I am a woman. And an endearing warmth shelters me when the world hits me. It is the warmth of other women, of those who made life this sensitive, fighting corner, with soft skin and a warrior heart.
That warmth from other women, of whom Alejandra Pizarnik speaks, has also been my shelter.
My history is marked by women.
My great-grandmother Irene, my grandmother Laura and my mother worked for and by women. The stories of them, of my daughter and of so many women who have impacted my life, invited me to immerse myself in our emotions and behaviors, to try to decipher something of our inner feminine world.
So I started with a blank page and with a clear purpose: I wanted to reveal something of what was happening to us in that which is not seen, but that we do experience, that which happens inside us. I had some general ideas of what I wanted to capture, but I needed to go searching for inspiration.
So on one of those afternoons looking at this sea in the background, I remembered that 10 years ago I had first encountered the story of the monarch butterfly. How was it possible for something so small to make a trip of more than 4000 kilometers from the United States and Canada to the treetops in Michoacán Mexico… Then I thought, I want to learn from her!
I began to investigate it, to learn about its process of change and its route. The more I learned, the more I marveled and began to discover similarities with our female gender…
I learned, for example, that of the 240 days that the super monarch lives, 35 of them are spent transforming. That is, 15% of your life is experiencing some change.
In its beginnings, the monarch is an egg. Then a caterpillar. Being a caterpillar, it changes its skin 5 times and increases its body mass 2000 times until there comes a time when it can no longer grow and its body tells it that it is time to enter its chrysalis for the last change in its trajectory: the biggest change and probably the most difficult.
Then she wraps herself as a caterpillar in a silk cocoon that she builds herself and which finally ends up being the only witness of her great metamorphosis.
Possibly that chrysalis must not be at all comfortable for the monarch. Locked, tight, silent and alone. An unknown scenario for her… However, she senses that something bigger is coming for her, she does not know it for sure, but her intuition whispers to her that it will happen… Then, she trusts the process, she surrenders to the process and that is when she becomes the protagonist of your change.
On day 15 she is no longer the same. She has changed her caterpillar skin for butterfly skin. The monarch breaks the chrysalis and feels new. She feels her wings and begins to beat them slowly to irrigate them until after about 12 hours, she takes her first flight. The monarch has exchanged a life at ground level for one without limits, in the air.
Watching this moment made me think about our own moments of transformation. If I look at my life and probably yours, I would say that those moments of profound change have been in silence and solitude, like the monarch.
Change is life itself.
We face many moments of change: a job change; a divorce; the loss of a child; from a parent or partner; the distance from a friend, an illness…
Nobody prepares us to change, I am not sure that they have taught us to positively dispose to changes. Furthermore, I believe that there is a natural resistance towards changing or facing changes in our lives.
Sometimes this resistance has to do with a predisposition of our brain to everything new and everything that requires effort. It is an unconscious resistance… They propose something new to us and perhaps our first response is NO, it is better to stay as we are… They invite us to dare into an unknown space and we say… we better try it in the future…
Our brain likes comfort, it likes what is known and what does not generate effort. So we face change and we resist it and refuse it.
Let’s go back to the monarch butterfly… What would have happened if the monarch had resisted entering her chrysalis?
What would have happened to her species?
Thanks to the fact that she did not resist, we can see her colors and admire her flight and migration.
From chaos emerges the cosmos, from disorder the order, from darkness the light, from the ugly the beautiful, and we can only recognize the virtues of the beautiful against the background of what we find ugly; that which seems graceful to us above that which is unfortunate to us. What is broken, fractured and hidden can be noticed thanks to the contrast with what is integrated, what is linked, what is united.
Words by Michel Manciaux in his book Resilience.
That’s right… it is only possible to admire the light after going through the dark.
If we did a survey we would realize that what draws the most attention about the monarch is her colors. It’s what everyone remembers.
However, its transformation process is somewhat forgotten by the result.
It is its process of change that allows us to admire its colors.
It is her process of change in silence, loneliness and perhaps pain, that makes her later enjoy her wings.
It is the process of its change in the chrysalis that will allow its migration.
And possibly the same thing happens with us.
It is that change that we are going through that will bring us new learning and a new life.
Like the Monarch, we probably won’t be able to see the wings that await us after that change. Nor do we have access to see that destiny that will be waiting for us after the change.
But we have to be sure that there will be something for us after that metamorphosis. We will then have to trust our intuition and embrace that change.
A little over a year ago I faced one of the biggest changes of my life. A change that I never imagined I would experience.
I resisted that big change for several months. I gave him the fight. But I couldn’t change the story. It was then that I entered my own chrysalis.
They were months of a profound metamorphosis, there was also pain and there was silence,… but something whispered to me that after that change something great would come for me.
So it was. Being in my chrysalis, I had the impression that I had to start writing… I had to write about what I was experiencing and what I had lived… And thus the first lyrics of SOY MONARKA were born.
In the first pages I was presented with a dilemma: would I open my story? Would you tell in this book what you had experienced and what you were experiencing at that time? I knew that opening my story would mean opening the good and not so good, opening pleasant moments but also wounds.
So I struggled for several months, in fact I even procrastinated… I filled my agenda with many activities so that there was no time left to look in the mirror and look at my past. Until I realized that I couldn’t talk about the inner world if I didn’t have mine.
So I decided.
I began to remember and with the memory came the words and the manuscript began to take shape.
I also had the impression of speaking with great women of the world to record their stories and include them in the book.
I went in search of 10 extraordinary women. And I found them… their stories and their conquests joined the draft.
After a year of work, I AM MONARKA was almost ready to be born. And I was also ready to emerge from my chrysalis as a new woman.
I AM MONARKA has a life of its own.
Writing it taught me that it is healthy to look at ourselves. That it is healthy to look inside ourselves. That we heal when we do it. And that we help heal our circle of love when we do so.
Writing it taught me that these changes in my life bring a gift and that embracing change will not be easy but doing so will allow me to live in peace.
Think about that change you had in your life, or that perhaps you are experiencing today.
You can’t see your wings, you probably can’t see where this change you are experiencing will take you… but rest assured that there will be something for you after that metamorphosis. It will then be up to you to trust your intuition and embrace your change.
Thank you.
Check out the photo gallery of the Launch here