Caterpillar Soup
It was a cold winter by Florida standards, but the burgeoning spring blossoms seem right on time anyway. With them have gradually come the wonderful fluttering butterflies. There is a year-round population of monarch butterflies here, as well as some that join in the migration, but when it’s cold they head to the more southern parts of the state. Recently I saw my first one of the season, the first in many months. It was huge, its wingspan almost the size of my hand. Then I noticed several other smaller ones, all very busily drawing nectar from the banquet of flowers all around them.
As I watched, I marveled at their beauty, and mused about the almost mystical metaphoric and symbolic quality of their journey of transformation - from egg to caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly. That musing reminded me of this quote from Adyashanti:
There’s a fierceness about life that calls for a fierceness to not anxiously solve it but to allow it to transform you.
I, and most people I know, tend to put a lot of energy into resisting transformation, into protecting the status quo, or trying to fix life around us. But I’m willing to bet that that butterfly - one of the most heralded products of transformation on the planet - doesn’t resist it at all, doesn’t try to solve anything, but rather embraces it and allows it, with that natural fierceness Adyashanti described.
What would that be like if I just as fiercely adopted the approach of allowing life to transform me? What if I gave up trying to solve life? What an amazing and liberating thought.
I decided to delve a little deeper into the transformational life of a butterfly to see what it might teach me. Of course I knew that a butterfliy starts as an egg, out of which hatches a caterpillar. The caterpillar spends its entire life eating and growing, sometimes shedding its skin six times during that form, and then retreats into the pupa/chrysalis/cocoon stage, and then hatches into a butterfly. But what happens when the caterpillar is in that retreat?
Well, very simply put, after the caterpillar has eaten its fill and formed a protective chrysalis around itself, it basically digests itself! Yep, the entirety of the squirmy leggy caterpillar turns into a liquid soupy mess. It gives up EVERYTHING to become what it is destined to become.
How does it know what it is to become? Because there are certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs that survive the digestive process. They were developed in the egg, before becoming a caterpillar, one for each body part it will need as a mature butterfly - legs, wings, eyes, proboscis, etc. Once the caterpillar has disintegrated all of its tissues except for the imaginal discs, those discs use the protein-rich soup all around them to fuel the rapid cell division required to form the wings, antennae, legs, eyes, genitals and all the other features of an adult butterfly. When the formation is done, the butterfly kicks and pushes its way out, and pumps blood into the droopy wings to support their standing up and out to dry. When they’re dry, the flying begins.
The butterfly KNOWS that it is a work in progress, and so does NOT “anxiously try to solve life” as it moves through its stages, does not resist the digestion of old forms into caterpillar soup. It uses the soup to feed the being that it is destined to become. Embedded in the imaginal discs, the butterfly that is to be actually already IS - even though while in progress, it seems to be a hot mess.
I don’t know anything about imaginal discs, but let’s just consider that our own version of that - taken out of the biological process and into that of consciousness - might be that we KNOW who we are, in our hearts/souls/spirits. We know that inwardly, even before we have developed our consciousness enough to accept who we are, understand what we are capable of, and see ourselves as the majestic beings that we are.
So we swim about in our own version of caterpillar soup - our memories and experiences, imagined futures and reimagined pasts, that become our stories and beliefs, that become our bodies’ interpretation and reflection, that become our words, actions, emotions and thoughts, awaiting our awakening consciousness to accept that ALL of that soup, every single drop of it, is there to awaken us into the glory of who we are. Every hurt, fear, rage, comparison, doubt, denial…..all of it is there to feed the awakening heart/spirit/soul. If only we will allow it, rather than fighting it. (“no, not THAT soup, I want another one!”)
My prayer is that rather than anxiously trying to solve life, you may relax into allowing life itself to transform you, as it does the butterfly. May you become an eager eater of your own particular caterpillar soup. Without judging your life experiences that are its ingredients, may you know that your own soup is perfectly composed to transform you into the magnificent form that your heart and soul have already designed for you. May you use all your fierceness to allow life itself to transform you…into who you already are.