The Wind

What if awakening is not about becoming more, but becoming less contained?

“I used to aspire to be the butterfly. Now I aspire to be the Wind.”

I wrote those words years ago after one of those peculiar little epiphanies that arrives without fanfare and then proceeds to completely rearrange the furniture in your mind.

For years, I loved the butterfly.

Who doesn’t?

The caterpillar-to-butterfly story may be one of our most beloved metaphors for transformation. We use it for healing. Awakening. Reinvention. Spiritual growth. Becoming.

And it is a beautiful metaphor because it tells us something we desperately need to remember:

You can become more than you were.

The caterpillar does not simply improve itself.

It transforms.

It enters the darkness of the chrysalis, becomes something very much like goo, and somehow emerges with wings.

How marvelous!

But lately I have found myself wondering:

What if becoming is not the end of awakening?

For that matter, even the word awakening has begun to intrigue me.

Awakening suggests that I have been asleep.

But I don’t think I have been.

Perhaps I have simply forgotten some very important things worth remembering.

And perhaps the deeper invitation is not to acquire yet another label—awake, enlightened, evolved, ascended, transformed—but to stop labeling ourselves to infinity.

What if the deeper invitation is to stop needing to become anything at all?

Because one day it occurred to me that, glorious as she is, the butterfly is still…

a butterfly.

She has wings.

She has altitude.

She has mobility.

She is certainly freer than the caterpillar.

But she still has a shape.

A lifespan.

A trajectory.

A boundary between herself and everything else.

And suddenly I had my aha! moment:

The butterfly is just another box—with a wee bit more elevation.

Well now.

That was inconvenient.

Because I had spent a good deal of my life trying to become the butterfly.

Transform.

Grow.

Heal.

Awaken.

Become wiser.

Become freer.

Become more spiritual.

Become the next version of myself.

And somewhere along the way, I began to wonder whether I had simply continued trading one container for a more beautiful one—forever trying to keep up with the spiritual Joneses.

That is when the Wind entered.

Not as another metaphor, exactly.

More like recognition.

A remembering.

The Wind does not ask:

What am I becoming?

Am I transformed enough?

Am I flying high enough?

Am I doing awakening correctly?

The Wind simply moves.

It cannot be contained by the shape of what it passes through.

It moves through trees and becomes the invisible fingers that rustle the leaves, almost as though the forest itself were an instrument.

It moves across water and becomes waves.

Through a canyon and becomes a howl.

Across your cheek and becomes a whisper.

Through a flute and becomes music.

And yet—

it never becomes any of those things.

It remains the Wind.

That realization stopped me in my tracks.

Because perhaps this is what I have been trying to understand all along.

Perhaps awakening is not endlessly constructing a better version of ourselves.

Perhaps awakening is becoming less identified with the container altogether.

The Wind has no constraints.

The Wind has no box.

The Wind has no questions.

The Wind has nothing to prove.

And oh, what a relief there is in that.

Because if we are not careful, even spirituality can become another achievement system.

We laugh about climbing the corporate ladder, but if we’re being honest, there is a spiritual ladder too, isn’t there?

Become enlightened.

Raise your vibration.

Manifest better.

Heal everything.

Transform.

Ascend.

Evolve.

Be more conscious.

Be more present.

Be more aligned.

Be more.

Be more.

Be more.

Sometimes contemporary spirituality sounds suspiciously like achievement language wearing the scent of incense.

Even the butterfly can accidentally become a spiritual performance review.

Look! I metamorphosed!

(HA! How’s that for a word?)

The Wind could not care less.

The Wind does not submit quarterly awakening reports.

The Wind does not compare its spiritual development to the breeze next door.

The Wind does not wonder whether it has sufficiently healed its ancestral trauma before it is permitted to move across the meadow.

The Wind moves.

And perhaps that is why another layer of this metaphor fascinates me so much.

Across ancient languages, the boundaries between wind, breath, and spirit are wonderfully porous.

The Hebrew word ruach can mean wind, breath, or spirit.

The Greek pneuma carries that same extraordinary constellation of meanings: breath, wind, spirit.

Long before we turned spirituality into something we could diagram, certify, package, or master, human beings seemed to recognize something elemental:

Spirit moves.

Spirit breathes.

Spirit is known by what it touches.

We cannot see the wind itself.

The wind is invisible.

We may see dust or leaves carried upon it, but those things are not the wind.

Instead, we know the Wind by its effects.

We see branches bend.

We watch waves of grain ripple.

We feel something brush our skin and tousle our hair.

We hear the shutters rattle.

We witness the evidence of its passing.

And for many of us, perhaps there is something familiar in that.

Those we love in Spirit may also be unseen.

And yet unseen does not necessarily mean unfelt.

Or absent.

We may learn to notice movement.

A ripple.

A touch.

A coincidence.

A familiar song arriving at an impossible moment.

Something that bends the branches of our ordinary world just enough for us to pause and wonder:

What just moved through here?

Perhaps that is why a line attributed to Buckminster Fuller has stayed with me:

“The wave is not the water. The water merely told us about the wave moving by.”

The water reveals the wave.

And the Wind helps create it.

Water + Wind = Wave.

Something invisible meets something visible, and a third thing appears.

That fascinates me.

Because perhaps there is another equation here.

Wind + world = evidence.

The Wind becomes knowable by what it moves.

And perhaps:

Spirit + us = experience.

Something unseen meets something embodied, and suddenly there is a ripple.

A knowing.

A synchronicity.

A moment of recognition.

A song.

A sign.

A story we cannot quite explain but cannot quite dismiss either.

The Wind does not become the tree when the branches sway.

Spirit need not become us in order to move through our lives.

And suddenly I find myself wondering:

What if I am more like that than I have ever understood?

What if this body, this personality, this biography, this carefully assembled identity called “Cheryl” is not insignificant—but neither is it the whole story?

What if the container is simply one beautiful way something larger is revealing its movement?

That possibility feels very different from self-improvement.

It feels more like surrender.

And surrender is a word I have misunderstood for much of my life.

I used to think surrender meant giving up.

Now, at 63, I wonder whether surrender might mean giving up something entirely different:

the exhausting belief that I have to carry myself everywhere.

That I have to prove I am becoming.

Prove I am awakening.

Prove I am ascending.

Prove I am getting somewhere.

Which brings me back to the butterfly.

Perhaps I do not want wings anymore.

Not because wings aren’t marvelous.

They are.

But even wings imply that I must carry myself somewhere.

I must flap.

Navigate.

Choose altitude.

Choose direction.

Avoid predators.

Find the right flower.

Hang out with the other butterflies and try to keep up.

Keep myself aloft.

There is still effort involved in being the butterfly.

The Wind suggests something radically different:

What if I let myself be carried?

There is real permission in that question.

Permission to stop trying so hard.

Permission not to know where everything is going.

Permission to enter mystery without immediately requiring a map.

Permission to move without first explaining the movement.

Permission to allow life to pass through me rather than constantly trying to engineer it into the shape I think—or someone else tells me—it should take.

Perhaps this is another way of refusing to collapse the wave.

Perhaps I do not need to force one answer too quickly.

Perhaps I do not need to decide precisely what I am becoming.

Perhaps there is wisdom in remaining spacious enough for something unexpected to move through.

The Wind does not know the shape it will take around the next mountain.

It does not need to.

It does not get ahead of itself.

It meets the mountain when it arrives, moves around it, and allows whatever is on the other side to remain a surprise.

That may be the distinction I was trying to name all those years ago when those words first came to me.

I was not rejecting transformation.

The butterfly is beautiful.

The chrysalis is holy.

Becoming matters.

But perhaps transformation itself can become another identity we imprison ourselves inside.

Perhaps becoming is not the end of awakening.

Perhaps there comes a time when the invitation is no longer:

What shall I become next?

but:

What am I willing to stop containing?

For years, I thought transformation meant growing wings.

Now I wonder if the deeper transformation is finally discovering that I was never required to remain a creature with edges.

I used to aspire to be the butterfly.

Now I aspire to be the Wind.

What if?

Cheryl A. Page