There are some things in this world that simply stop you dead in your tracks. Some things just hold us still, command a moment of astonishment, a gasp, a pause, a sigh, a silent exultation. More often than not, for me, these things are almost always found in nature.
Little things that become momentous and meaningful, yet are almost always forgotten until the next one. Like the first glance of a big full moon hanging low in the sky that hits me like a bam! Making eye contact with a deer in the woods and watching it dash off, dancing off into a dream after it’s gone. A startled heron taking flight, circling over like a prehistoric bird. The sight of a double rainbow at the end of a crappy day.
This time, it was a monarch caterpillar devouring a milkweed leaf in a meadow in Mattapoisett that had me standing at a halt before it. Risking the wrath of the low-lying poison ivy, I moved in closer and focused my camera lens upon her; black and gold, wide and round, her fat, juicy body bulged as she ate her way through this phase of her existence, just one of the myriad faces of the manifold mystery of the monarch.
This time, I knew more than she, I thought. I knew what she was going to be one day soon, what she would look like, her very nature as I captured her form in the moment with my camera click, studying each end of her, all of her mine for the moment.
I conjured up a quick poem and whispered to her, “Butterfly, flutterby, right now, the hungry caterpillar, with no thought other than this leaf. Within a fortnight, you will leave this place as the meadow falls to grief.”
The lengths it will go to, the heights it will flutter through, the struggle that it will endure to perpetuate the mystery of birth, rebirth, everlasting life, of transformation, the very essence of living.
Perhaps that is what fascinates us about monarchs, about butterflies in general. A child will chase her, intuiting the creature’s inviolability in nature and, in the collective consciousness, like all of us, will strive to emerge in life as a butterfly and fly.
This caterpillar I beheld will never know the deadened winter meadow of her birth, nor will she return. But her descendants will and, if I am blessed, I will, myself now only a mere hungry caterpillar devouring life’s experiences and taking nourishment from them in this phase in my own existence, greet them next year on this very spot, feeding on the leaf that will replace this leaf, and I, standing inside the unending circle and finding myself an eternal part of it.
By Jean Perry
