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Rebecca Solnit on the Butterfly


One of the values of coming to MEA is we give you the safe crucible to become a first-class noticer which allows metaphors aplenty to arise. A recent compadre who was meditating near our pond in Santa Fe spotted a snake, a symbol of transformation and also known for its molting. She immediately came to realize she’d outgrown her present life that was constraining her vision of her new life. Just like we outgrow our shoes as adolescents, we often outgrow our lives as middlescents.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting writer Rebecca Solnit on a couple of occasions in San Francisco and love her book “A Field Guide to Getting Lost.” She has some keen observations on the art…and ugliness…of transformation. 

“The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel “Regeneration,” Pat Barker writes of a doctor who “knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cat of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.” But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is “psyche,” the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.” 

”But the changes in a butterfly’s life are not always so dramatic. The strange resonant word ‘instar’ describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar, like a snake, like Cabeza de Vaca walking across the Southwest, splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar. It remains a caterpillar as it goes through these molts, but no longer one in the same skin.  There are rituals marking such splits, graduations, indoctrinations, ceremonies of change, though most changes proceed without such clear and encouraging recognition. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.”

-Chip

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