Heroes Not Zombies

The first butterflies of the year have appeared in my garden in the last few days. They really are such astonishing creatures, butterflies. If you watch one flying around their trajectory seems utterly random. They just seem totally incapable of flying in a straight line! You have no idea, literally, no idea which way they are going to fly next. You can’t tell whether they will veer right or left, up or down, in the very next second, and you can’t tell where they are going to land next. I’m sure I read once that scientists have still not been able to explain the flight dynamics of butterflies. Apparently we don’t know how they manage to fly in this astonishingly varied way.

Apart from the sheer wonder at the flight of the butterfly, and the beauty of individual butterflies, what astonishes and inspires me most about them is their life cycle. They are the creatures which undergo the most incredible metamorphosis. When you look at the different stages of the life of a single butterfly you can’t help being amazed how different, how physically, and structurally different they are at each stage. From egg, to caterpillar, to pupa, to butterfly, each stage just couldn’t be much more different from the other. In fact, it’s hard to take on board that the caterpillar and the butterfly are the same creature.

So, the butterfly has become one of the main symbols of metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis is a sort of super-charged emergence. Emergence is this fairly new scientific concept which describes stages of change in complex systems. It means that the creature, organism or system undergoes such rapid and comprehensive change that once it has changed it seems radically different from its prior condition. So different, in fact, that it would have been impossible to predict exactly what would change, and what the outcome of the next stage would look like. We can only make sense of the stages by looking backwards and putting together the narrative of the timeline.

Metamorphosis is much more widespread and common than it first appears. In fact, I’d argue that each of us undergoes continual metamorphosis throughout our lifetimes. You don’t think so? Well, take a look at some old photos. Do you have any photos of you when you were a baby? You when you were a toddler? You when you were a teenage? You see where I’m going here. At each stage as we look back we know that we are looking at an earlier version of ourselves but we almost can’t believe it because we have changed so much.

We undergo continuous psychological metamorphosis too. It’s not just our bodies which grow, change, mature and age. Our personalities, our thoughts, our beliefs, values, habits, ideas, memories and fantasies do too. Isn’t what Jung termed “individuation” a description of the process of human metamorphosis?

The thing about metamorphosis is that it is BIG – I mean SIGNIFICANT. It’s not a minor tweak here and there. It’s not even a series adjustments. I recently heard an expert, talking about the crises of pandemic and climate change, call for such wide and deep change in the way we humans live on this planet, that what we need is a metamorphosis and to underline his point he said

“A butterfly is not an upgraded caterpillar”.

I love that. And it’s true. We don’t need a “silver bullet”or a “technofix”. We don’t need a simple, single new law or practice. We need to metamorphose. We need a holistic, multi-factorial, complex, wide-ranging, deep, radical change – in our own lives and in the way we live together as communities, as nations, as a human species, and as one of the thousands of species of life on this little blue planet.

The thing is…..we can all participate in this. We can all imagine, invent, suggest, contribute towards the creation of, an utterly different way for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren and the whole of Gaia. But none of us can know what such a metamorphosis would look like.

What we can do is choose different thoughts, different ideas, different values, and different actions which bring us more into harmony with each other and with the world. Because in complex systems, integration and harmony produces emergence, and emergence can be as profound as a complete metamorphosis.