Metamorphosis

I find butterflies to be a particularly potent symbol for the environmental crisis of our time. They have fascinated man across cultures, from time immemorial. They represent the parable of the life cycle: First we are born; then we become the caterpillar, the insatiable worm toiling on earth; then the chrysalis as death, the coffin; then the butterfly as the resurrection or reemergence in an afterlife. Whether you want to read that in a religious or scientific way, it is a cycle and therefore circular—it goes around and around endlessly.

Butterflies are symbolic of hope and renewal, but simultaneously, there is also a long tradition of them representing darker forces of temptation, destruction, and death. It seems like that could be the reading we also need to pay attention to now—the dark messenger, the prospect of the end of that life cycle completely, the spirit crushed, the end not just for the butterfly or the insect or the bee but for all of us, because we are inextricably interlinked.

I should make it clear that I am a total layman in terms of lepidopterology. What I’m thinking about is more subjective, as in the butterfly representing the natural world, a metaphor for the material expression of the endless creative mind of evolution, nature, God, whatever you want to call it. I’m just looking and asking you to look at what an amazingly intricate and unknowable place this Earth is, how amazingly intricate and unknowable these creatures are, how amazingly intricate and unknowable a creature you are—we are—the symphony of life, the beautiful struggle. What are you going to do to help?

To me, metamorphosis means that salvation is present in every one of us.