Foreword

This is not a memoir in chapters.

This is a murmuration.

A fluttering of cardboard wings.

A dance of reflections, not resolutions.

A series of stories, small and sacred, scattered across geographies and timelines, but stitched together by a single thread:

the slow, unsteady courage to become.

Here, memory meets metaphor.

Conversations become classrooms.

Cardboard becomes cathedral.

And family becomes a field of possibility.

Each story is a diary entry, not an argument.

Each one asks not to be consumed, but held.

You are invited to read slowly.

To listen between the lines.

To feel the wings beat.

Let the stories move in you as they moved through me.

Because becoming is not a linear path.

It is a relational one.

A friend

Next: The Fifth Version of Me: Winter Lessons from Orléans

© 2025 Dominique Bel. Cardboard Wings: A Constellation of Becoming. All rights reserved.