Monarch Meditations

*Nothing gold can stay...

* * *

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

* * *

I find the first chrysalis by accident in early March, tucked under the lip of my outside potting bench: an unexpectedly lovely thing, the same pale opalescent green as the milkweed leaves the monarch caterpillars have been frantically eating for two weeks now, edged with a gold and black border near the top and an arch of gold dots near the bottom. The soft shell seems too fragile to protect the new being growing within.

I watch the chrysalis for the next few days, hoping to catch the actual emergence. I miss it, only perhaps by a few minutes, because from one hour to the next I find the transparent remnants of the pod and perched beside it, a butterfly. But her wings are still wet and crumpled, only beginning to unfold. She holds very still as they dry, perhaps uncertain of what she has woken to. Or that she has awoken at all? Do caterpillars think their lives are over as they prepare the chrysalis? Do they think they are awakening in heaven when they come from their enfolded world?

She sits, patient, wings held against each other as they dry. She fans them open, folds them closed, again and again. The wings stretch and—oh, she surges into flight in the same movement—up up up testing her skill, her strength, her courage, before dropping to rest on the grass and flick her wings open and closed, open and closed. She soars and flits and hovers for hours above the backyard, exultant.

This butterfly started as an egg on the milkweed plants edging my patio, the start of a life made for change, racing through a complicated, metamorphic process, from egg laid on the back of a leaf (3 to 5 days), to caterpillars that grow and go through five stages called instars (1 to 3 days for the first four, twice that for the last), shedding their skin each time, to the chrysalis and finally emerging as butterflies as adults (7 to 15 days).

The most extraordinary transformation is of course the one that takes place when the caterpillar spins her silken chrysalis, entombing or en-wombing and then dissolving herself into a sea of green goop and imaginal discs, groups of cells coded for the structures of the butterfly. Those cells go into overdrive to develop into the butterfly: legs and thorax, abdomen and genitals, wings and antennae, eyes and palps and proboscis.

They mate within a few days to a week of emerging, a courtship of flutters and flashes and flickers, then a mating that is both longer and rougher than you would think for such delicate creatures. I’m lucky enough to witness a pair in the yard. Their aerial dance is lovely, lifts and flits and flaps, before they settle on the trunk of the live oak, happily conjoined. They linger, creatures that live fast slowed by affection, perhaps to enjoy the only companionship they will have in their lives.

She went in to the chrysalis as entity, as monarch, as gold. She surfaces, caterpillar magically transformed to butterfly, to Danaus plexippus: still entity, still monarch, still gold. But she has a different kind of being, a different kind of beauty.

There is caterpillar beauty: slow, methodic, melodic, night edged by day.

There is butterfly beauty: wing-quick, flick-fleet, day edged with night.

And so are we not too, emerging from one chrysalis after another, still entity, still human, still gold. But as we go and glow and grow through life, we are different beings, with different beauties.