Learnings of The League: Emerge With Wings

When we are in the throes of transformation, and we cannot tell up from down or left from right or (sometimes, even) right from wrong, we can look to nature for encouragement – and the butterfly is one of nature’s most exquisite performances of transformation. Most of us know that it begins as a creepy-crawly caterpillar, living in trees and eating leaves – and then it spins itself into a chrysalis, emerges some time later with wings to fly, and spends the rest of its life feeding on sweet nectar. But what happens inside that chrysalis – hidden away from the world, out of sight – between one phase of its life, and another? We might just imagine that the caterpillar hangs itself upside-down from a branch, folds its safe cocoon around its body like a cosy sleeping bag, and simply goes into a rest state in order to grow that spectacular pair of wings.??

But, nope. In the case of this masterpiece of nature, the mechanisms of transformation are downright gruesome: when it’s safe inside that little pendulous sac, the creature essentially digests itself. Hormones within the caterpillar’s body trigger the process at precisely the right moment. Enzymes break down muscles, legs, gut, eyeballs, antennae and all of the other physical structures that make up a caterpillar. What was once its body becomes an undifferentiated biomass in which no cell can be identified as belonging to any part of a body. It’s essentially a protein-rich goo, like a thick soup or phlegm. In fact there is only one type of cell that remains undigested, called an “imaginal disc” – we’ll get back to it later. And yet, even in goo-form, the creature is as alive as ever. If we slice open a chrysalis while this process is underway, the goo spills out, and so does life: the creature will die immediately. There will be no butterfly.?

But if the process is left to run its course, the goo of undifferentiated cells gradually reconstitutes itself into a brand-new creature. This is possible because the broken-down, “digested” caterpillar cells are comparable to foetal stem-cells: they are biological raw materials from which any kind of cell might form. Those “imaginal discs” become responsible for building brand-new body structures from the cellular phlegm: they fuel rapid cell division in order to constitute butterfly legs, antennae, gut, muscles, eyes – and now, for the first time, wings. When it is wholly (re-)constructed and ready to emerge from the chrysalis the butterfly is, in a very real sense, an entirely different animal than it was before – and yet it’s also the same.?

We have a lot to learn from the caterpillar and the butterfly. Maybe most of all, we could take a few notes from that undifferentiated biomass within the chrysalis, the gob of goo, the being-in-acute-metamorphosis: transformation can be gruesome, for sure. Structures we had taken for granted (identities, relationships, plans, assumptions, belief systems) can break down and disintegrate. In the thick of it, we may seem unrecognisable even to ourselves. At times we might feel very much like that phlegmy goo, so vulnerable and fragile that we feel we might die if exposed to scrutiny. We should remember: even in this state, and perhaps?especially?in this state, we are brilliant beings rich with imminent energy and vitality and possibility. We can succumb to the goo-state, go with it, and trust that this gruesome and gruelling process of breakdown must happen in order for us to take our fully-expressed form. Somewhere within us, something comparable to the butterfly’s imaginal discs will guide our reconstruction. We don’t need to do anything. We need not slice open our own chrysalis, to analyse the state of things too closely: we can tuck in, be patient, and trust the process to run its course. And when we are finally ready to emerge on the other side, we might find that we are both the same creature that we were before, and also – in a very real sense – an entirely different version of ourselves. This time, with wings.?