The Story of a Butterfly... And the Courageous Caterpillar

I wonder how the caterpillar feels, in that moment before it accepts its fate.

It can’t know what it is about to become, can it?

It has spent its whole life as one thing, with one thing on its mind: eating. It just eats and grows, and it uses the growth to eat some more. It learns the right way to move, it learns the best things to eat. I bet you if a caterpillar had Twitter, it would read tweets about how to eat more and share tweets about how much it eats.

And when it looks around, it sees most of its friends die off, eaten by birds. Only about 10% of caterpillars survive to the point of making a cocoon. Those that do must feel pretty good about themselves and how good they are at staying alive. They probably also feel terrified of the sky, the place death comes from.

When it sees its friends go into a chrysalis, it must think that’s the end. Certainly, the thing that emerges is not what went in and as soon as it can it flutters off into the place death comes from, never to return.

So, it must be terrified of what happens in a cocoon. I would be. If I saw all the people older than me eventually wrap themselves up and stay immobile for almost a lifetime, then something that looked like a monster that ate my friends emerged, I would not assume good things had happened.

Despite this, once the caterpillar consumes all the leaves it can, once it realizes that the next leaf no longer represents progress on its journey, but would only serve to delay it, in that moment, it stops moving. It knows it will never move in the same way again, its mastery over its environment now worthless. It decides to hang itself off a leaf, floating in space, with nothing to support it, with no defenses to protect it, and it builds a thin shell around itself. It must know it is vulnerable, but it trusts that something will protect it until it is ready.

I think about it a lot. And I think about how hard it is to confront our deepest, most traumatic experiences. I think about looking into the wounds that affect us, and seeing the unknown and how it looks like the place death comes from. How we think about the fact that we can just keep doing the things we’ve been doing, the things we’ve done to avoid it, and how at some point the next bite isn’t progress. It’s regression. And how to continue our journey we are going to have to stop. We are going to have to look into that thing, dangle from a leaf, go inside of ourselves and hope that something will protect us until we are ready.

Then something magic happens. The butterfly emerges. Where it could only creep along branches, it can now fly through space, unconstrained. It changes from being a consumer of its environment to something that creates its environment, pollinating flowers and spreading seeds. It goes from reviled to revered.

But for that to happen, it must do the really hard thing. It must look into the void, uncertain of what comes next, embrace everything that scares it, let go of everything it was and trust the universe will protect it long enough to become what it was meant to be.

And every single time a caterpillar has the chance to do it, it does.

Isn’t that something?