Greetings from Inside the Chrysalis

The really remarkable thing about my brother's photography (See my previous post on "You Thought It Was Easy?") is the process he used called "Focus Stacking" which provides an image so rich in detail that it can be blown up a hundred fold and still not pixelate. As the caterpillar turned to just worm-guts and then hardened its outer surface in the creation of the chrysalis, it was clear that there was no element of butterfly inside that package. And yet over the next few day's pictures, as the outer layer of that jade cocoon thinned you could see something happening. New lines and dark shapes could ever-so-faintly be seen through the surface. Change - real transformative change - was happening.

This creature just did what it was programmed in its DNA to do. But we humans, and this one in particular, far too often are wed to the past understanding of who we think we are.  Our memories of past successes and failures are blended and baked into a story that becomes our map for moving forward.  Constructivism (a field of psychology) says that we can only perceive new events within the context and framework for which we have a vocabulary and a basis of antecedent experiences with which to make sense of them. Actual "new: learning or behaviors are difficult to produce because we simply do not have the tools to produce them and we are too attached to the story already and always running in our mind. But what if that story (and that is what it is, the story we made up about what some event meant - not at all the actual event itself) is fictional? Mark Twain once quipped, "the older I get, the more vividly I can remember things that never happened!"

But inside the chrysalis, nothing of caterpillar, except for some of the worm guts, remain. Caterpillar is lost - not just forgotten - but totally gone forever. And that is what is called for in transformation: I must lose the story. All of it. I must lose the one about how I can do it by myself. Lose the story of how I am alone in this quest. Lose the story of "if you want something done right, do it yourself (thanks dad and Abe Lincoln for that one)." Lose the story that I am somehow better or stronger or more creative on my own than with any others as a pair, trio or group (Yes I know how arrogant that sounds - and inside here, that arrogance must die as well).

I am baffled as I peer through the enlarged picture of the cocoon and see what look like lines of a patterned wing are beginning to form. How is that possible? How can a black, yellow and white striped multi-legged worm lose all its defining characteristics and, as we will see in a few days, emerge as a skinny, six-legged insect with vibrantly colored orange and black wings. Transformation makes no logical sense.