Connected While Apart
Butterfly People

Jeneane emailed me a picture of this postcard with the following message a couple of months ago: “Found this old postcard yesterday while cleaning…it struck me as so humorous that I had to share it!! I can’t remember where I got it but apparently I’ve had it since 1994! Enjoy the butterflies.”

We create transformative, resilient new realities by becoming transformed, resilient people. (Krista Tippett)

Dear Mayfield,
I received a typical amount of information about butterflies as a child educated in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  In the summer my brother and I took advantage of the wide space between the original double hung windows in our old house and the screens that were held in place with several hooks like the ones on screen doors.  If we found a fat caterpillar or even a cocoon, we might gather it up with some grass and twigs and deposit all that natural material between our bedroom windows and the screens that covered them.  I recall the formation of cocoons not chrysalises, so we were observing the metamorphosis of a moth not a butterfly.  When a moth would emerge, we would undo one or two of the screen hooks, so there would be space for their new wings to stretch into flight beyond our windows.

Years later I was in my 30’s with Amanda and then Amanda and Molly visiting my aunt and uncle in Monterey, CA. Next door on the Monterey Peninsula is Pacific Grove where there are trees known as the butterfly trees.  Pacific Grove is along the route for the smaller west coast flyway of migrating monarchs.  We always visited in the summer or winter, so I was never there to see the amazing phenomenon in the fall when hundreds and hundreds of monarchs rested on those trees.  I did hear about it though.   It was the late 1980’s, and the steep decline in monarch numbers had not yet begun.  About the same time, Paul Fleishman won the Newbery Medal for Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices.  The voices were those of various insects.  I was enchanted by his poem “Chrysalis” voiced from the perspective of a butterfly who winters over in the chrysalis stage.  I had accumulated  bits and pieces of butterfly knowledge, but it was so little compared to what I have learned during our years of habitat restoration in the Mayfield Monarch Waystation.

In between then and now, when I was writing away for my Doctor of Ministry degree in the first couple of years of this century, now almost twenty years ago, one of my chapters explored a conversation between metaphor, which draws unlike elements into relationship, and metamorphosis, which bursts out into a transformation so unlike what has been before.  Jeneane’s postcard causes me to playfully wonder about humans and metamorphosis, and it sends me back to reread what I wrote then. Here are some of my words at the beginning of the 21st century:

“If metaphor informs connection, then metamorphosis dares change.  Whether subtle or substantial, metamorphosis is about transformation and the disclosure of fresh and untried forms.  It is identity seeking itself anew.  Butterflies, frogs, barnacles, anemones, and certain types of rock undergo complete or incomplete versions of metamorphosis…Metamorphosis results in changes of form, appearance, or character.  It is energetic.  In the midst of metamorphosis, the outcome is not always that apparent.  Metamorphosis can leave us dangling by the slenderest of threads.  Whatever the colors of our known existence, in metamorphosis, those colors are altered at least once, perhaps more.  While metamorphosis is underway, we tremble with the knowledge of what is gone and with an empty awareness of what is to come.  Stilled, we are not assured of survival, at least as we have known it.  We absorb an aloneness beyond description.  The change of metamorphosis can at first feel unwelcome and stormy.  But then in metamorphic change, we can be freed to conceive something utterly impossible in a life of the old and prior forms of being.  Metamorphosis strains the limits of known imagination and is genuinely generative.
Such a description of metamorphosis can suggest a noisy and grand scale.  But more often, metamorphosis is quietly grand.  One indication of that is the relatively short life span of most butterflies…Metamorphosis can be minute but still stunning.”

I look again at Jeneane’s postcard of an unknown origin.  With serious faces everyone is sporting wings of transformation.  How have they changed and at what cost?  Are they embracing the new or longing for what is gone?  Is this a welcome metamorphosis even one they planned for or one that simply crashed into their well-ordered lives?  Can they see beauty in their altered identity or not?

Right now we are living through transformative days.  Will they finally bring us to resilience or not?  I wonder if we might lean into the metamorphic wisdom of our neighbors, the butterflies and moths who frequent the Waystation.  In stillness, we might hear their voices encouraging us through the hardness of now.  Are we open to alterations beyond what we are hesitantly expecting?  Way near the top of this web note are Krista Tippett’s words about transformative, resilient new realities rising from transformed and resilient people.  Is that us?  In some sense, could we be the butterfly people of these days?
Peace, Martha