I think there’s something magical about the creative process that is just good to talk about: the messy process that melts everything into a formless, fertile goo.

When we study something, or get inspired, or even just provoked by something we see or hear or read—there’s a moment where I can feel it starting to melt inside me. The verbal input, the visual input, the data, the emotions—it all begins to lose its original shape. Like it no longer matters where it came from or what it meant. It just liquefies. It becomes goo. The goo of thinking.

That’s how I started to call it after our last offsite. It’s that place where everything mixes into this dense, shapeless substance. And I don’t try to make sense of it too quickly. I’ve learned not to. I don’t chase meaning. I close my eyes. I try to stop judging. I let the bias go. I let the templates go. The accents, the prior versions of myself, the frameworks I’ve used before—they all dissolve. I let the goo do what it needs to do. I let it be.

A few days ago, during the latest ENSO’s off-site, we had the chance to sit with Julia Butterfly Hill. And… She carries a kind of understanding of life that is so wide and so tender. Physical and abstract, spiritual and grounded. She shared with us the story of why her name is Butterfly. And it hit me. It hit all of us, I think.

She described the transformation of a caterpillar. And how, in the cocoon—in the chrysalis—everything turns to liquid. Like, really. Every cell breaks down into this primal soup formed of imaginal cells–isn’t it the best name ever? And from that goo, that weird mix of imaginal cells, every single part of the butterfly is built. Every cell has a role. And that’s it—that’s the process. Liquefaction. Transformation. Emergence.

In Portuguese we say casulo—the cocoon. And I love that word. I’ve been inside many casulos in my life. And usually, those moments came during a crisis. And now that I think about it, it’s funny how close the words crisis and chrysalis sound. Maybe it’s not a coincidence. Maybe every crisis is a chrysalis. Maybe it’s the exact same thing. A moment where we don’t know who we are becoming. Where our shape disappears. And we’re just goo. Confused. In between identities. But not lost—just becoming.

Kirk Souder said something during the offsite that stayed with me: “A crisis is what you experience when your identity is changing.” That’s it. The crisis isn’t the end. It’s not the breaking. It’s the liquefying. It’s the process. And as much as we want to resist it, to hold on to what we know, to keep our shape—we can’t. And maybe we shouldn’t. “What you resist persists”, right?

So I want to celebrate the goo. I want to thank Julia for that image. I want to thank crisis, even, for being the weird doorway into becoming. I want to invite more of us—not just as individuals, but as organizations, as cultures, as society—to enter the casulo. To trust the process. To let the shapes fall apart. And to know that something new can emerge.

The butterfly is beautiful. But so is the goo.