Metamorphosis

Have you ever thought about what happens that turns a caterpillar into a butterfly? It’s not a case of a worm growing wings. Inside its chrysalis, the caterpillar essentially dissolves or melts and from the caterpillar solution, a butterfly grows.  That’s the kind of transformation I’m starting to envision when I  think about  climate breakdown and  COVID-19 and the desire to build back better.

chrysalis

Photo by J. Harrington

Think about what happens when a woman gives birth. The fetus lives in a liquid-filled sack and functions very muck like a parasite in the womb, obtaining nutrition and oxygen through the umbilical cord. After birth, the fetus has become a human infant that breathes oxygen and ingests milk through its mouth. That’s a stunning transformation.

butterfly

Photo by J. Harrington

To respond to the kinds of threats posed by COVID and any subsequent viruses, and the challenges of energy and societal transformation required to adapt to the effects of climate breakdown as well as mitigating the severity of those threats, the world’s economies and cultures must undergo changes as radical as a monarch butterfly or a human fetus. If we do it properly, we should end up with results as beautiful as a monarch and as astounding as a human infant. There will still be a need to grow and develop and mature, but that’s what evolution has prepared us for: adapting to change. Let’s make it the best kind of change we know how to do. There’s already been the  transformation from feudalism to capitalism and there are many different kinds of economies and cultures now functioning in the world. Unlike each butterfly or infant, human societies have done this before. It’s just those of us alive now who haven’t.

The Cabbage Butterfly

Minnie Bruce Pratt - 1946-

The human brain wants to complete—

The poem too easy? Bored. The poem too hard?
Angry. What’s this one about? Around the block
the easy summer weather, the picture-puff clouds
adrift in the blue sky that’s no paint-by-numbers.

In the corner garden, the cabbage butterfly
bothers the big leafy heads, trying to complete
its life cycle by hatching a horned monster to
chew holes in the green cloth manufactured so
laboriously by seed germ from air, water,
light, dirt. There’s no end to this, yes, no end.

Even when we want to stop, stop, stop! Even
when someone else calls us monster. Even when
we fear and hope that we will not have the final
word.

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