The following is inspired by a post on Austin Kleon’s blog. I liked it a lot and thought I’d share the idea as well.

A few days ago, I came across this piece from the New York Times called The Truth About Cocoons. While the article goes in many directions, one idea I found fascinating was what happens inside a cocoon. Here’s an excerpt:

“It turns out that the inside of a cocoon is – at least by outside-of-a-cocoon standards – pretty bleak. Terrible things happen in there: a campaign of grisly desolation that would put most horror movies to shame. What a caterpillar is doing, in its self-imposed quarantine, is basically digesting itself. It is using enzymes to reduce its body to goo, turning itself into a soup of ex-caterpillar – a nearly formless sludge oozing around a couple of leftover essential organs (tracheal tubes, gut).

Only after this near-total self-annihilation can the new growth begin. Inside that gruesome mush are special clusters of cells called ‘‘imaginal discs,’’ which sounds like something from a Disney movie but which I have been assured is actual biology. Imaginal discs are basically the seeds of crucial butterfly structures: eyes, wings, genitalia and so on. These parts gorge themselves on the protein of the deconstructed caterpillar, growing exponentially, taking form, becoming real. That’s how you get a butterfly: out of the horrid meltdown of a modest caterpillar.”

Reading this reminded me of a scene in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

Alice replied, rather shyly, “I – I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

Alice is confused, seeming to change with every minute inside the rabbit hole, and is looking to the caterpillar for some sympathy.

“When you have to turn into a chrysalis – you will some day, you know – and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?”

“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.

Not a bit. What an amazing reaction. While the basis for the caterpillar’s nonchalance remains a mystery, I wonder if there is some wisdom in this outlook – that when the world seems to implode and ‘digest’ itself, there is something extraordinary happening. And so while the current events worldwide go far beyond my comprehension, perhaps there is something after all this enzymatic chaos, something extraordinary, like a beautiful butterfly emerging from the horrid meltdown of a modest caterpillar.