As one story falls away, another is emerging

Inside the chrysalis, there are two stories playing out, both happening at the same time.

The form of the caterpillar breaks down into a gooey soup, but the form of the butterfly hasn’t yet taken shape.

This metaphor beautifully sums up what is happening in the world right now. Both in the outer world, as the systems crumble at an ever-alarming pace, and in our inner landscape, as a light shines on what isn’t working for us anymore, and with it, turmoil often ensues.

It can feel like a bumpy old time when one story is falling away. So, knowing this can help – that you’re in the soupy phase, where the old has broken down and something new is slowly forming.

I remember my therapist telling me this many years ago, when my own life felt as though it were falling apart. A broken marriage. Letting go of my home and moving into a caravan.

These were times of real despair in many ways for me.

She said to me, “Something else incredible is forming, Nicola, even though you are too deep in grief and turmoil to see it right now.”

Those words stayed with me.

So, if this is where you find yourself today, let these words meet you too. Something else is forming. A new story is emerging, even if you cannot yet sense its shape.

Trust the process. The breaking down of the old is part of how the new comes into being, just as the caterpillar must dissolve before the butterfly can emerge.

You’re right in the thick of an alchemical process.

Releasing the old story

This winter is the ideal time to give space for the old story to fall away. The conditioning we have undergone. The values we have been taught. The beliefs we have inherited. The musts and must nots, dos and don’ts, and the should’s and shoudn’ts.

So, last weekend I took myself off on an ancestral trip to release an old story that has been consuming me for all my adult life.

Born into a working-class family, my ancestors up all my ancestral lines were workers. Working hard has been built into my DNA, literally. The belief that my productivity matters above all else runs through every cell in my body.

I inherited this story, and it was reinforced through my education, where, from the age of five, my life was governed by the bell. I was required to meet particular objectives and graded based on my performance.

This continued into my career in corporations, where I was always measured and expected to be productive. My time was a unit of productivity to achieve someone else’s gain.

It is a tough conditioning to let go of. This has been my spiritual work over the last twenty years and continues to be so.

But every year, I get better with this, and this week, I have been doing more work on releasing that old inherited story.

On my recent ancestral trip to Yorkshire, I worked with a story from over two hundred years ago, that of my four-times great-grandfather, Thomas. When his family lost their right to farm their land through the Enclosures, Thomas moved into the slums of Leeds, where he spent most of his life caught in the work engine of the Industrial Revolution.

The consequences of that displacement echoed through the generations. His descendants remained in those slums for four generations, with my mum being the last to be born there. She left as a child with my nan and grandad to the Garden of England, Kent.

I grew up hearing stories from my nan about what life was like living in the slums. She would tell me how she would walk the streets as a child picking up scraps of coal that had fallen off the wagons. There were strips of cardboard in her shoes to soak up the rain that came in through the holes. This was a tough life.

During my research trip over the weekend, I visited a Victorian slum exhibition and spent over an hour there. I left feeling hemmed in, constricted, and deeply repressed by the weight of it. The constant noise. The oppressive closeness. The foul smell.

Then, a few days later, I visited Skipwith Common, one of the last remaining lowland heathlands in England and a site of national importance. It was a place of open woodland and pasture, where kestrels and buzzards hovered above birch, pine, heather, and gorse.

Children played with sticks in puddles, entirely at home in the landscape around them.

The comparison between these two places will stay with me for the rest of my life.

And yet, for my ancestor Thomas, this was the trajectory of his life. From a small boy taking the family cow up onto the common to graze, to living in what must have been some of the harshest conditions humanity has known, hemmed in by heavy industry.

The power of ceremony

I held several ceremonies during my trip. One was at the workhouse, where Thomas died a lonely death, separated from his family when he was just too old to work as a horse keeper anymore. The other was in the graveyard at Tadcaster church, where my ancestors are buried, going right back to the English Civil War. Had Thomas’s family not had their land taken from them, he would have lived a very different life here in the village, surrounded by his intergenerational community and farming his land.

On my way back to Lancashire, I stopped by the church in Spofforth where Thomas and his wife, Susanah, married. By amazing ‘chance’, there was a lady, Christine, who had popped back for a few minutes to pick something up, and so the door was open. I explained why I was there, and she offered to sit and wait for me. I walked down the front of the church and sat in the pew right next to where they had spoken their marriage vows.

The tears began. Uncontrollable tears flooded from me. But these didn’t feel like my tears. I wept for all my ancestors who were denied their rural life and forced into servitude, working, working, working. I was consumed with grief for them, knowing what became of their lives and the injustice of it all. How their lives were only valued for their productivity, not as the people, the heroes and heroines that they were.

I stayed for a few minutes and then carried on crying in my car for a while. To think of Thomas and Susanah’s happiness in that moment when they married, and the excitement of their life ahead. And then to think of what was to come in the decades that followed.

And when Thomas got too old to work, his sixty-year-old body no longer able to endure the gruelling work of looking after horses in the heart of industrial Britain, he was sent to the workhouse. Essentially a prison for the poor, people were institutionalised here, forced to carry out terribly mundane work for the bare minimum of bland food. Thomas probably never saw his wife and son again, even though they were in the very building, partitioned off into separate areas.

This is the story I have been bringing to light this past week, so I can release it. I felt different when I returned home. It felt like the work had been done.

Emergence

Remember the story of the caterpillar and the butterfly?

Inside the chrysalis, as the caterpillar breaks down and becomes formless, held within the protective walls, something extraordinary takes place. Within that living soup are cells known as imaginal cells, carrying the blueprint that guides the formation of the butterfly.

This is what I sense happening within me, and what I believe is unfolding across our Earth right now.

The mess, the uncertainty, the chaos all belong to this gooey phase. The systems we were born into, the same systems my ancestors lived within, are breaking down. Structures that once felt immovable are falling away, and from their ruins, new ground is beginning to form.

I have sensed this shift for many years, and my work has been to orient myself toward the emerging world. Panic has lived close to me for much of my life, since I was around twelve years old, when I first became aware of the damage our way of living was causing to the planet.

And yet, since Samhain at the end of October, over these past seven weeks, something has changed. I feel different in my body, my nervous system, and in how I meet the world. Something quite profound is moving within me.

I attribute this shift to the arrival of Interstellar Nomad 3I/ATLAS.

Now, to many, what I am about to share will sound crazy. When I check in with myself, I wonder about that too. However, it is my intuitive knowing, and I would encourage everyone to do their research, check in with their spirit guides and find their own knowing with this.

3I/ATLAS is an interstellar object, meaning it has come from somewhere outside of our solar system. It’s travelling at great speed through our solar system right now. It has such precision that it moves within just 5 degrees of our ecliptic plane, the plane in which the planets orbit the sun.

It passed our sun in late October, around the time I felt a massive shift within me regarding humanity's outlook on Earth. At this time, it was erupting, projecting matter in gargantuan jets 50,000 km long.

It is in some ways like a comet, but with many anomalies. And it is this, along with the fact that it isn’t of our solar system, that makes it so interesting. If you want to know more, watch my short video series here.

I like to call 3I/ATLAS an Interstellar nomad rather than an object. This change in word turns it into a conscious being, which of course it is. Everything has consciousness in animism.

This can be a strange concept to get your head around: that everything has consciousness and sentience. I worked with this for 17 days in the summer on my pilgrimage to Ingleborough Mountain in the Yorkshire Dales. Throughout that time, I met the mountains as sentient beings rather than simply mountains. I listened, related to them, and entered into conversation with them.

I have recently learned a lot about nomads through a book I was guided to read in a shamanic journey, Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin.

Throughout the history of our world, nomads have been the change-makers, as Sattin writes:

“The path picked through ruins, the highway of history, would have us believe that the only notable achievements of the 10,000 years before the Christian Era came from people who were settled. But we know from the builders of Gobekli Tepe through to the Huns who hastened the end of the Roman Empire, nomads, migrants and other people who lived on the move made significant contributions in advancing civilisation, from building the first stone monuments to taking the horse and teaming it with wagons and chariots.”

Our Interstellar Nomad is here to help us. Change is coming. It will be bumpy – change so often is – but it will take us to a much better place for humanity here on Earth, and one that we aren’t yet able to comprehend as possible.

Potential

Over the past six weeks, my spirit guide has been calling to me frequently, sometimes daily, bringing the same message again and again: potential.

We have very little awareness of our true potential as human beings. Much of what is possible exists beyond the edges of our current understanding.

The images I have been shown speak to this. At first, it was like rain falling on a desert, followed by an explosion of beautiful purple flowers. Then, more recently, I was shown that same desert transformed into dense woodland, resembling a rainforest.

Curious, I looked into whether this could happen in the physical world. And it has. At different points in history, the Sahara Desert has been forested.

Who would have imagined that?

This is the potential I sense in 3I/ATLAS: the capacity to turn desert into forest. I experience this as unfolding both in the outer world and in our inner landscapes.

There will soon come a time to begin dreaming, and to dream boldly. To ask what we truly want from our lives, and who we are ready to become.

And when I say dream, I really do mean dream big.

Not of this dark matter

Last week, in a shamanic journey, I was shown a scene from a film. I love receiving messages this way, as it allows me to step fully into the imagery and meaning. The scene was from Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, during Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Knight training with Yoda on the swamp planet of Dagobah.

Luke is learning to work with the Force, beginning by moving rocks without touching them. He succeeds. Then Yoda asks him to lift his spacecraft from the swamp where it has sunk. Luke tries, fails, and walks away in frustration, convinced it cannot be done. Moving rocks feels possible, but lifting a spacecraft does not.

Yoda’s response is that the difference exists only in Luke’s mind. “You must unlearn what you have learned. Do or do not. There is no try.”

Yoda then lifts the craft effortlessly from the swamp.

Luke watches, stunned, and says, “I don’t believe it.”

“That,” Yoda replies, “is why you fail.”

This takes me back to the story of the chrysalis. If a caterpillar only believed it could ever be a caterpillar, the butterfly would never emerge.

Yoda then talks about how we are more than our bodies, and our physical existence: ‘Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.’

I believe the energy that 3I/ATLAS is carrying has the potential to shift our perception in a similar way, if we are willing to be open to it. Whatever was released with the explosions into space as it passed close to the Sun at the end of October, our Earth will move through it in March.

This interstellar energy feels like support for becoming unstuck, helping us move beyond what we think is possible and toward our truest potential.

This alchemical process we are in may feel fast-moving. It may feel challenging if we resist it. And it may feel exhilarating if we choose to move with it.

What feels essential now is holding the highest vision we can, even if we do not yet have language for it, or a clear sense of what it might look like. Standing in a desert, would you imagine a forest? Looking at a caterpillar, would you anticipate a butterfly?

If someone told you this was possible, would your response mirror Luke’s, that it cannot be done?

My encouragement to you is to hold the highest possible vision for your future, even if it feels beyond your current understanding.

As I say, it’s time to dream big.

At the Way of the Buzzard, we will work through this process over the coming months. Right now, we are in the soupy phase, allowing the old story to fall away and exploring the resources available to support us as it does. This is winter time. Gestation time. Slow time.

There is no need to do very much at all, only to stay aware and allow whatever is ready to fall away to do so in its own way. Be open to change. Be open to letting go.

Many are working with ancestral inheritance and trauma, as I was last weekend. For others, the focus is on relationships, work, or long-held patterns that have shaped their lives. All of this unfolds with guidance, supported by spirit guides and by time spent in nature.

As spring approaches, beginning with Imbolc on the 1st of February at our Ignite the Spark At Home Retreat, we will move into a phase of visioning, carrying this work through to the Spring Equinox and beyond.

And for now, we begin with the Winter Solstice and the New Moon today. You are warmly invited to join us. It is free to attend and offers a powerful moment to drop into this work together, at the turning point of the year.

Cosmic synchronicity

One final story I want to share today, something that has caught my attention over this past week, is the remarkable timing surrounding the discovery of 3I/ATLAS.

On the 1st of July this year, the very day 3I/ATLAS was first spotted, astronomers also recorded a huge burst of energy arriving from a distant galaxy. This was a moment of cosmic synchronicity that deepens the sense of mystery surrounding this interstellar nomad and hints at the deeper significance.

Less than twenty-four hours after 3I/ATLAS was first picked up, a record-setting gamma ray burst reached our planet. These bursts are among the most energetic events we can observe in the universe, emitting the highest vibrational frequencies of light. Their origins are still not fully understood.

This particular burst was extraordinary. It lasted for twenty-four hours, with three distinct pulses. It was the longest-lasting gamma ray burst ever recorded and the second strongest on record. The light from this event had been travelling for around five billion years, arriving from almost the same region of the sky that 3I/ATLAS emerged from.

These are two completely different cosmic phenomena arriving from roughly the same direction, within the same narrow window of time.

What astonishing synchronicity.

When we slow down, open our eyes, and truly pay attention, it becomes easier to sense that something remarkable is unfolding. There is a feeling of support, of movement, of profound transformation underway, both within our world and beyond it.

As one of our mystery school members so beautifully said:

3I/ATLAS.

AT LAST.

Click here to register for our Winter Solstice New Moon gathering. It's free.

Friday 19th December, 7pm or via the replay available Saturday morning