New Folk Tales of Practicing Metamorphosis
Collaboration without complying. Safety outside the walls. A multi-layered narrative that breaks the stories keeping us trapped.
Thousands of starlings moving as one fluid intelligence. No central command. Each bird responds only to its immediate neighbors, yet together they create patterns too complex for any single mind to imagine.
Narratives that connect without controlling. Ideas that spread organically, adapting and evolving. Stories that refuse the binary between fiction and reality, between the rational and the magical.
Social transformation that doesn't wait for heroes or saviors. Communities that organize themselves through shared stories, tools, and practices. Revolution as emergence, not conquest.
When a caterpillar retreats into a chrysalis, it doesn't grow wings.
It dissolves into goo.
Inside that goo, imaginal cells activate.
Pre-coded seeds of something new: wings, legs, a future.
This "code" helps rewrite the goo's structure.
The caterpillar doesn't evolve.
It self-destructs to reorganize.
An eating machine. Consuming everything. Growing bigger but never changing form. Afraid of the dissolution that transformation requires.
Postmodernity created the chrysalis - taught us to dissolve, to doubt everything. But gave us "solve without coagula." We're stuck in the goo, grieving a world that never reorganized.
Imaginal cells: Stories as seeds. Ancient wisdom and new possibilities. From consuming machine to essential for biodiversity. What if we stopped being afraid of becoming the butterfly?
"Stories are seeds. Imaginal cells. Whispers of what could be.
Some ancient. Some silenced. Some just now awakening.
Let's tell good stories. Let them compost in the goo. To grow wings."
25 years in the future, Vera is a journalist who hates the dying city she's moved to. She meets a crow that speaks of murmurations. She discovers the Weavers - Lila, Maris, Flick, and Shadow - who become her community of resistance.
But this isn't a typical hero's journey. Instead of saving the world and returning to normal, they refuse to come back: "The world we left wasn't broken - it was a lie."
Six "glitches" break into Vera's story - academic critiques of capitalism as religion, tech solutionism, the mythology of individual heroes. These aren't interruptions; they're intentional intrusions of real-world analysis.
Each glitch forces readers to confront: How do the stories we tell ourselves keep us trapped in systems that are killing us?
This isn't entertainment. This isn't manifesto.
This is speculative responsibility - embedding tools for real change within enchanted narratives that refuse the rational/magical binary.
Without magic, we become machine. Our technologies feel more alive than we do because we forgot the Earth is already enchanted. We don't need to invent wonder - we need to notice it again.
This is only one murmur.
There are many more.
Let's hope this resonates with you.