What if your soul is fed but you don’t go to Oz?

What happens if you don’t enter the cocoon?

After digesting the calling of Imaginal Cells and sorting through Imposter nutrition, we need to clarify: there are two sorts of soul nutrition.  The manna-type of soul food is your daily dose of “sustaining-your-homeostasis” sort or nutrition. Your usual, basic spiritual routine. This looks different for everyone.

Then there is this capital “N” nutrition that feels qualitatively different. It’s the kind of message you hear uncannily from many different unrelated sources and places that makes you go “…hum….?”. It is the “holy smokes, that is pivotal” sort of nutrition.   The “wake-up-soul-you-need-change” sort of nutrition. 

It is this type of spiritual hunger I want to discuss.

There is risk involved when this type of nutrition is on the scene.

This type of consumption usually comes in response to a crisis: a crisis of relationship, crisis of career, crisis of identity, crisis of an emotional storm…whatever form the cyclone takes, you can be sure your authentic nutrition was meant for sustaining you through it.

This kind of soul nutrition serves an imperative purpose. To lead you into the cocoon. What happens if you bump into, receive, or consume capital “N” nutrition and do not enter the cocoon?

Let’s consult the caterpillar:

“The end result is death. The caterpillar is a form has one mission and one alone: to gain enough weight through eating to go through several molts, then use its stored energy to complete the process of metamorphosis. Usually, caterpillars will always undergo pupation as long as they are in good health and of the correct weight; the later topic is vital, as a caterpillar needs to put on a set amount of mass to both shed its skin and activate the final goal of pupation….[if the caterpillar does not enter pupation]…the caterpillar becomes so massive that the breathing apparatus cannot adequately provide oxygen to the developing tissues.

The Danger of Not Visiting Oz

In the book, “When the Heart Waits” (Kidd 1990), the author makes an analogy that hit me right between my emotional caterpillar eyes. She discusses the story of the Wizard of Oz.  There are a lot of psycospiritual gems in the metaphor of the story, but this specifically speaks to where you and I are circling:

As the storm is raging, a scary holy calling for overhaul…Aunt Em is seen running for the cellar, screaming for Dorothy to join her there. Dorothy and Tod are in the house (the home is a Jungian metaphor for the inner world of the soul, by the way…excuse the psychobabble) and cannot get to the cellar in time. Thank goodness.

“There is always the risk that we will retreat into the security of the cellar rather than ride the cyclone to a new place…’when my life fell apart around me, I picked up the pieces and put them back together the same way they were before.  Nothing changed.  When I did that, I was Aunt Em retreating into the cellar I didn’t ride the cyclone; I never left Kansas;”.  (Kidd, 1990)

My reflection is that I (we)  have to say yes to the cocoon.  It may not look like much is happening outside, but we are riding the cyclone on the inside.

If we feel the draw of imaginal cells and capital “N” nutrition, if life falls apart around us and metamorphosis, so much needed, starts its work....but we put the pieces of life back into the same arrangement they were in before (internally and externally)...we foster soul hibernation at best...soul suicide at worst. Heartrending waste. Just like the Just like the caterpillar that didn’t make its way into the cocoon.

Lord, take these moments of everyday, ordinary life and give me the courage to rearrange the shattered pieces rather than piece them together in that same, old, former way—soul hibernating way. Awaken me to the nutrition you are providing, make me hungry for it.  Let me feel the something new you are doing in my bones and say yes to the calling of that frequency that beats to the rhythm of your divine thriving. Amen.

Isaiah 43 [Voice]

Eternal One: Don’t revel only in the past,
        or spend all your time recounting the victories of days gone by.
¹⁹     Watch closely: I am preparing something new; it’s happening now, even as I speak,
        and you’re about to see it. I am preparing a way through the desert;
    Waters will flow where there had been none.

Romans 12:2 [Message]

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Kidd, Sue. 1990. When the Heart Waits. Harper Collins. New York, New York.