Spiraling into Costant Universal Flux

Remember good old uncle Heraclitus? Despite the terrifying nastiness of my classical Greek tutor in school, the woman who made three years of my life an utter misery, I have always manifested a respectful fascination for the ancient Greeks and their philosophical efforts. I don't remember a great deal about Heraclitus really, but his Πανθά ρέϊ (Pantha Rei, apologies to the Greek scholars here present, but I don't have a spell check for Greek characters..) everything changes, everything flows, the universal flux (as some have interpreted it), is a concept that has stayed with me and has acquired increasing significance over the years. At a youth camp few weeks before I left for England and Bible college, a newly met friend gave me a passage of Scripture from Isaiah which loosely translated is "You will set forth with joy and return in peace". At the time, that verse gave me a lot of encouragement because somehow I felt like as if God himself was commissioning my departure and sealing a pact of constant vigil and protection over my experience and development. I look at the past five years and I can so very definitively see that. I left home aged 19, with a great deal of passion, zeal, enthusiasm and, yes, overpowering excitement and blissful happiness. However, I was very much like a caterpillar.. I felt ugly, unworthy of love, crooked,inexperienced, unfinished, arrogant in her ignorance, strong of her smallness, overwhelmed by possibility, scared by opportunity, incredulous of dreams. That ever changing, moving, passing of time forces that caterpillar to shake, shiver, evolve..I wonder if caterpillars actually ever wonder if all that pain is worth it in the end..how many times even when people around us encourage us by giving us a picture of what all the hardship will be "worth in the end", it is still hard! Five years later is still 'me', just an adult version of me. Despite the trials and difficulties, the joys and the sorrows, the good, the bad and the damn right ugly, it is still I, still the ugly caterpillar, now enabled to spread my wings to fly. Many times have I complained over the past five years why had I been endowed with the gift to fathom the possibility of flight, a big blue sky to fly, but no ability to actually fly; how many times have I actually felt that my wings had been cruelly plucked out by some unkind giant..what I had not yet realised is that I was still a caterpillar and my wings had not yet developed enough to fly! "Every thing changes, everything flows", and now grown, reinforced, changed and hopefully matured, I venture back to the parental nest as a daughter, as an adult, as a woman.

Moving back to Italy six weeks from tomorrow, can you believe it?