Nigredo

It’s easy to think of personal growth as an upward movement, an accretion of awareness brought about by the light of our consciousness - that like caterpillars we are elevated to the status of butterflies by the measurable addition of wings. And yet, a caterpillar doesn’t simply spin a cocoon around itself because it wants to be a butterfly. It does so because it has lost its appetite for leaves and for dragging its belly across the ground. And so it seals itself off from the certainty of its former life to be reduced to a primordial ooze of cells - a state of being even less desirable than the one from which it is escaping. And yet it is only after the caterpillar has been irretrievably lost that its cells can be drawn together again into a butterfly. Nigredo is an on-going exploration of the betwixt and the between. A ship at night between ports. A chrysalis between lives. What these gaps have in common is darkness. The thought here is that sometimes the changes and transformations we seek to make in our lives cannot take place during the day - that sometimes we need to be cracked open like a seed in the darkness to rediscover ourselves in the light.