The Bloody Hell Threshold
And Butterfly Dreams
I’m of the opinion that big and small transformation occurs when something or someone reaches “bored to the point of irrational irritation.” I have grown this opinion during an epic and exhausting battle between Old Me and I Don’t Know Me over butterfly dreams.
OlderER versions of ourselves, to be specific, many ages of ego, peek into real time with a critical eye. They are quite rationally irritated by questions that include “who am I becoming” and “what will I lose?” Generally, those questions are framed with unmet dreams and heart hurts that echo from their time period. When this happens, “rational” irritation can go rogue and lead to a state I am currently coagulating in. Let’s call it Stuck in Slimy Hot Sauce.
Looking waaaaay back, fifty-years-old had a la-di-da shine. I thought I’d navigated THE most turbulent period of my adult life and had arrived mostly in one piece. As a visual, it would be a caterpillar escaping the maw of a bird and falling out of the sky to land on a massive tomato plant. A tomato plant owned by someone that doesn’t use pesticides. Someone like me. After a few tomato plant nibbles, the caterpillar’s heart rate—caterpillars do have hearts—winds down to normal. As it blissfully gorges, the caterpillar assesses the status of things and finds it almost wants to shout “thank you” to the bird that nearly ate it.
If you find yourself in a la-di-dah stage, write about it. Take pictures. Remind yourself it is rare and fleeting. Hold it in the crook of your arm like a newborn and treasure it for times when la-di-da’s are the butterfly dreams people have if they are fortunate to be sleeping in a cabana on a private tropical island. An island with a butler, a lagoon, and drinks with frilly umbrellas.
What our imaginary friend the gorging caterpillar could not know is that for caterpillars, lah-di-da is the stage before the biggest, most terrifying, and brutal shift in its short life. Eventually, the caterpillar learns that thanking a bird for accidentally dropping it sounds pathologically polite.
For me, similar to the caterpillar, the la-di-da period in my fifties was before a brutal shift. And now, nearly fourteen years later, I have the awareness my feet are splat on the threshold of the after world.
It is THE BLOODY HELL THRESHOLD of the next stage.
It is madly, incomprehensibly, NOT the butterfly stage.
**gnashing of teeth and spitting venom ensues**
I have melted into goo and can’t get up.
I’m of the tremulous opinion (tremulous because who can know what the F is for sure), that big and small transformation occurs as something or someone reaches “bored to the point of irrational irritation.” At least, I bloody hell hope so. I have developed this opinion during a lengthy, epic, exhausting, and gooey battle riding the threshold between Old Me and I Don’t Know Me. There are calluses on blisters of riding this threshold. Present Me and the gang of Old Me’s have been riding this threshold for over a year. It seems like forever. Building a butterfly must take longer for humans…. and of course it does.
Old Me’s fling demands about ancient dreams and then Present Me replies reasonable assertions.
“You can’t want to go back to school…AGAIN. That already happened and it didn’t work out.”
“We can’t travel the world with a backpack during the most chaotic time period since the ‘70's. And, by the way, did you notice how the body isn’t twenty anymore?”
“Moving back to California while the coast burns or floods is not possible.”
Old Me’s grumble about boring Adultville and Present Me nods in agreement.
“We do the same thing every day.”
“Why does everything revolve around the dogs?”
“Do you have a life outside of the house, work, and a family?
“What is a life, anyway?”
The last was said with snarky disdain.
Present Me sighs, “Yeps all around.”
Having survived another brutal and terrifying period of change, I imagine I must be feeling similar to liquified caterpillars in their cocoon. Surely, caterpillars CATERwaul in a I-miss-gorging-on-tomato-plants and boredom infused rage as goo cells ever-so-slowly shift into butterflies.
Michael Meade calls the goo era, the “threshold.” Prior to this, back when I thought a brutal stage ended and instantly I’d become a butterfly, I wrote about thresholds. Though, not with Meade’s attention to the Latin origin—limin.
The word liminal comes from a Latin root that means threshold. Literally a threshold is a doorway. But a threshold is also a starting point, the initial stage of a transition from one thing to another, a position on the cusp of change. For example, “We are on the threshold of a new beginning.”
During a Point of Relation podcast with Thomas Hübl, Meade spoke about the “liminal stage of liquefaction.” He believes humans have avoided evolving for so long that nature is forcing us to change as a collective alongside the planet. There ought to be ominous horror movie music playing in the background of that concept.
Please follow the link below. I found it well worth the minutes.
Meade explains the threshold as the point in front of the many deaths a single life experiences—including the final transition to whatever comes next.
Cells of living matter evolve, multiply, and die with an aging environment, each element shifting in a soup of ongoing change mixed with resistance. According to researchers, the original cells of a caterpillar resist shifting up until the moment they are overwhelmed by time and size-factored hormones igniting change.
As the larva (caterpillar) feeds, its gut, muscles and some other internal organs grow and develop, but the imaginal discs are temporarily suppressed and remain dormant. The caterpillar behaves like a free-living, eating, growing but developmentally repressed embryo.
How Does a Caterpillar Turn into a Butterfly? Richard Jones, Discover Wildlife, BBC (2024)
Caterpillars are DNA-made to resist change until…. well…. until.
One of my life philosophies is that as nature goes, so goes the human experience. Dragging one’s sneakers on the road of life appears to be a natural developmental stage. We are within a global organism that digs its heels in and as Meade suggests in the podcast—evolutionary change continues, even as life resists.
Humans don’t only live alongside nature, we are nature.
I am using the “nature is” philosophy to explain myself *to* myself as Old Me and I Don’t Know Me versions cage fight on the threshold.
Taking note of the world and Michael Meade, I don’t believe I am alone on this current threshold. Nature and society appear to be cage fighting at the same time, resolutely determined not to go quietly into the good night.
My utter boredom with cage fighting, whether it is within myself or with a society cantankerously resisting change, fuels my ratchety angst. It is an angst that reminds me, but underperforms as an example, of when my shoes are too tight and a situation won’t allow for their removal. On an airplane and my feet swell or sitting down after walking in heels from a parking lot. I need to rip my shoes off and can’t. I want to thrash the surrounding environment into a la-di-da moment that does not seem close to being on the horizon. I cannot smell the ocean or banana leaves or even a smidge of a tomato plant.
There is no horizon.
I’m in liquified hell on the side of an asphalt road.
I imagine my furry friend the caterpillar might offer tips. Or, condolences—because, they likely woudn’t have tips to offer.
**I’ll be adding threshold tips into a future newsletter for a goo-angsty distraction.
Michael Meade believes society at large has declined to use thresholds to gain awareness. He opines that if we did, we’d find our understanding of them would help us learn to evolve more gracefully. We might then age, change, and eventually, transition for the last time, with something akin to peaceful acceptance.
I wonder if during a la-di-da moment it is possible to hold it all in the crook of my arm—the ratchety angst, the grief, and the sublime—while gorging on a tomato plant and perhaps, (though highly unlikely, me being me), thanking a bird that didn’t eat me.
Am I suggesting that a la-di-da moment show up to test this outlandish theory?
Bring it.
Please.
Yes, truth. I think liminal spaces have their own energy, not complying with the time specifications we would prefer.