LANNIE would like me to tell you that, after finally narrating her own essays last week, she has had to hand the microphone back to her favorite British lady.

That would be me.

Because apparently developing shingles on the roof of her mouth wasn’t quite enough, so they eventually worked their way down toward her larynx and gave her laryngitis too. Her voice is currently somewhere between unreliable and completely absent.

Which, considering this essay is about transformation, dismantling, uncertainty, and trying to recognize what might be emerging while everything feels slightly chaotic, is almost too perfectly on theme.

She’s not sure she could have arranged the metaphor any better if she’d tried.

So, for now, her favorite British lady is back at the podium.

The Imaginal Cells

An Essay written by Lannie, narrated by her favorite British lady

I think I was six the first time someone showed me God.

Which sounds dramatic, particularly because it happened in a first-grade classroom and God was, as I recall, hanging from a stick.

It was a chrysalis.

My teacher had brought one into our classroom and explained that there was a monarch butterfly inside.

Or there would be.

I don’t remember exactly how she explained the science of it. I was six. There were probably crayons nearby. Somebody was almost certainly eating paste.

But I remember the chrysalis.

I remember watching it.

And more than anything, I remember how it made me feel.

I was completely overcome by the idea that this unremarkable little thing hanging in front of us contained something entirely different from what had gone into it.

A caterpillar had crawled in there.

A butterfly was coming out.

Come on.

Even at six, that seemed suspiciously like religion.

Or maybe magic.

We watched that chrysalis as a class until eventually there was a monarch where there had previously been no monarch at all.

And then I went on with my life.

For fifty-five years.

I grew up. I went to college. I fell in love. I got married. I had babies. I became a designer. I started a business and ran it for twenty-six years. I collected an absolutely indefensible number of plates. I raised children. I lost people. I got divorced. I left the city that had been home for most of my adult life. I took care of my mother while she was dying and then had to learn how to live in a house where she wasn’t.

I became sixty-one.

And somewhere in all of that, apparently, the chrysalis waited.

A few days ago, I stumbled across a conversation between Mel Robbins and a psychologist who studies imagination. They were talking about transformation and something called imaginal cells.

Which I already loved, because imaginal sounds like something imagination might have invented.

Imaginal cells are involved in the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The actual biology is considerably more complicated than the inspirational-internet version of the story because biology usually is, and I am an artist, so we are going to give the scientists their due and then get back to the part that made me cry.

The idea was that the caterpillar contains, in some form, the beginnings of what it will become.

The butterfly isn’t delivered from somewhere else.

The possibility of it is already there.

And something about that knocked the wind out of me.

Because lately I have been wondering what in God’s name I am doing.

Not metaphorically.

I mean on an almost daily basis.

Almost daily, my brain presents me with a buffet of slightly out-there ideas for us to participate in.

The reasonable part of me says:

“That’s a terrible idea.”

The other, larger, more easily distracted part of me says:

“What time should I be ready?”

This has become something of a lifestyle.

I am trying to rebuild a business.

I am looking for land near Round Top, Texas, for a place I have already named Harp Weaver Manor despite the relatively inconvenient fact that I do not own it.

I started a YouTube channel.

I started writing this newsletter.

I am writing something that may be a book.

I have another thing that may also be a book.

I’ve been wondering whether I could cultivate a speaking career.

I’ve been thinking about hosting small groups of people during Antiques Week.

I want cottages and gardens and long tables and dinners and flowers and workshops and stories and enough money to pay for all of it.

And on any given Tuesday, I can convince myself that all of these things are connected.

By Wednesday afternoon, I am fairly certain I have simply lost my mind.

I call them rabbit holes.

And I am excellent at them.

I can begin the morning researching one perfectly reasonable thing and, six hours later, have named three guest cottages for a property I don’t own and priced a shuttle bus for guests who don’t exist.

This is not, traditionally, how they teach business planning.

And after going down approximately seventeen of these rabbit holes recently, I felt that old question creeping in again.

What is the point?

That’s the question underneath a surprising amount of what I’m doing right now.

Yes, I need to make money.

I am extremely pro-money at the moment.

But I’m beginning to understand that money isn’t the entire shape of the hole I’m trying to fill.

I’m trying to make a life.

More specifically, I think I’m trying to make a life I want to be present for.

Because parts of the old one disappeared.

Some slowly.

Some violently.

Some exactly as they were supposed to.

Children grow up.

Marriages sometimes end.

Cities stop being home.

Businesses change.

Mothers die.

And eventually you look around and realize that so many of the things that once answered the question Who am I? have quietly stopped raising their hands.

And on top of that, life has lately developed the annoying habit of throwing something at my head every time I stand back up.

Money problems.

Old taxes I thought had been dealt with that had very much not been dealt with.

Legal matters.

Financial uncertainty.

A broken wrist.

A broken thumb.

Recovery.

Then something else.

Then something else.

There have been stretches when I honestly felt like I ran into a wall every morning, repaired the damage by afternoon, went to bed, woke up, and ran into another one.

For example, the other morning I started watering everything before the ground began impersonating the surface of the sun.

While I was watering, I apparently disturbed a wasp on the bur oak as I walked past, and it decided my neck looked offensive and stung me right near what I consider to be a VERY IMPORTANT VEIN.

So naturally, I put vinegar on it, because apparently I am now someone’s pioneer grandmother.

Then, while I was tending to my wasp wound and digging around in a drawer for the topical Benadryl, my phone dropped out of my hand.

I bent down to pick it up, and one—or possibly both—of my Great Danes walloped me in the mouth with those beautiful big heads of theirs and gave me a fat lip.

So, after two weeks of shingles, I also had a swollen lump on my neck and a bloody fat lip.

I looked a little bit like I had lost a bar fight.

At this point, I’m fairly certain I have been unknowingly cast in a 2026 reboot of a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon starring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

Only this one is called Lannie Coyote, and the plot revolves mostly around me looking upward periodically, waiting for the ACME anvil to arrive.

You know how people say, “Everything happens for a reason”?

They leave out the part that says:

“Sometimes the reason is that you’re a dumb ass and don’t think things through.”

Which, frankly, accounts for more human suffering than most inspirational signage would have you believe.

Some things happen because we made bad decisions.

Some because somebody else did.

Some are consequences.

Some are accidents.

Some are loss.

Some are just rotten freaking luck.

And I don’t believe we have to turn every painful thing into a spiritual assignment just because it happened to us.

My mother didn’t die so I could transform.

Financial fear is not a gift basket from the universe.

Breaking my wrist and thumb did not make me a better person.

Mostly it made me a person with a broken wrist and thumb.

But there is another thing we get wrong about the butterfly.

We make it pretty.

We put butterflies on greeting cards and garden signs and mugs that say things like Trust the transformation.

Which is easy for us to say.

We’re not the caterpillar.

Because metamorphosis is not a spa treatment.

Inside the chrysalis, enormous parts of the caterpillar’s old anatomy are dismantled and repurposed while the structures of the adult insect develop.

The old form becomes, quite literally, material for the new one.

That feels considerably more familiar to me.

Because I think I’ve been calling what came after all of this rebuilding.

And I’m not sure that’s the right word anymore.

Rebuilding implies that you know what the structure is supposed to look like.

The house burned down; here’s the blueprint; put it back.

But I don’t want the old house back.

I loved enormous parts of it.

There are rooms in it I would give almost anything to walk into again.

But I don’t want to live there.

And maybe that’s why rebuilding has felt so confusing.

Perhaps I’m not rebuilding.

Perhaps I’m in the middle of becoming something for which there is no blueprint yet.

Which brings me back to that caterpillar.

A caterpillar doesn’t become a better caterpillar.

It doesn’t finally get organized.

It doesn’t buy a planner.

It doesn’t establish a morning routine, hydrate properly and optimize its protein intake.

It becomes something its previous form could not have explained.

And apparently this process is not particularly tidy.

This comforts me enormously.

Because neither am I.

Maybe Love, LANNIE is an imaginal cell.

Maybe Harp Weaver is one.

Maybe Curated Chaos is one.

Maybe the ridiculous book I’m writing is one.

Maybe The Vintage Laundry, which I thought for years was the whole animal, turns out to be material that gets carried forward into something else.

Maybe some of these ideas aren’t imaginal cells at all.

Maybe they’re just rabbit holes.

That’s possible too.

I don’t think transformation means every idea you have is extraordinary.

Some ideas deserve to be abandoned with dignity and perhaps a small graveside service.

But I’ve started noticing something.

Certain things keep coming back.

Story.

Beauty.

Place.

Gathering.

Making.

Beginning again.

I keep finding them no matter which rabbit hole I crawl down.

And maybe that’s how you tell.

Not by asking which idea you’re most excited about today.

But by noticing what survives.

What keeps appearing.

What continues asking something of you after the initial excitement wears off.

What imagined future actually causes you to behave differently in the present.

Harp Weaver makes me call the realtor.

Writing makes me get out of bed and write.

Curated Chaos made me turn on a camera when I would have been perfectly comfortable spending the rest of my natural life on the other side of one.

Vintage Laundry keeps teaching me that a table was never really about the plates.

These things are changing what I do.

That feels worth noticing.

Maybe that is what survives the dismantling.

And maybe transformation isn’t about being grateful for everything that broke you open.

Maybe it’s simply about deciding what can still be made from what remains.

Because when I look at my old life from here, I can see pieces of it everywhere in whatever this next thing is becoming.

Twenty-six years of The Vintage Laundry taught me about beauty and hospitality and gathering.

Being a designer taught me to see things before they exist.

Motherhood taught me what it means to make a home around other people.

Caring for my mother taught me things about belonging and leaving and love that I suspect I will spend the rest of my life trying to put into words.

My marriage gave me my children and decades of a life that mattered enormously to me even though it wasn’t the life I would keep forever.

The money problems are forcing me to understand money in ways I wish I had understood it thirty years ago.

Even my mistakes are becoming material.

Not because I’m glad they happened.

I’m not.

But they’re here.

And if they’re here, I might as well build with them.

Maybe I have been taking the protein soup of my former life—there’s a sentence I certainly never expected to write—and trying to make wings out of it.

I don’t know that I believe manifestation means imagining something hard enough and having the universe deliver it to your front porch.

If that worked, there would currently be twelve unrestricted acres outside Round Top with my name on the deed, a charming old house, a barn and a perfectly functioning septic system.

I have checked.

There are limits.

But I do believe imagination lets us visit a life before we know how to get there.

And sometimes, after we’ve visited often enough, we begin recognizing the road.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing.

Maybe all this imagining isn’t evidence that I’m scattered.

Maybe some of it is reconstruction.

Maybe some of it is how I am finding my way.

And maybe the six-year-old girl sitting in that first-grade classroom understood something the sixty-one-year-old woman would eventually need.

She didn’t know what was happening inside that chrysalis.

She couldn’t hurry it.

She couldn’t help.

She couldn’t even see evidence, for a while, that anything was happening at all.

She just kept looking.

Until one day there was a wing.

I don’t know what I’m becoming.

That’s still the truth.

I don’t know exactly where I’ll live.

I don’t know what Harp Weaver will become.

I don’t know which thing will make money.

I don’t know whether there is a book in all these words or a stage somewhere in my future.

I don’t know whether some of my beautiful ideas will turn out to be imaginal cells or spectacularly elaborate bad decisions.

Based on the historical evidence, probably a little of both.

But maybe I don’t need to see the butterfly yet.

Maybe right now I only need to notice what refuses to disappear.

The stories.

The beauty.

The places.

The tables.

The people.

The making.

The possibility that life can begin again without pretending the life before it didn’t matter.

Some mornings I still wake up wondering what the point of any of it is.

But I’m beginning to think that may not be the question I need answered yet.

Maybe, for now, it’s enough to look at this strange collection of things emerging in my life and say:

Oh.

Something is happening in here.

And then keep feeding whatever looks like wings.

Now, if you’ll excuse me—

today’s bad decision isn’t going to make itself.

Love, Lannie