appetites, content to live within the microcosm of that singular plant world. They were beautiful.
Keenly aware of these beings, I noticed the beginning of the transformation cycle. A caterpillar would attach itself to the plant at the base of their bodies, and throw a silk sling around the middle. A couple of times, I was lucky enough to witness the exact moment the caterpillar wriggled out of its skin - from the top down, cracking open the outer layer of its body, releasing the beautiful green and yellow exterior and dropping it like a small turd. I’d never seen anything like it. The morphing body settled almost immediately into a new shape. A chrysalis. Distinctly elegant, bright green, and solid enough to protect the interior being from outside forces, the chrysalis would hang there, unmoving, usually for a few weeks. Eventually, a beautiful black and yellow swallowtail butterfly would emerge, unfurling its wings and adjusting to its new universe, before flying for the first time. Magic.
I was mesmerized by each stage of the process. What I came to understand about those few quiet weeks was that the caterpillar had dissolved into imaginal cells - a necessity for transformation. But the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly doesn’t happen without mess, stepping into uncertainty and resistance. As the caterpillar liquefies, the old cells fight against the imaginal cells, sensing danger. The caterpillar on some level is resisting change, which in turn makes the butterfly have to work extra hard for its existence. Determined to emerge, it feasts on the imaginal cells to become a completely new version of itself. Witnessing this process quietly unfold in front of my home was a mind-blowing experience.
FCCAN has been through its own process of change since my time with the organization- emerging from years of releasing our old form to make way for something new. It turns out that resisting the imprint of being a traditional nonprofit organization is hard and messy!
It has been an honor to have labored together to give birth to our healing justice work in 2018. That began with the simple act of reading radical dharma together then grew into dreaming about a community space that didn’t see healing as an individual act, but a collective process that needed hands-on healers who are rooted in place, ancestral technologies & survival strategies of our lineages. Together to host gatherings and based in the inseparability of healing and justice. Over the years, we integrated and deepened our work together to center non-gendered body teachings of movement and mindfulness, Indigenous and land centering and creative writing and art making.
As I continue to emerge into motherhood, and transition away from FCCAN, I feel a deep commitment to all living beings right now in the present. I am also thinking about the future—four years, forty years, four hundred years from now. I feel a commitment to try to restore balance, to hold space where we can all feel safe, respected, belonging, where we can remember we come from the soil, we emerged from the cocoon, from the womb of our mama, with a lot of breathing and praying involved most likely! And to remember our impermanence. Our time on this land is finite, but the food and medicine we can grow, and plants we can nourish, can keep growing long after we are gone.
With this I bow and give a HUGE thank you to everyone for your inspiration, friendship and love over the years. It is with you, and for you, that we have reemerged as a collective. I invite you all to sit with me in the contradictions and possibilities of this moment in our planet’s history. How are you wiggling out of your old skin, dissolving into something new, wing by wing? As Audre Lorde told us, the only remedy for the onslaught of bad news is to ” find your work, and do it”.