Filed under: the difference between stillness and captivity
Galaxies rehearse in miniature. 🪐✨
Don’t Mistake the Cocoon for the Cage
There are chambers in life that close around us like nightfall. We feel the hush and call it exile. We feel the narrowing and call it loss. But not every silence is a prison. Not every closing is a curse. Some silences are wombs. Some shadows are scaffolds. Some endings are beginnings rearranged. The cocoon and the cage share a silhouette— both enclose, both darken, both strip the world away until we can hear only our own pulse. But hear the difference: the cage is built by fear. The cocoon is spun by faith. The cage exists to contain. The cocoon exists to transform. One denies the future; the other prepares it. Inside the cocoon, the body unravels into star-matter. Not death—alchemy. A slow remembering. Cells whispering that they were once sky, that wings have always been hidden in the pattern of their becoming. From the outside it looks inert— motionless, suffocating, small. But inside it is a storm: Galaxies rehearsing in miniature. An eruption disguised as stillness. And yet, we forget. When our own lives draw closed, we panic. We call it stagnation. We call it failure. We call it defeat. But perhaps what we name ruin is only the spiral in motion. Perhaps the unraveling we dread is the exact geometry of transformation. Don’t mistake the cocoon for the cage. The cage says end. The cocoon says wait. The cage says you are trapped. The cocoon says you are changing. Don’t mistake the cocoon for the cage. Because one day, the seam will split. The light will find its way through. And you will not crawl back into what you were. You will rise from your own undoing. You will unfold like prophecy— A constellation given wings. The air itself rearranging to bear your weight. The sky has always been waiting. The sky has always been waiting.
🦋 Ever in metamorphosis,
—Rebecca M. Bell
www.rmbellwrites.com
PS:
Galaxies rehearse
in silence too.
Even stars
begin cocooned.
Filed under: the difference between stillness and captivity