Chapter fifteen: further discoveries within.

   What Shall I Be

   I have again and again grown like grass;
   I have experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds.
   I died from minerality and became vegetable;
   And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
   I died from animality and became man.
   Then why fear disappearance through death?
   Next time I shall die
   Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels:
   After that soaring higher than angels--
   What you cannot imagine. I shall be that. (53)

The journeys into my body that had been so helpful to me continued. Previously it was to my belly, to my liver, that dark, impenetrable doorway to the Under World. That was my only experience with journeying inside my body, and so I had formed an expectation that any such journey would begin with breaking away from the consensual reality, followed by a long, deep retreat inward, deep into the psyche, and backward in time to prehistory, through a chaotic series of encounters and darkly terrifying experiences. This time I encountered order, experiencing a fulfilling, harmonizing presence that gave me a centering initiation to return to my life with. (54)

This time, instead of going down deep, I found myself entering my head, through the nostrils and into the brain. I knew that I needed guidance, and this time I had the presence of mind to ask for help, even though I really didn't know who I was asking.

I faintly remembered the map that Bear had once communicated to me, with the South in the direction of my forehead, and the North in the direction of the back of my head. The right brain lay in the West, and the left brain in the East. While I felt comforted by having this orientation, I could not fathom the meaning of the information. I clearly needed help.

Know what I know. The thought came floating toward me as if carried on the rays of friendly morning light. Follow the natural progression of my journey, and you will understand. Butterfly humbly offered me her story. It unfolded in images, vignettes of transformation from egg to larva to cocoon and finally to the birth of the butterfly. (55) First there is a beginning, an egg stage, that primordial yet delicate emerging from the pregnant potential of the unseen and unspoken, not yet altogether a reality in this world. Butterfly reminded me of how Raven, too, emerged from the stillness, the void, where there is nothing yet in form. In due time the egg stage grows into the larva, allowing for development from conceptus to being. Here is provided initiation, introduction to the new world, an inkling of what could be, of what is to come. Here strength of character is nurtured and teachers offer "tools of the trade" which will be necessary for continuing the journey. The larva stage gives way to the cocoon stage, where one goes within, sheltered in the swaddling clothes of timeless repose. Bear enters the cave, the womb-cave, to digest past experience and arrive at completion with it. And in the fullness of time comes birth for the butterfly, fully-formed and prepared to fulfill its purpose.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I felt calmed by the tranquil presence of Butterfly. There was no hurry to move from one stage to the next, and yet each new stage of transformation incorporated what had come before. And so each new stage expanded what had come before, at once leaving it behind, completed and to be buried, and yet bringing it into this timeframe, incorporated, elaborated, liberated.

Despite feeling so calm and unhurried, I felt some frustration at not understanding the relevance of Butterfly's story to my view at the threshold of the brain. I wanted to comprehend, but it seemed so much more complex here than the primitive scene of the liver, the unburied dead and the guardians. I had many questions, especially what guardians served here at the threshold of each new stage?