In recent weeks our family acquired two baby monarch butterfly eggs. At this moment, they are both in chrysalis form--it's been an exciting process to watch!! One particular part of the process keeps hanging on my mind, as it seems it could be a metaphor for so many of life's adventures.
I suppose it wasn't a part of the process, exactly. It was more a simple moment in the process. Every couple of days I had to change the milkweed leaves out so that the caterpillars had enough food for their exponential growth. On this day, one of the caterpillars had eaten itself onto just the stem of the leaf. For a solid three inches of stem, it had consumed all of the leaf substance previously surrounding that area. All that remained was stem and caterpillar.
I keep thinking about life on a limb.... pondering how my life might be compared to this caterpillars... bent on nothing but consumption? Risking injury to get what I want? Pushing until there's nothing left? Needing new direction? Thinking about the present, without too much thought to the future? Focusing on one area without seeing the big picture?
I'm not sure that all of these would apply to me. I am sure that one could probably derive many more "wonderings" about life based on this simple picture. It's just such an interesting image....plentiful milkweed, and there hangs the caterpillar, alone, on the end of the stem....
Just pondering. Guess it's been one of those weeks, just to wonder about life and what we're all really doing. (And what are we supposed to be doing....?)
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