The Liminal Breath Before Flight | Honoring the Woman Who Carried Me Here

Emergence is not always a dramatic ascent. Sometimes it looks like this; quiet, patient, and deeply embodied.

Last Monday, as the threshold of the Solar Eclipse approached, my partner and I chose to spend the day inside a butterfly conservatory. I felt no urge to mark the moment with noise or ritualized declarations. Instead, I was drawn toward stillness. Toward a softer way of listening.

Within that warm glass sanctuary, the air held a living hush. Beautiful and delicate wings moved like breath made visible, each gentle flutter rippling through the space with quiet insistence. It felt less like observing nature and more like entering a conversation without words, where presence alone became enough.

And then I saw her.

A butterfly newly emerged, suspended from an empty chrysalis. Wings still heavy with becoming, body trembling with the work of arrival. I watched her there, holding on, wondering why she did not rush toward the sky. She remained there, held between what had carried her and what had not yet begun.

Something within me recognized that posture immediately.

In the days since, I have found myself reflecting on the woman who walked beside me through these last nine years, and most deeply through the long shedding of this year of the snake cycle. Not with nostalgia, and not with the urgency to close a chapter, but with the quiet reverence reserved for a path that demanded everything and still asked for more.

She was the one who stood at every ending without turning away. The one who carried transformation not as spectacle, but as endurance. She held heartbreak and revelation with equal steadiness. She learned through fire, not because she sought it, but because the work required completion, and she answered.

Watching that fragile butterfly remain connected to the translucent shell behind her, I felt the truth of integration rather than departure. Transformation does not always arrive as a clean severing. Often it is a soft widening of the self, where what once protected us becomes transparent, no longer defining us yet still honored for its purpose.

Later that evening, scrolling on social media, I learned that the Sabian symbol for 29 degrees Aquarius where this solar eclipse falls is described as "A butterfly emerging from a chrysalis," which represents transformation and the process of personal growth and renewal. This symbol emphasizes the beauty and potential that comes from change and new beginnings.

Reading this, blew my mind, because I didn’t know this when I stood there, now I find myself wondering why me and my partner just decided out of the blue, to visit a butterfly conservatory on the eve of this Solar Eclipse and why, I was so lucky to see this butterfly emerge from the chrysalis and why I seeing her there so fragile moved me to tears.

The scene felt familiar, as if life had quietly placed me inside the very language I have been learning to speak; the language of emergence rather than escape. The chrysalis behind her was hollow, luminous, fulfilled. Its work complete. And in that quiet image, I recognized something within my own bones.

I am not who I was at the beginning of this 9 year cycle. Truthfully, I am not even who I thought I was just a month ago. Something quieter has taken root. Something my past self once reached toward in silent prayer, without knowing what form it would take.

So I sit with this moment not as a beginning, and not as an ending, but as a breath between tides. A sacred pause where my soul understands that what has fallen away was never meant to follow me forward. The year of the Snake taught me the wisdom of release. The year of the Fire Horse begins to whisper of movement.

Yet this week is not about motion. It is about reverence.

Because liminal spaces are often misunderstood. We are taught to prove our transformation by how quickly we rise, how loudly we declare our rebirth. But nature offers another rhythm. The butterfly does not fly the moment it emerges. It hangs in stillness, allowing strength to circulate quietly through fragile wings.

And perhaps this is also what my own body has been asking of me lately.

Receiving this month a diagnosis of rare autoimmune disease has slowed time in ways I could not have imagined. And since, there are days when I want to rush forward, to return to the version of myself that could carry everything without pause.

Yet the butterfly reminds me that healing is not a race toward flight. It is a sacred recalibration; a learning of new rhythms, new boundaries, and a deeper listening to the wisdom that lives within the body itself.

I see a holiness in that pause.

Standing among the soft echo of wings, I understood that liminality is not emptiness. It is integration. It is the body learning to trust what the soul already knows.

And as I step forward into what unfolds next; through this new chapter of my life, through the quiet turning of the sky; I do so as the woman who has been waiting beneath the ashes all along, the one revealed when the masks, the narratives, and every borrowed name finally lose their hold.

What unfolds next is not a return to who I was, but a deeper agreement with who I am now; slower, wiser, and finally listening to the language of my own wings.

Not reborn in flames.

But revealed in stillness. ✨️

☥