Goo

G’day. It’s your gooey friend Lyndall here. It’s been a while, I know. Sorry about that folks. I kind of turned into a lump of goo.

Here’s what Martha Beck writes about the gooeyness of the transformation process as caterpillars become butterflies:

The first thing caterpillars do in their cocoons is shed their skin, leaving a soft, rubbery chrysalis. If you were to look inside the cocoon early on, you’d find nothing but a puddle of glop. But in that glop are certain cells, called imago cells, that contain the DNA-coded instructions for turning bug soup into a delicate, winged creature – the angel of the dead caterpillar.

She calls it glop. I call it goo. And right now, transformation is the name of my game.

I’m waiting, and waiting, to turn into a butterfly. But the universe is conspiring to keep me in the gooey stage for longer than I ever thought necessary. The lesson, it seems, is patience.

Beck writes about three stages of transformation:

1. Dissolving
2. Imagining
3. Re-forming

I’ve spent a massive chunk of 2023 in the dissolving stage. But just recently, I found myself tentatively entering the imagining stage, forming mental pictures in my mind of potential futures, trying on selves as if I were trying on dresses in a fancy boutique. None of them have quite the right fit yet, with some of them pinching around the waist, others definitely making my bum look big.

So patience it is.

Rumi says:

Patience is not sitting and waiting, it is foreseeing. It is looking at the thorn and seeing the rose, looking at the night and seeing the day. Lovers are patient and know that the moon needs time to become full.

So there’s more dreaming to do, more scheming. And it’s the perfect time of year to ask myself what 2024 might hold for me.

I’m excited to let you know that I’ve been accepted into the Writing a Novel course with the Faber Academy, starting in February 2024. With one-and-a-half drafts of my novel under my belt, I decided that it was time to seek some external impetus to complete it. The thing I am most looking forward to about the course is the other people that I will meet who are on a writing journey too. And I have to say that some deadlines, some discussion and some instruction around my particular writing challenges won’t go astray.

Something else that is slowly emerging out of the goo stage is a realisation that content design is turning into my calling in my professional day-to-day. These days, I’m doing more and more design work for documents, reports, figures and brands – and my confidence is growing too. I’ll hope to share more of the design aspect of my work on the blog in the new year.

I’d love to know what’s happening for you. Are you in the middle of a transformation journey, or are you already stretching out those butterfly wings? Wherever you are, I don’t think dreaming and scheming can ever go astray.

I wish you all the best as we rush toward the festive season. I’ll be taking a break from the blog until the new year and I’ll be using a lot of that time to dream. I hope you can find some time for dreaming too.