What a long title for a post! Read on . . . .

I first heard the phrase “imaginal disc” yesterday in a post from Donna Towers, one of our Enso Circle residents. She wrote that she was in the “Imaginal Disc Stage” with her pod structure exploration.

Donna Towers: Pod Two, Gift of Acceptnce

That phrase, “imaginal disc,” stopped me cold. I didn’t know exactly what it meant yet, but it felt instantly familiar—like something I already understood in my body. So I looked it up.

An imaginal disc is that strange, silent thing inside a caterpillar that already knows it will become a wing (see the wing pouch i the diagram below). It doesn’t look like a wing. It isn’t useful yet. And at first, the caterpillar’s immune system even tries to destroy it. But eventually, that tiny cluster of cells becomes the organizing force of the entire transformation.

When I read that, it landed like a small flash of déjà vu.

Because I know that stage.
I’ve lived in that stage.  – in fact, am living in it now.
I just didn’t have a name for it.

It’s the phase where any new work doesn’t make sense yet. Where it feels scattered, awkward, or unfinished. It’s the stage where the work doesn’t look like what it will become—and sometimes doesn’t even look like it belongs to me. And I realized how often I’m in that stage right after the work for a  exhibition like Encantos is finished, packed, and sent off.

There’s a strange quiet after the work is gone. The adrenaline drains out of my body, and I’m left with this little hollow feeling I never quite expect, even though it happens every time.

For a long while, everything in me has been shaped around one body of work. It had a rhythm. A vocabulary. A gravity. Its own universe! And then it’s finished. Sent out into the world. No longer needing me in the same way.

And that can feel scary. But now I realize that it is often the beginning of the imaginal disc stage. I love that metaphor!

The old form has done its work. Something in me has loosened. But the new thing isn’t visible yet. This is the moment when I’m most tempted to rush. To make something just to make something. To repeat what worked. To grab onto any shape that will make the uncertainly go away.

But transformation doesn’t work like that.

This part asks for trust. It asks me to sit with what I don’t understand yet. To pay attention to the scraps that won’t leave me alone.

A color.
A word.
A shape.
A feeling I can’t explain – like the phrase imaginal disc that suddenly felt like serendipity.

These collected separate shards and notions don’t look like wings. They don’t even look useful. But they carry something inside them. There are possibilities here . . . . .

I think my job in this stage isn’t to decide what comes next. It’s to protect what feels alive, even when it doesn’t make sense yet. And if my caterpillar self can’t see it, maybe it’s because something new is just beginning to grow there—patiently learning how to become wings.Or legs! Or antennae …or maybe a hundred tiny things I don’t have names for yet. Yay for the Imaginal Disc Stage of Creative Metamorphosis!