Cocoon

I didn't expect to spend a month in a cocoon, but nature and metamorphosis have an innate wisdom.

May 05, 2023

I became intrigued by cocoons after stumbling onto a podcast interview with Donald Hoffman, a professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of CA Irvine. Hoffman compared the fruits of meditation to metamorphosis, explaining:

“It's not a minor palliative; it's from the ground up, a complete restructuring of the personality. The best analogy is a caterpillar going through a metamorphosis to become a butterfly.”

The interviewer mentioned “imaginal cells,” so I Googled to discover this lively description from Augusto Cuginotti, a specialist in business transformation:

A caterpillar crunches its way through its ecosystem, cutting a swath of destruction by eating as much as hundreds of times its weight in a day until it is too bloated to continue and hangs itself up, its skin then hardening into a chrysalis.

Wow. I had consumed a lifetime of impressions until the bloat of living in the fast lane and losing Karen forced me into a cocoon. Augusto continues:

Deep in the caterpillar’s body, tiny things biologists call ‘imaginal disks’ begin to form inside this chrysalis. Not recognizing the newcomers, the caterpillar’s immune system snuffs them as they arise. But they keep coming faster and faster, then linking up with each other.

Eventually, the caterpillar’s immune system fails from the stress, and the disks become imaginal cells that build the butterfly by feeding on the soupy meltdown of the caterpillar’s body.

Double wow. All my manic energy had been fighting off the cocoon, trying to snuff out the reorganization. Switching back to Donald Hoffman:

“Eventually, the immune cells of the caterpillar get overwhelmed, and then much of the structure of the caterpillar gets liquefied. Now that cannot be pleasant — liquefaction while you're still alive! And then having those raw materials turn into something else that you have no prior concept of. How could a caterpillar know what it means to fly and how to be a butterfly?”

Liquefaction had a B-movie horror vibe to it, so for a giggle, I rewatched Cocoon, the 1985 classic where a bunch of old farts regain their youthful virility by swimming in a pool containing alien cocoons.

Inciting incident: Don Ameche jumps into the pool and yells, “I feel tremendous; I’m ready to take on the world!!”

Later, Ben Luckett’s wife Mary confronts her alien-juiced, bonerific husband:

Ben: “So you think… we're cheating nature?
Mary: “Yes.”
Ben: “Well I'll tell ya, with the way nature's been cheating us, I don't mind cheating her a little.”

But Mary had it right. Opening a cocoon before its time, even a little, is cheating.

It’s a cuckoo premise, but “Cocoon” — liquefaction and all — emerged as my April theme.

Let’s talk about being bound in the cocoon. Thirty years ago, Bhagwan helped Karen and me get back together after a two-year separation. We were still married but living apart. Bhagwan spoke to me about kanta-bhava, the love of wife.

“This love is bounded by our duties in the world to bring forth children and have a home,” he explained gently. “This is who you are with in this world. You are bound in this love.”

I wrote at the time:

“I think I heard the word, “bound” and not much else. I was still married, so I was bound. Being bound either feels good or it doesn’t. In that moment, the gig was up. I let go. I accepted being bound. Jews bind their arms. Chinese women bind their feet. Babies like to be swaddled. Yoga is about being yoked and ‘tying the knot’ comes from a Celtic tradition of binding the bride and groom’s hands during the ceremony. I was relieved that I didn’t have to choose because I was already bound.”

We got back together immediately and had a second child.

And now, thirty years later, I find myself totally free, utterly bound, and wanting to dive into the magical pool.

I feel like an aging misfit trapped in a cocoon amid a world of love and laughter.

John Huston’s 1961 classic, The Misfits, comes to mind (sorry, circuitous mind, film degree). In Arthur Miller’s love letter of a screenplay, a sensuous but neurotic Marilyn Monroe falls in love with a gristled, over-the-hill cowboy played by Clark Gable. The characters circle each other, trying to get close, but their timing and age differences doom a real connection. The all-important bondo remains elusive.

In real life, Arthur Miller’s marriage to Monroe was falling apart in the haze of her drug abuse, and John Huston reportedly was hitting the bottle throughout production.

More sadly, Monroe and Gable experienced untimely deaths (ages 36 and 59) after making the film — a real-world coda to cocoons that don’t open.

My favorite Marilyn line from the film, “If I’m going to be alone, I want to be by myself,” inspired me to write:

If a beautiful moth gestates inside my husk, who can sense what’s within? How long can an aging misfit survive without bondo. Love is like oxygen.

Needing some bondo, I checked in on the Five Points that are guiding my grieving:

ONE - “The Universe Didn’t Make a Mistake”

Step one is to search your storyline for serendipities. You want proof that God’s guidance system hasn’t malfunctioned. My Circulation exercise delivered an odd mix of synchronicities. During cocoon month:

My friend Deb invited me to an orthodox Passover Seder — the Chabad Lubavitch thing with black coats, beards, and hats. I dreaded it, but to my surprise, it was a rich and magical evening. L'Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim!
Wendy and Jonathan, two friends I see every five years, called while I was mowing the lawn: “Want to go to Madras Mantra for some Indian food? Like right now, we’re coming by.”

“Absolutely,” I dead-panned, putting the gas can down, “I’ve been waiting for such an invite.”

It started like a normal meal until the waiter arrived. I didn’t expect uthappam and saag paneer served by a kippah-topped orthodox Jew. I high-fived my inner Henny Youngman for the reminder: God has a sly sense of humor.
Cavit, the imam of a local Turkish mosque, and one of Karen’s chaplain students, invited me to a Ramadan Iftar dinner. “Oy,” I thought. “Chabad, Indian, and now Ramadan…” I offered zero resistance and drove 45 minutes to the home of a never-met Turkish family. Again, a passionate fest punctuated by black tea at 9:30 pm and high-octane Turkish coffee at 10 pm. I happily let the buzz pull at the seams of my cocoon all night long.
Last week, my neighbor Ella asked, “Do you like to float?”

“You mean tubes down the river?”

“No, flotation tank in saline solution,” Ella explained. “We could go together.”

“Uh, I’m looking to limit my spiritual experiences,” but then remembered my resolution, “Since you ASKED...”

Something is moving inside the chrysalis. My lesson (in sailor talk): If you tie yourself to the mast and stay the course, you will be guided.

TWO — “A Major Loss Releases the Energy for Change”

Take your pick from an earlier chapter: The dog-toppled-the-trash paradigm or the facing-the-breaking-wave paradigm. Powerful events release the energy needed for change. With that, I harnessed a full blast of manic energy only to end up in a cocoon.

THREE - “The Hereafter is Here”

Remember Shelley: “Karen is like a Buddha – and she’s not going anywhere?" And Bhagwan: “If you live fully in yourself, you are with her.”

Well, one thing is for sure, Karen is with us. Immediately after she passed, like a weather forecast from the hereafter, I reported “Radiance.” Inside the cocoon, I have moved to “Constancy.” Without rewriting the Tibetan Book of the Dead, here’s what that means:

Our time in this world is a dream life — a flood of thoughts, sensations, conflicts, and joys. Around age 42, the future shows its face as a mid-life crisis (I prefer mid-life change). Catching us unaware, the inner work begins. My teacher Reshad called this transformation “The Triple R Ranch” — Recognition, Redemption, and Resurrection. I call it the “F.L.F. Show” — Facing stuff, Letting go, becoming Free.

Life is a madcap race toward realization. Hopefully, using Rumi’s words, we grow in capacity to “Die before we die.”

Ramana Maharshi spun it differently: “The ego becomes “a mere skeleton of its normal self, like a burnt rope.”

Burnt rope is a tough sell, but in the spirit of “ashes to ashes,” some part of us continues outside of time.

I wrote to a group on Facebook this week:

My wife died four months ago. At first I felt a “radiance” and now I feel a Buddha-like constancy — like a co-partnership born from our shared love. This constancy remains as an eternal present if we pass through physical death with consciousness intact. I explain it to people: “The hereafter is ‘here’.” It’s not some special place, or heaven, or afterlife. Just unremarkably here. Groking this simplifies everything.
That’s why taking your own life will always be a massive fail: “No one gets outta here alive - or dead either!”

FIVE - “Don’t Let the Grief Plumbing Back Up”

Jumping ahead to number five: I discovered Grief Plumbing during my manic phase. It was my way to talk, walk, and bizzy myself to manage the pain — highly recommended. But now, during the cocoon phase, that grief has settled into a hollowness that can’t be filled.

I’m writing this section at our mountain cabin. Karen deemed it her spiritual home, but I find it to be an empty outpost. While driving here, I looked into my emptiness and asked, “What would it take to fill this hollowness with fullness? I could give an esoteric answer, but Karen nailed it:

“Life is so sweet.”

If Karen can say that on her deathbed, who am I to complain?

Each chapter of life arrives with loss and brings a promise. Childhood, school, college, dating, marriage, career, parenting, empty-nesting, the so-called golden years, and bereavement — each with a loss and a step into the unknown. Karen challenged me to find sweetness in the fact of being alive.

When Rumi was on his deathbed, he explained to a friend who prayed for his recovery:

“Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.”

The reports all agree that Karen is still here, happy, like a Buddha. And I hope she likes threesomes (that’s my Henny Youngman self).

This takes us to number four.

FOUR - “Spread Your Wings”

Spreading wings involves risk-taking, sharing your heart, and unleashing your newfound labile nature.

Saturday night, I cooked a romantic dinner for a most beautiful member of my Grief Group — I’m calling her Kaia. From the New York Times:

Tarragon-Cognac Chicken: The sophisticated French flavors of brandy, butter, and tarragon season this golden-skinned roast chicken, adding panache to what is otherwise an easy and straightforward recipe. Oolala! In the name of risk-taking, how the hell do you shove a mixture of butter, tarragon, and cognac under the skin of a chicken?
Aloo Palak: Onion, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, and layered spices pack a fiery punch for the humble potato and spinach. My dinner date is an expert Indian cook (whoops), but the white guy faced the challenge. Even better, the dish sparked a lively conversation on the difference between garam masala and goda masala (Ha, she’s not a total expert — never heard of goda masala). I was tickled to see Kaia light up as she sniffed the goda (with an aromatic coconut sweetness unique to Maharashtrian cuisine). So, we opted to go off-recipe and sprinkle with goda masala.

Okay, I take back the romantic part; I’m still on the 12-month plan. But after the meal, while sipping pinot noir, Kaia asked to move to the porch to enjoy the fragrant spring night.

Remember how that Turkish coffee pulled at my cocoon? The pinot had the same effect. Having been with one woman for forty years, I wasn’t sure how to be. Let that sink in. I didn’t know what level of vulnerability was appropriate, so I cranked the dial and let myself be present, eye to eye, heart to heart.

“Let’s plan on this again,” Kaia announced, pulling out her iPhone with businesslike certitude. “How about May 27 and again June 24?”

It seemed very efficient, so I pulled out my iPhone and plugged in the dates since we were officially not dating.

The cocoon month of April had one more event on the calendar:

“The Memorial Celebration of Karen’s Life and Calling.”

Karen’s boss Theodora had been intent on planning a memorial service — nearly five months after the fact(!) I had already moved into the cognac chicken phase of my mourning, so it seemed wildly out of sync. But dutifully, I prepared a multimedia remembrance and steeled myself for an uncomfortable two hours.

When I arrived, the room quickly filled until more chairs had to be set. Two of Karen’s students had driven from Nashville, and another two flew in from Boston. Suho was even reported there, but she managed to remain invisible.

Until this event, I never fully recognized Karen’s impact. One after another, students and colleagues shared life-changing stories:

“Her demeanor put me at ease instantly, and she asked me kind, generous questions. She made observations about my life that I'd never even put together for myself.” - Sarah

“I will never forget her ability to get me to open up and speak about my life, my feelings, and what is on my mind.” - Angela

“I asked her how she was so calm about her illness. She succinctly told me that she had no fear of death and welcomed the experience. The only part that was unsettling was leaving Bruce and her boys.” - Marjorie

“During my interview, Karen said, ‘I sense you're uncomfortable.’ I sheepishly smiled, ‘I really need to use the bathroom.’ She laughed out loud, saying, ‘One thing you will learn about me is I think it's really important to take care of ourselves.’" - Shelby

“I always include your emails in my achievements; It feels like I'm sending them to an inbox in heaven. Your passing made me realize that the outreach and work you did are now being carried on through others that will speak of your goodness, service, and light.” - Noah

“Karen had a way of listening intently to what I shared. She'd give me her signature smirk, where the corner of her mouth would creep up and an eyebrow would shift ever so slightly, indicating that she knew there was more to be unearthed. The fact that she knew, that I knew, that she knew, was enough to bring it out of me.” - Nicole

Then it was my turn.

I know how to be an extrovert, yet I have little experience speaking to groups — especially when coming out of a cocoon.

So, I asked my Henny Youngman, and he was quite clear — some well-timed schtick always clears the air. I grabbed the podium and looked at it left and right. I explained, “I’m liable to get emotional,” then I deadpanned:

“Is there a call button if I need a chaplain?”

The roar of laughter pulled me out of the cocoon and opened my heart. Or maybe I liquefied and sprouted wings. You can’t force these things, but I accepted the wisdom guiding my journey.

“When you engage something with intention, like facing the wave head-on, there’s meaning in the experience.” Karen Miller