Monarch

I have never been much of a flowers-and-frills, sunshine and butterfly type of girl, but I love the monarch. 

I first learned to love them from my grandmother, and my mother--as a child, it was simply a routine activity to scout yards and fields, pastures and road ditches, looking for milkweed plants and their tiny inhabitants, the caterpillars that we would take home, house, feed, watch, and eventually release to their new lives. I learned how to recognize the eggs and capture them before the caterpillars had even hatched. I learned how to collect the milkweed leaves and keep them fresh in the refrigerator, and how to use nylon stockings to make the perfect breathable jar lid that doubled as a safe place to attach a chrysalis. Grandma showed me how to use sugar water on a cotton ball to feed the butterflies once they had hatched, until they were ready to leave and fly. 

Once I had children of my own, I passed this part of my childhood on, and my boys became avid monarch caterpillar collectors. The large jars with their homemade lids, the Ziploc bags full of leaves in the refrigerator door, the kamikaze missions to the nearby road ditches for supplies, all became a normal part of the rhythm of our household; and as I've grown older, my love for the monarch has grown and deepened too, as I've come to understand the profound mystery behind its magic.

Often, you will hear people talking about how a butterfly "makes" a chrysalis or a cocoon. But the monarch, like other butterflies, doesn't actually make a chrysalis. (And, a bonus PSA, cocoons are made by moths. Not butterflies. No, not ever.) The chrysalis is not a constructed thing, it is a developmental stage. It is the pupa stage in the life cycle of a butterfly. The monarch, as you can see in the video above, does not make the chrysalis--he simply sheds his skin to reveal it. He has shed his skin many times before, and this last time we see what he has always known, that the chrysalis has been there the whole time, underneath it all.

What does this mean, then, to the story that the caterpillar will go inside a cocoon, this hiding place that he has constructed, and inside, through some secret process of transformation, he will become a butterfly, and then come out? Well, it blows the entire idea out of the water. If the chrysalis is not the caterpillar's construction, but is simply his next stage of becoming, then it is not a hiding place for transformation, but a part of it--what you become while you are becoming a butterfly. We can see that this is true because the chrysalis, far from being a shield that conceals transformation, only to reveal it when it reaches completion, actually becomes more and more clear as transformation takes place, allowing all to see the butterfly inside. And when he sheds his skin, that hard chrysalis shell now thin and brittle, for the final time, there can be no doubt--this is what he has been becoming from the beginning.

So if you are in the process today of transformation, as indeed we all are, understand that transformation is a process that happens from within. We are transformed, as my own Great Story says, by the renewing of our minds--or, as Eugene Peterson puts it in his own translation The Message, "You'll be changed from the inside out." As we grow, we will shed our old skins again and again, and this may even be painful at times, may even require help from those who love us, as in my most dearly loved passage of the Narnia stories, where Aslan's sharp claws dig deep to strip the layers of dragon skin away until only the boy, Eustace, can be seen. But eventually, be seen we will, because what we are becoming is already inside us. The caterpillar skin sheds to reveal the chrysalis, and the chrysalis skin splits to release the butterfly, and by this we know the mystery of the monarch:

The butterfly is inside the caterpillar all along. 

There is no need to worry if right at this moment what is seen may not seem, to the unknowing onlooker, to be worthy--if it looks ugly, or plain, or unfinished, or if it's hard to see the beauty. There is no need to hide our transformation away from the world until it's complete. Everything we will be is inside us, and we are only in the process of becoming.