A slight movement caught my attention and I realized it was a butterfly. Heat poured in from the still rising sun and there the monarch rested, by the water, on a stone; black veined, orange gossamer, speckled white on the fluttering edges.
It moved in rhythm, wings open, wings close, turn a bit on the rock, wings open, wings close, turn again, wings open, wings close. Wings open, flat open, soak up the heat, absorb the energy, turn again so that every vein, every angle, every nuance of being was filled by the sun.
Only then can flight happen. And then only in short spurts as air currents cool her wings. Then she can find a flower, a rock and rest, absorb the heat and power up again.
She's really just a bug, but arrayed in her glorious garment she's a spectacle of glory, a breath of inspiration, a gentle whisper of hope on the breeze. She's a pretty worm to start with, all stripey yellow, black and white. Some, thoughtless, would still step on it and crunch the potential underfoot. Even in its metamorphosed state there are those so callous who would wound and dispatch the lovely away.
No one knows the artistry tucked away inside a worm, the potential in the unlovely. Yet for those who pause, and gaze, who wait willing for the unfolding there emerges exquisiteness unimagined. But the debasing journey of isolation in the chrysalis and liquification must occur before the imaginal discs can form the pupae into it's glorious new state.
I look up the word "Chrysalis" and find it comes from the Greek meaning 'gold'.
Gold is the place of transformation and the outcome of the transformation. Comprehension! I think of the man who said "When He has tried me I shall come forth as pure gold." (Job 23:10-11). He went from glory, preferred status, to worm. And because of the dying, the golding process, the second glory was greater than before. But the undoing, the agony of loss and suffering was immeasurable, except in the hands of the One who measures no more and no less than what He knows will bring the pure gold.
The process of unbecoming brings forth pure gold, pure beauty. But the process is one of dying, an internal undoing of all we are, until all that's left are the elemental building blocks. Only then can the reconstruction begin, the recreating of the intended and the emerging of the true design of love.
And the sheer, astonishing truth in it all is that unless the lovely, unfurled splendor finds its life in the sun, it will die. For without that radiant source of heat, those thinnest of wings cannot flutter, they cannot take the newly formed one to find food or shelter or new sources of heat when the cold sets in.
The sun is life to the butterfly.
"But they that wait upon the Lord (YHWH) shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." Isaiah 40:31
"Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have God's Son does not have life."
1 John 5:12
