Last summer, sitting in the last row of the Unitarian
Universalist Church of Rockland, I learned about imaginal cells. Every
caterpillar in his cocoon has a butterfly blueprint waiting to become what they
are. Its fate has already been written, if not yet expressed. A caterpillar’s
time of crawling, while important, is not only temporary, but already outmoded,
from the moment of its birth. This too shall pass, it says to itself, eating
leaves and scrunching along on the ground being fuzzy. It may take hours,
months, or years – my attention to the sermon was fading in and out – but metamorphosis
is a destiny it cannot resist. A delicate flyer waits to manifest inside the
humble insect. This is a good metaphor for the individual human experience, no?
Our own slow and unsteady life cycle. Everybody likes it, thinks about the
process and feels empowered, happy, certain that they can relate. One of these
days, by God, I will emerge a beautiful fluttering creature and fly away, blithe
and free. Maybe. Maybe not, though. Perhaps we’ll stay caterpillars until the
day we die because we don’t possess those transformative and very real cells.
Mostly we remain unchanged. The world moves around us and we hold on, hoping. Imagine.
