metamorphosis

Life is like a story, when all the resolution is resolved, you heave a sigh of relief.

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality.

When Albert Einstein told you to hide your source, he wasn't giving you a deliberate advice to conceal the root in which you're growing, but was to conceal the root from the eyes of people that will dare to uproot it.

At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.

The metamorphosis of your life begins with your mental appreciation for the cocoon stage of your journey. The adversities, the struggles, the perils of life are what either destroy your motivation or encourage your transformation to become what you were truly born to be. A WINNER!

Self-knowledge, a spiritual metamorphosis, precedes understanding other people and comprehending the beauty of being part of the spontaneous interplay of the natural world.

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.

Stop being okay with the norm, seek to transform.

When, at last, I ceased to be myself, I came to be.

I have no use for these other loves.Seal them shut in jarsand place them in the pantry. A reserve of love.Thank them for their love.They are so kind.Perhaps store them in the fridgeFor others to take.They say love is a panacea. I know it is not.Flakes of snow,no two are alike.When I am down on my knees, hopeless and angry,for the world no longer makes sense,I won't look in the pantry or fridge.It is your hand pressing on my shoulderthat makes me whole,makes me forget.What trouble? What world?

Does the butterfly lose time in the months it grows from caterpillar to flying beauty? One day, I__ going to want to sleep twelve hours at a stretch and I won__ be able to. I__ not losing time. I am going through a metamorphosis.

The human mind__ innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being.

To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.

Usually, when I dream of flying I am simply flapping my arms and somehow I lift off and glide through the sky. Last night was different. I missed you so much and my yearning was so powerful that I sprouted wings like a phoenix and soared to reach you. And now I finally understand: if you see lovers on a roof, do not worry. Surely, love has metamorphosed them.

Sometimes to change a situation you are in requires you to take a giant leap. But, you won't be able to fly unless you are willing to transform.