Taking a Deep Dive into Caterpillar Life.

 Friends, 

Over two and a half years ago now, I left social media. This is not a humble brag, or an outright brag. It is just a fact. In the early days of Facebook, back in the aughts, I was hesitant to join. People were leaving MySpace and for some reason, I stubbornly refused to create an account. I didn’t have a good reason...perhaps I was suspicious, or just entrenched in my mid-twenties mindset that if everybody was doing it, it most certainly couldn’t be cool. Ugh. And back then if I wasn’t spending all my time obsessed with how the world perceived my coolness quotient, then I was, by my eye, wasting my time. Little did I know then, that one of the main functions of social media would be in service to the ego. Had I known; I would have leapt in wholeheartedly! Anyway, I did join eventually, and in more recent years, I spent a great deal of time on Instagram. I followed some really great women on there that helped me in many ways recover from my divorce and contemplate how to be a fierce, magical, dream-seeking mama. There were moments of real inspiration and what felt like friendships with women far away from me whom I had never met. I was grateful for those connections because I was so alone in my real life. I had no family connections, few friends, and two tiny children that needed me to heal and regain wholeness so I could nurture them. In addition to gratitude for connection, I also felt bogged down by platitudes and maxims that sought to express spirituality. I was discouraged by opinionated rants that were equivocal in my mind to shouting into the wind. Comment sections rarely evolved into meaningful discourse. And those women who inspired me were not there to call in the wee hours when the dark night of the soul I was experiencing extended month after month in an inky, midnight abyss. All the inspirational quotes in the world were unable to comfort what felt broken and anxious and deeply sad in me. Eventually, I grew angry that I ever imagined they could. There was a deep process happening for me. It was nuanced and complex and confusing and at times utterly unspeakable. I certainly could not take a picture of it and caption it. There was no hashtag for this. I was dissolving, liquefying, dying. I knew this on a soul level and it frightened me. I felt permeable in ways that were disquieting. But there was another awareness that sprung forth. It was that there was new life in the midst of this death. There was mitosis. A building up and rapid division of fresh new cells. I was perplexed about how life and death could exist within me in such profundity at the same time. And then a beautiful gift of synchronicity arrived. I happened to read about the life cycle of a caterpillar. I had no real reason to, and I don’t particularly know how I happened upon it, but there I was taking a deep dive into caterpillar life. 

Of course, most of us learned as children that caterpillars go into a chrysalis and emerge as the much-celebrated butterfly. The butterfly is everything that the humble caterpillar is not. It is colourful, free, beautiful and of course, as many inspirational quotes will remind you, in case you forget—it is transformed. Our culture loves a transformation. Weight loss journeys, a sassy single post-divorce, rags to riches stories, the person who learns to ballroom dance at 80, or even, more solemnly, he who forgives the killer of their child after 20 years. We want to believe we can be transformed too, and so we look to these kinds of stories as evidence that new life is possible. We long to hold on to the idea that we can be freed from what has been our bondage. We can, of course, this is absolutely true. But what happens in the in-between? This is where our culture so often stays silent. We don’t speak on it nearly enough. There is no diagram or hashtag or 10 ways to know list when it comes to navigating deep, uncomfortable transformation. 

The shocking thing that I learned about caterpillars and butterflies is what happens inside the chrysalis. Inside there what once was a leaf-munching caterpillar is liquefied. It dissolves entirely. If one was to interrupt the transformation, we would find caterpillar soup. Nary a wing nor an antenna to be sure. Soup. What is to become, not yet. What was, no more. It’s kind of gross, really. It seems like a rather unsavory way to be alive. But to me, caterpillar soup is a far more exalted state than we really recognise. It is filled with promise. In our human life, we might call it liminal space. Neither here nor there. This a state of being that can’t be summed up in a catchy quote. It is nuanced and sometimes painful. It holds both the stem cells of future joy and the enzymes required to digest the past. This is the kind of space that the monks and mystics of every tradition invite in and contemplate over and over again throughout life. This is the place where we stand at the veil between worlds, right next to the Divine that surges through every stitch and cell of the Universe. It is where we might enter into the “paradox of being broken down and also living: a fierce aliveness, freedom, sacredness and awareness of Divine Presence.” In liminal space, we stand on the brink of becoming and yet if we become preoccupied with quelling our anxiety or shifting out of our confusion, we just might miss it. Our penchant to soothe ourselves rather than paying attention might alleviate discomfort in a moment and prevent the fullness of our becoming. It is destabilizing but it can be the space in our lives where we finally come to recognise and sit with the vulnerability that we are not in control of reality. What does it look like to just be soup? I can tell you what it meant for me. For me it meant I had to turn off the noise of my life. I had to look to nature and to the gifts of my own soul. I had to tune my ear to the rhythmic heartbeat of God that I longed for in my online connections, but never found. I had to embrace betwixt and between without any evidence of becoming. It may look different for you. It likely will. We all dissolve and come to life again in our own unique ways. There may not be a hashtag for that, but I believe there is solidarity between travelers on this road. As a Christian, transformation is at the centre of my newfound faith. We are called to see transformation as evidence of resurrection in all things. And in this Christian life, the life I lead now, there are so many scriptures that speak about the eyes and how we see. Amongst my favourites is found in the gospel of Matthew, when Jesus explains why he teaches in parables. Parables are paradoxical stories that illustrate truth. They require contemplation. He says that through our human seeing and hearing, we human creatures for generations back to ancient Israel, remain utterly committed to missing the point when we hear without understanding and see without perceiving. Healing comes, I think, when we embrace the liminal spaces in our lives. May we all have ears to hear, eyes that see, and hearts that turn toward the radiance of new life and blessing. May we see the co-mingled beauty and the very real struggle of transformation. 

Blessings, 

Amy 
 

The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ Matthew 13:13