My Cocoon tightens — Colors tease —
I’m feeling for the Air —
A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear —

A power of Butterfly must be —
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty implies
And easy Sweeps of Sky —

So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clue divine —

–Emily Dickinson

photo by Jenn Cavanaugh

We romanticize the caterpillar’s transformation, and it’s easy to do because it’s hidden. And because we relish the concept of shedding a homely, crawling, bristly self for a soaring and beautiful one, but no one wants to undergo what the caterpillar does. It’s a real death and resurrection. Essentially, it digests itself. Breaks down into goo and reforms on a cellular level before a sticky and difficult rebirth.

I’m sure I’ve learned this fact half a dozen different times, because my imagination regularly rejects it and returns to my childhood image of the insect contortionist twisting and bending, unfolding to reveal what it always was inside.

It turns out that there’s some truth to that image as well, in that there are structures within the caterpillar that it has always carried within itself that emerge intact to become the exterior qualities of the butterfly. It doesn’t break down completely, just the parts that were inherent to the larval stage break down and reform around the structures of the mature and fully realized version of itself, which entomologists call the imago. The structures are called imaginal discs. They carry a “pre-pattern” of the butterfly’s final incarnation. Entomologists, whom I’ve never properly credited as the poetic souls they obviously are, can chart a “fate map” for an imago by studying these discs.

I wonder, can we do the same for ourselves? I suspect that outside perspective helps here, but what parts of your self that have always been hidden inside you do you suspect are ready to emerge like wings? What divine clues have you been given to your ultimate design?

If transformation were really all about contortion and twisting into an unfamiliar shape, it seems like the caterpillar would seek out a wide, open space in which to do it. Instead, it creates a small, confined and private space in which to let the hard carapace that protected it dissolve, to let its wings and antennae move to the surface. In our Lenten confinement, so may it be.