Leisha The wild thing, I imagine is that the butterfly remembers when it was a caterpillar even though its brain dissolved into liquid and formed again into something entirely new, the wonderous miracles of life.
I have been thinking about that a great deal lately, about dissolution and about how life so often requires something to crumble, to soften, to melt before anything new can emerge. I have been reflecting on the way a life can seem to break down entirely, how structures we depended upon can dissolve, how identities we once wore confidently can lose their edges, and yet the core memory of who we are remains intact beneath it all.
Even when circumstances shift, even when relationships fall away, even when time itself feels shortened and sharpened, there is something essential that does not disappear. It may be quieter, it may be stripped of illusion, but it remains.
Everything around us can change shape, yet the inner thread continues, holding the continuity of self through every season of unraveling and reforming.
I have built walls from red soil. I have lived without the means to support myself in a world requiring finances. I have planted trees into ground that I will never see mature. I planted in land that once held nothing but rock, rubble and stubborn grass. I have watched something rise from intention and labor and belief. I have tried and tried more than most to create a living ecosystem of people, microbes, roots, and risk.
It stands now because I kept going.
And yet, in other places, I am standing in absence.
I do not know my granddaughter in the way I once imagined or quietly longed that I would. There is a space in my life where relationship should be unfolding, where familiarity and shared moments should be layering themselves into memory, and instead there is silence. It is not dramatic silence, not a public grief that gathers sympathy. It is a private thinning, a soft absence that lives in the background of ordinary days.
It feels like another form of dissolution, another kind of liquefaction, where expectation melts but no visible form rises in its place. It is a grief without ceremony, one that does not come with rituals or condolences, yet it exists all the same in a world that can feel startlingly unkind.
The remarkable and powerful men who shaped parts of my story now live primarily in memory and in the architecture of my nervous system. Their voices surface in moments of decision, in tones of humor, in flashes of courage that do not feel entirely my own. I can still hear them. I can still feel the imprint of their presence in the way I stand, in the way I persist, in the way I choose. They are not here in body as they once were, and yet something of them continues to echo within me.
Perhaps that is how continuity works, not through physical proximity but through integration. Perhaps they are not gone so much as folded into my own wiring, part of the structure that now carries me forward, wings forming from memory rather than flesh.
And then there is the project, the living work of my hands and heart, into which I have poured nearly everything I have earned and everything I am. At an age when many gather their resources inward, securing comfort and predictability, I have invested outward. I have chosen soil over savings, vision over conventional safety, creation over accumulation.
I understand clearly that the financial returns may not secure me in the traditional sense. The numbers do not promise that kind of certainty. What I am hoping for is a different form of security, one that cannot be measured in accounts or portfolios. I am hoping for the security that comes from alignment, from knowing that what I have built holds meaning beyond currency, from trusting that what has been given into the ground and into community will return in ways that are not purely monetary. I am hoping for the security of having lived fully in accordance with my design, even if that design does not mirror the expectations of others.
And somewhere in the background, like a steady hum that I did not recognize in earlier years, there is the quiet understanding that my time is limited.
This awareness does not arrive as fear or panic; it arrives as clarity. It feels less like threat and more like unveiling, as though the illusion of endlessness has simply dissolved. It is the natural consequence of metamorphosis, of having lived long enough to see cycles complete and begin again, of having loved and lost and built and broken.
The body speaks differently when one listens closely. It does not shout. It shifts tone. It reveals subtle truths in sensation, in fatigue, in resilience, in the way recovery takes longer or wisdom comes faster. Awareness of finitude is not morbid; it is intimate. It sharpens gratitude. It deepens presence. It refines what matters.
The heart can feel as though it is tearing under the weight of what it carries, not only in sorrow but in joy so immense it almost aches. There are moments when the chest feels too small for what is inside it, when emotion thickens into density, when breath shortens under the press of meaning.
Feeling becomes heat, becomes pressure, becomes something that demands movement. The body, in its quiet intelligence, responds. It gathers fluid. It opens the smallest ducts at the rim of the eyes. It allows water to fall. We cry!
Yet this water is not simple, nor is it merely salt and surrender.
It is a precise response, a biochemical articulation of what words cannot fully contain. The tears formed in grief carry different compounds than those formed in relief or awe. They hold stress hormones, metabolic byproducts, fragments of the body’s internal dialogue.
Tears of joy are shaped differently, composed differently, signaling a different internal state. Emotion is translated into matter with astonishing specificity. What feels abstract in the heart becomes measurable in fluid.
The body does not release vaguely. It encodes experience in drops of water. It regulates through flow. It ensures that what would otherwise stagnate has passage.
Tears become a mechanism of balance, a soft overflow that prevents hardening. They fall from above the heart and trace a path downward, as though designed to return to the very place that generated them, cooling and comforting the source.
To cry is not collapse. It is expression of intelligence. It is evidence that the system is alive, responsive, and willing to move what is too great to be contained. In that movement there is both vulnerability and strength, because only something deeply alive can feel enough to overflow.
The body does not weep vaguely. It encodes experience with precision..
Tears are not weakness. They are regulation. They are chemistry in motion. They are the body’s quiet intelligence saying, this must flow.
And perhaps that is why the eyes sit above the heart. So what is made in the pressure of the chest can fall back over it, cooling, cleansing, reminding it that it is still alive, still feeling, still capable of breaking and expanding in the same breath.
And I have cried from all of it.
From awe at what I have built.
From sorrow at what I have lost.
From anger at what has been dishonored.
From love that has nowhere to land.
From knowing that I am not like most people.
That last one has been one of the longest struggles of my life.
To see differently.
To feel intensely.
To think in systems and patterns.
To question what others accept.
To build where others would not.
To refuse what feels untrue.
To stand alone more often than I would prefer.
In my difference I have come to recognize something that feels steady and true. I am not meant to stand at the center of the room demanding attention or recognition; I am meant to build the doorway.
This has been the quiet pattern of my life for as long as I can trace it. I see what could exist before it is visible to others, and I sense possibility where there appears to be only obstacle. I gather materials, endure uncertainty, hold the vision when it is inconvenient or misunderstood, and slowly something opens: a space, a project, a shift in understanding, a piece of land transformed into ecosystem, an idea shaped into structure. Then others walk through.
For many years I questioned this impulse in myself. I wondered whether it was pride disguised as generosity, or a subtle need to be needed. It is wise to examine such things, because the heart is capable of disguising ambition as virtue, and motives deserve scrutiny. Intentions must be held up to light. Yet when I sit quietly and honestly with my own interior landscape, when I strip away comparison and insecurity, what remains does not feel like arrogance; it feels like orientation.
Some people are meant to inhabit the house, some are meant to tend the hearth, some are meant to walk the path, and some are meant to build the threshold that allows movement between spaces. A door does not boast about being a door, nor does it demand applause for opening; it simply performs its function faithfully.
To create access is not prideful, and to imagine possibility and labor toward it is not self-exaltation. Pride enters only when recognition becomes the goal or when control over what others do with the space becomes more important than the space itself. When the act of opening is done in order to be seen, it shifts. But when it flows from a genuine desire for others to receive, to enter, to grow within what has been made available, it is service.
I have examined this in myself more than once, during seasons of loneliness, during seasons of misunderstanding, during seasons when the cost of building seemed heavier than the outcome. What I continue to discover is that I am wired to recognize thresholds. I sense where something is closed and where it might be opened, and I am willing to take the first uncomfortable step so that others may find it easier to follow.
This does not make me greater than anyone else; it simply means I am aligned with the design I carry. Each of us embodies a different architecture. Mine is not centered on spotlight or applause, but on access, on creating conditions, on shaping environments in which something larger than myself can unfold.
In the soil, microbes prepare pathways long before roots appear; they break down what is dense, soften what is compacted, and transform what is unusable into something that can nourish. They do not claim the forest as their achievement, yet without them the forest would struggle to take hold, because their work is foundational rather than visible.
Perhaps my role carries a similar rhythm. Perhaps humility does not require denying the gift, nor shrinking from it, nor exaggerating it, but accepting it with steadiness and clarity. I know, in the depth of my heart, that I create doors so that others may enter, and embracing that truth does not feel like pride; it feels like responsibility held with gratitude.
I am not liquefied and gone.
I am liquefied and reforming.
Some days I feel closer to caterpillar, heavy and earthbound. Some days I feel winged. Most days I am somewhere in between, remembering both.
And the remembering is what matters.
