The Silver Thread

of body and spirit

It is safe inside my silk cocoon

Hello dear readers,

It has been such a long time since I last wrote to you. I have been pulled and tugged into outer life recently, and I have needed to tend to the world and the relationships around me.

I have been drawing, but I have not been writing. Perhaps I have needed to stay a while longer in the dark non-verbal space of the images. A space that offers me a kind of existential receptivity and responsivity. I have been trying to hold these things at the same time: existence and the capacity to respond, spirit and matter, crisis, collapse, daily life, and real relationships.

Thank you for patiently waiting and not giving up on me completely. I hope we will start to gently re-find each other.

When I was in pre-school, I, like many other pre-schoolers, had my very first pet: a box of silk worms. The cardboard box had rough holes that were big enough for the silk worms to breathe, but small enough for them not to climb out. The box had layers of mulberry leaves scattered inside. These leaves would disappear overnight from the ravenous worms. Luckily, there was a large mulberry tree on my short walk to pre-school, so we had a constant supply.

Perhaps around the same time, my parents were reading Hope for the Flowers to me before bed. It is a story about a little caterpillar called Stripe who eats and eats and thinks surely there is more to life. He wants to touch the sky and joins a large pillar of caterpillars, all trying to do the same. He climbs and climbs and grows increasingly uncomfortable about trampling the bodies of the other caterpillars in his own pursuit. He meets Yellow along the way, and they fall in love. They decide to climb down. Their love and partnerships holds them for a while, until Stripe feels the niggly feeling again of wanting to touch the sky and see what is up there.

Yellow stays behind, and Stripe leaves for the pillar, this time with greater determination. He tramples and squashes and tells himself he doesn’t care. Close to the top, a magnificent yellow butterfly comes to find him. She flaps her wings and wriggles her antennae, trying to tell him to come down, no longer able to speak the same language. After some time, he follows her. He tries to tell people along the way that this isn’t it. This squashing and squirming and trying to get to the top is not how to touch the sky. Down the pillar, through the grasses, and all the way to an old and dead tree. She shows him her old cocoon, and he climbs up and starts spinning. Round and round, darker and darker, enclosing himself in. He grows more and more afraid…what if I have to lose everything?

In my mind’s eye, during a visualisation, I step into a dark cave. It grows darker and darker, and I feel held in the womb of the earth. When the time is right, I slowly emerge through an opening. I step out into a lush landscape, fertile and fecund, deep green indigenous forest, bright fynbos, and cola-coloured rivers.

I morph into a bird woman, whom I know well by now. I travel through the landscape, moving from periphery to center, from above to below. I land deep in the forest, and I rest near the river. A Being of Life approaches me. I cannot quite see her as such, but I feel her wrapping a cocoon all around me, spinning round and round. The cocoon is made of silk, and I am inside. It grows dark, but my eyes adjust, and I start to see her. She is a worm-woman, spinning a single silk thread. She gives me the thread, and I give her one in return, which emerges from my body with a little needle attached to the other end.

You see, when I was born, I had a dark line running down the middle of my body, and I had a single prick on my neck that oozed see-through goo. And just below that gooey prick, a single silver hair grew from my chest. My parents told me that when I was born, the angels sewed me up, and by mistake, they pricked me with their needle, leaving a silver silk thread inside my body. And to this day, I have this little prick on my neck that lets out a see-through goo, and this little silver hair growing from my chest.

I loved it when they told me this story, the celestial story of my incarnation, with something precious left behind as a reminder.

I think about how Stripe had this calling that got all mixed up with individual pursuit. I think about how Yellow came back to find him and managed to show him, with her body, that what he longed for was truly possible, more than possible, inevitable. I think about how they could no longer speak the same language and how they had to learn to translate all these messy and ephemeral things like love and instinct and longing and spirit. I think about how I couldn’t see this worm-woman who came to me in my visualisation, but I felt her, and I came to know her more intimately inside of her cocoon.

I think about this story of my birth that was woven by my parents, with threads of the material (my body) and threads of the spiritual (the angels). I think about how this lodged something very precious inside of me, something just beneath my skin, something much bigger than my individual existence. Something I forget over and over and over again.

I wonder if you have a silver thread? Well, I am sure we all do. But I wonder if it tugs at you every now and then? I wonder if it asks you to trust in a different language that you can’t quite understand, but that communicates love and instinct and longing and spirit. I wonder if it sometimes pulls you into its cocoon and sometimes pulls you out towards life.

I wonder when the last time was that you touched the sky?

As always, your thoughts, feelings, and associations mean so much to me, and I would love to hear them in the comments below! Also, a like, and a share go a long way too!