Photo by Greg Daines on Unsplash
“Shedding is an act of involuntary bravery.
We do not choose when our skin grows too tight for us.
We are split open from the inside out
by the pressure of our own growth.”
~~ David Whyte
Greetings to all my precious people,
I want to tell you something true about the caterpillar, because we’ve romanticized it into something gentler than it actually is.
Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar does not gracefully rearrange itself into a butterfly. It dissolves. Nearly its entire body breaks down into a kind of living soup — cell walls collapsing, structure gone, no shape left that anyone would recognize as a creature. And here is the part almost no one tells you: scattered throughout that soup are clusters of cells called imaginal cells, which have carried the blueprint of the butterfly all along, dormant, waiting. At first, the caterpillar’s own immune system attacks them. Treats them as foreign invaders. Fights the very thing that is trying to save it, because it doesn’t yet recognize its own becoming. continue reading
