Here’s a little something I wrote a few months ago…
Sorry I don’t have an illustration of a caterpillar - so here is one of a child dressed as a caterpillar!
We found a caterpillar in the kitchen. It had left a trail of holes through the leaves of some flowers I had placed in a jar. My daughter was upset about something at the time so I used the excitement of finding this caterpillar to try to cheer her up. And it worked! The caterpillar was given a name and placed carefully into the bug catcher. The caterpillar was very still. A little too still. Maybe it was unwell?
We showered it with love, leaves and drops of water. We watched. We waited. After eating all those leaves, maybe it would build a cocoon and turn into a butterfly?
We kept watching to see if it moved. We wanted some reassurance that it alive. And then we saw it. A little wiggle here, a roll over there! Were we about to witness a beautiful transformation? We kept a close eye on its body. There were some changes happening. Each end looked more green, more vivid perhaps. The yellowy brown middle section appeared to be coming off. But the caterpillar remained concerningly still.
And then I realised, we were either watching it transform into its new life or watching it leave this one permanently. It was like we were watching some weird kind of experiment, like Schrödinger's*, except this one involved not a cat, but a caterpillar, and not a metal box, but an clear plastic bug catcher.
I felt I was losing hope, but maintaining it at the same time. It really was in a state of life and death at the same time and it would be, until one of these options reached its finality and we realised which process had been taking place.
But it wasn’t quantum physics we were observing. Maybe it was magical thinking. Maybe it was the thinking of someone who has been working from home while caring for two small children 24 hours a day for the past eight weeks. Maybe it was a reflection of how I felt about the coronavirus. We had flattened the curve but there was talk of a possible second and third wave. I wondered if the worst was over or if there was more still yet to come.
And so I went back to watching and looking and studying the minute details of this gorgeous creature. Have you ever noticed how delicate the legs of a caterpillar are? I hadn’t until this point. As the hours passed, I became more and more sure the caterpillar was dying. I was worried how upset my daughter would be. She becomes so attached to animals. I thought of the snails in the tub months ago that she carefully fed veggie scraps and then they albeit extremely slowly, wandered off. The slowest getaway ever, but they did it. The ants. The grasshopper in the bug catcher. The grasshopper that escaped the bug catcher, and the intense sadness that followed. The excitement when I caught a replacement grasshopper, and the awe when she solemnly agreed to keep this one for a short time and then let go.
It’s all loving and letting go.
Loving and letting go.
Loving.
Letting go.
GP x
(This is not at all a scientific explanation of the Schrödinger's cat experiment. You’ll need to look somewhere else for that!)