One of my favorite weekends of the year so far was our inaugural Golden Girls weekend workshop in mid-January, which I wrote about in this blog post. Dana was one of the women who participated and she came up with this wonderful metaphor to describe what we’re doing. If you’re curious to experience one of these Golden Girls weekends, we have two more scheduled in Santa Fe: April 2-5and May 21-24.
In biology, imaginal cells are tiny clusters of living intelligence hidden inside a caterpillar. Long before wings appear, long before flight is even imaginable, these cells quietly carry the blueprint of what the creature will become. While the caterpillar busies itself with eating and surviving, the imaginal cells wait. They are not in a hurry. They are not loud. But when the moment of transformation arrives, they awaken, multiply, and organize the materials of the old form into something entirely new.
They build the butterfly.
The MEA co-living model follows this same elegant logic.
The people who choose to live together inside a Chrysalis house are its imaginal cells.
They arrive because something is shifting. Careers are re-forming. A stirring of a desire for a new purpose is rising. Adventurers are seeking new horizons. Identities are loosening. Long marriages have ended. Children have launched. Caregiving roles are evolving. They may be pioneers looking to forge new paths. Or perhaps they are just curious about what could be? The outer structure of life is changing or shifting, and with it comes a tender, luminous question: Who am I now?
In this in-between season, residents do not come to disappear. They come to explore, connect, contribute, and experience something new and innovative.
Each housemate brings a future self already stirring within them. New rhythms. New ways of loving and being useful in the world. Like biological imaginal cells, they hold forms that are not yet visible, even to themselves.
Individually, they may feel tentative and uncertain.
Collectively, they become catalytic.
Inside the SageHouse, patterns reorganize. Old habits soften. Conversations stretch longer. Meals become ceremonies. Silence is allowed. Curiosity is practiced. Governance is shared. The nervous system of the house slows enough for something wiser to speak. Community is created and nurtured.
In the insect world, imaginal cells are sometimes attacked by the caterpillar’s immune system at first because they do not look like the tissues of the old form. They are different. Radical. Unrecognizable.
So too with human transformation.
A person in reinvention can feel disruptive to their former life. Friendships may strain. Roles may fall away. Productivity scripts could undergo a metamorphosis. MEA co-living houses offer a place where that strangeness is not pathologized but protected. Where becoming is considered legitimate work. Creativity and exploration are celebrated.
As imaginal cells multiply, they find one another. They link. They coordinate. They form organs, wings, eyes, sensory systems. They do not compete for dominance. They cooperate in design.
Housemates practice the same choreography.
They are not roommates merely sharing square footage. They are co-evolutionaries. Witnesses. Gentle architects of the community’s becoming.
One person experiments with a new creative practice. Another tests a slower way of earning money. Someone learns how to rest without apology. Someone else learns how to speak again after years of caregiving silence. Each small experiment sends a signal through the collective: this is possible.
The house becomes a living laboratory for the third act of life.
The MEA co-living model honors something most housing systems forget: humans, like insects, are not static creatures. We are designed for multiple metamorphoses. We shed skins. We reorganize meaning. We build new wings from old materials.
The physical home is simply the container.
The residents are the transformation.
They are imaginal cells with coffee mugs and journals and shared calendars. They are wisdom seekers, elders practicing wisdom in action. They are people brave enough to pause long enough for a deeper pattern to emerge.
And when they eventually leave the Chrysalis house, they do not go back to being caterpillars.
They disperse into the world differently shaped.
Carrying flight in their shoulders.
Carrying community in their bones.
Proof that when the right people gather inside the right container, evolution stops being abstract.
It becomes domestic.
It happens at the breakfast table.
It hums in the hallway.
It unfolds quietly, cell by cell.
It is who they were always growing toward.
-Dana
Dana Collie holds an M.A. in School Psychology, with a career grounded in nonprofit leadership, and is a Founding Partner of ACT III – Aging Navigation – providing guidance to solo agers planning, transitions and end-of-life guidance to solo agers through later-life transitions. A four-time MEA alum and lifelong seeker, she is rooted for now in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while love, family, and spirit keep calling her onward to Houston, Portland, and a small farm in North Texas.