Seeing Magic | The Hot Mess of Transformation
Deep metamorphosis or creation of any kind is by nature slow, complex...and absolutely awe-inspiring. By sharing an example from our natural world, I invite you to develop reverence for your own process.
What Really Happens When a Caterpillar Becomes a Butterfly?
This is the first of many Seeing Magic episodes in which I’ll share tales, scientific insights, and curious truths about the truly magical, fantastical natural world, of which we are a part.
Today's episode is about what really happens in the transformational process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
This was a scientific insight that I first heard via Jocelyn Glei, who has the excellent ex-productivity podcast, Hurry Slowly. When I was listening to this particular episode, I was in the process of going through a period of transformation that felt deeply uncomfortable. I found this story of the caterpillar into the butterfly grounding and remarkable.
You may be more scientifically enlightened than I was, but I hadn’t considered what actually happens when a larvae enters a cocoon and emerges as a butterfly. If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I may have suggested that the plump body of a caterpillar simply sprouts wings and becomes a butterfly, but the natural process is even more remarkable. It has a lot to teach us about the truth between natural, organic, biological, and spiritual transformation as a human being who is part of this natural world.
The Hot Mess of Transformation
First, the caterpillar digests itself entirely. It releases enzymes to dissolve all of its cell tissue. If you interrupted this process and opened a chrysalis in the middle of this transformation, you’d be confronted with a hot mess of sticky cellular glue.
The cells are dissolved and slowly begin to rearrange themselves into the shape of the butterfly, but all cells are not made equal. There’s a particular group of highly organised cells called imaginal discs that survive the digestive process. These imaginal discs are the organising points for new body parts of the future butterfly. They begin to sprout. The wings sprout from one imaginal cell, the antenna, legs, and other features sprout from other imaginal cells.
This parallels with a human reproductive cycle where a baby girl is born with all of the eggs she will ever produce in her lifetime already inside her. This means that the egg that became you was already alive inside your mother, inside her mother. The process of you becoming you began far earlier than one might think.
The Mundane Magic of a Slow, Incredible Process
The building blocks of an enormous transformation, evolution, or creation are present even on a subtle and invisible level long before we could imagine.
Truly remarkable creative transformation is a very long, slow, and often invisible process.
That moment of magic – the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis totally transformed, utterly beautiful – has an invisible process of total disintegration, disillusionment, and hot mess glue behind it.
I find this heartening and supportive because we worry so much about falling behind and things taking longer than we expected. We live in a culture of instant gratification, but when we have reverence for the transformative process I believe we can experience more gratitude, awe, and wonder for the true magic of how much is involved. It is so much deeper and more meaningful than what an instant transformation would entail.
The magic is in the true complexity of this life-giving process. So many tiny moments had to go right for the caterpillar to become the butterfly and for the tiny egg that existed inside your mother at the time of her birth to end up being you, a unique expression of lifeforce.
Expecting transformation, evolution, or revolution to happen quickly, easily and in an aesthetically pleasing way is a recipe for impatience, frustration, and lack of reverence.
Whatever you’re trying to transform at the moment – whether it’s your professional life, your body, or your relationship with someone – I want you to keep the story of the caterpillar into the butterfly in mind. Start to revere the slow but steady magic of cell by cell, conversation by conversation, and decision by decision.
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