Releasing the Map, Metamorphosis, and The Risk of Joy

4/16/2025 | On finding pleasure in the process of change

10:30 pm and I’m just making it to my written ‘sunrise sadhana’ today.

I am grateful to get to have met with two wise collaborators of mine today and a stranger each mirroring back the reminder to soften my grip on the desire for a map.

The image I want to put here is of a caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly timelapse.

I’ll let this image and gif be enough for now…

The desire for a map: for my future, for the future I’ll share with those in my generation, for the collective future well beyond us, is so desirable to me.

Show me the steps.

Let my know where we’re headed.

I want to better plan this out.

And… I am being reminded how limited that quest is—the quest for a how-to plan big enough to put my mind at ease.

I’ve learn to create tasks for the planner in me—channel her into design frameworks and business development to help her feel accomplished and build reward for staying invested in things that grow, evolve, develop and change within more of the lotus of my control.

And… I practice as a social and spiritual being, releasing my grasp on needing to know the path to the future I will live and the one seven generations can thrive in…

Intention, remembrance, desire for guidance, gets to be the start—not waiting for notes on where to take the first step.

The metamorphosis—and our surrender to it's process—is the invitation, continuously.

There are days I can feel the holiness of that, and days I wish for a simplicity promising me a pain-free existence here.

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Waves come over me when something in me is shifting and having 4 back-to-back calls today sent a big one through my system.

I’ve learned to trust them when I can—allow the heaviness to overtake me (sometimes as an emotion but many times as a tiredness I believe here to protect my thinking mind from over-dwelling on things too big to “get,”)

I let myself close my eyes, listen to music, walk, sleep, give breath to surrender…

This evening as I did that, lying back at 7 pm and letting my eyes rest, a reflection emerged—around continuing to strive to let my joy inform the Living Map within.

Pain is comforting.

Accepting pain as a constant creates a certainty that trust in joy, goodness and abundance can’t give you.

To begin to put our attention on joy, goodness, and abundance, or ‘the good, the true and the beautiful,’ as Ken Wilbur and many mystics call it—can spur up something that is deeper/different than pain: fear of loss. fear of disconnection.

Sadness, sorrow, separation.

Pain let’s us feel a sense of promise.

The fastest way to exert control in a situation we have little? Complain about it.

Meanwhile to revel, in pleasure, in joy, in the intimacy of the moment itself—invokes the knowing: this will end, which can create such a profound sadness we might never choose the risk of joy at all.

I would say the feeling “this will end,” is also true of pain, but this is where the power of human attention comes in. If we want to—we can live a life surrounded by love and luxury and still in constant pain. (And I’m not talking about un-chosen pain, but that which we continue to manifest… and I don’t yet know the difference between those two.)

At the end of the day, the fundamental human choice is joy/trust/love.

This is why love and faith are one in the same.

The act of loving where there is none—is one of stepping into the Void.

Finally, I will just add to these snowy, fresh thoughts very subject to change:

I am learning how to hold sorrow with my joy.

It is my belief choosing trust fundamentally, involves feeling every emotion, and freedom from the repression of our need for self-expression through every wave of this transformation, wildly personal and intimately collective.

With love,

Libby