Moths & Moonlight
Are we dying, or are we being reborn? Is there even a difference?
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
- Oscar Wilde
Until very recently, I’ve felt like a moth pupa wrapped up tightly in a cocoon. For years now, I have become gloopier, my edges blurred, as I sit inside a dark and enveloping experience no one can see but me. Illness is strongly associated with a journey into the underworld – a confrontation with our fragility and mortality as well as the shadows that lurk in the darkest corners of our bodies and our psyches. Whether it be a subterranean cave system, a leaf-laden cocoon, or the darkness of a womb, to traverse the shadowy landscape of the underworld is to open yourself up to new ways of knowing and being.
My cocoon is vibrating these days. I feel monumental, yet invisible, tremors, which have ramped up in recent months and weeks: a larger change is upon me. I have more energy; I have moved to a new town; I have launched my soul’s work. And while I fear both overexertion and relapse, I know my womb-like life has become too comfortable. After a time, growth requires not just nurturing, but catalyst. I am in the somewhat awkward and painful process of emerging, and find myself reflecting on what I wish for from this stage of the journey.
As I think about how best to go about this, my mind keeps drifting to moths and moonlight. There is a reason I chose these symbols for my logo, both with their links to emotions and intuition, death and dreams, rebirth and transformation. I think that too often, our difficult experiences are glossed over and neatly fitted back into a capitalist mindset: essentially, how do I translate this suffering into a shiny and sell-able package? The moth reminds me that there is great value in holding the shadows of the underworld close to my skin as I emerge, to deeply cherish the hard won reconnection to my body and intuition, and to let the transformation continue to run its course.
Speaking of, here is something creepily comforting about the transformation process. Moths, like all other holometabolous insects that undergo full metamorphosis, must experience a complete meltdown before being reconstituted as a winged adult. (And if that is not a perfect metaphor for being a teenager, I’m not sure what is.) Essentially, the pupa digests its own body and becomes liquid before re-forming as a markedly different creature. And interestingly, it is a stress response, with the pupa’s immune system actively resisting the formation of long-dormant cell discs.
So if you are feeling some resistance to the soupy breakdown of your life – or the world around you – is it any wonder? And if a part of you dreads the rest of a long, cold, winter, you are not alone. Transformation can be painful. It can be dark. The timeline is unclear, as is the outcome. Are we dying, or are we being reborn? Is there even a difference?
For many, it feels like our entire world is dying; that we are living on a rotting corpse, the flies and the smell becoming stronger by the day. Global extinction, genocide, war, so many without food, shelter, or medicine, the sheer amount of fear and hatred and pain – these are not new problems, and yet we increasingly feel their escalation and their power. And with them, I feel the familiar vibrations I experience in my own body. Are these death tremors or birth pangs? Is it possible they are both?
Just as the moon “dies” each and every month, just as the pupa must die to be reborn as a moth, so too do we endure many tiny deaths in our lifetime: our illnesses and our injuries, our downfalls and our disappointments. Yet, moving through these spirals and cycles is always an opportunity to reimagine how we want to show up in the world – for ourselves, for each other, and for the world herself. In the midst of our own inevitable decay, we get to choose much of what dies and what is nurtured.
If you need inspiration: look around you. Look to the tides and the trees, the seasons and the solstices. Look to the creatures that hibernate all winter and emerge in the spring. Look to those calling us ever deeper into the rhythms of the natural world.
Moths and moonlight remind me that despite the immense pain of this process, it is also a time to dream. To lean into our bodily knowing, to be slow and still when we need to, and to trust in our natural rhythms. Like a moth pupa in a silky cocoon, we must undergo our own cycles of returning to the inky shadows before emerging anew. As in our own lives, so too in the collective – we do not need more responses born of urgency and desperation and fear. What we do need is a compelling, even magical, vision, one in which we weave together all our kin. It is not easy work, but I find great comfort in knowing that all around us in the natural world, examples abound of other ways to live.
So. May we pour our losses and heartaches into the earth and let her compost them, as she does for all that needs to die and be returned in new form. May we whisper our desires for our brilliant winged lives to the moon. And may we dare to dream together, wide and deep, so that we may create systems of care that serve us all.