Murry

I bought a monarch caterpillar when I went to the Butterfly Museum a few days ago and I have been fascinated in observing it's growth. I watched it eat like crazy, sleep as if it were dead, wake up and eat and sleep and poop ect. Many times I thought I killed it because it was so very still but then up again it would be eating the extra milk weed plants I put in it's little plastic cup. Soon I got to thinking it needed a bigger home, so I scrounged around my dad's bee-keeping supplies and came up with a nettled box about the size of a shoebox. Typically, these are used when the bees get shipped to the house and they have a nice screen to wrap around the wood and a bar in the center, and circle opening at the top. I slipped my plastic cup container in, taped off the top and thought the caterpillar would likely cocoon along the center bar. Interestingly enough, the caterpillar had little interest in the new home I created for him (I think of him as caterpillar first, Murry second). Anyways, before I knew it he crawled up the side of the "hutch" and rather than plot out a good journey for where to cocoon, tucked himself in the far corner and made his J, and soon, his cocoon.

The fascinating part about all of this is that it was as if Murry had it all figured out. He ate, he slept. He pooped, he ate, he slept. I sat thinking, "Dead? Not dead?" "Did I kill him? Is his home big enough?" all this time making sure this period of his life was the very best that I could make it. But to Murry, it's all peaceful. He's transitioning. Probably in the very biggest way he will ever know and yet seems so cool and collected.

"Yeah, sure, I'll hang upside down in a J for a few hours, I'm cool."

And even now, each day I come home from work, I peek in the corner to see how he's doing. When I wake up, I crawl over, shut my alarm off and look up to see how he's doing. He's very quietly hanging out in his cocoon, doing what he needs to be doing. Resting. Letting nature take it's course. It's all just so peaceful.

I don't think I have ever experienced a peaceful, quiet transition. My life is just the opposite. When I see transition coming, it's like I invite a tornado into my small hutch and before I know it, I can't find my milkweed, can't tell which way is up, where I should hang, anything. If I were in a cocoon, I'd probably be moving all over the place and stressing out about what color spots I wanted and how I'd need to be to make just those spots happen.

It occurred to me tonight as I peeked in at Murry, that there's a lot I could learn from this little bug.