The Butterfly Effect

  For the last few years we have planted Swan Plants in pots in our garden at the start of spring.  The plants attract the Monarch butterfly which lay their eggs on the plants and by mid summer they are covered in hatching caterpillars.  At this stage my daughter brings the plants inside and we watch as the caterpillars devour the leaves until each caterpillar is fully grown and one by one they start to turn into a chrysalis.  Two weeks later the butterflies start to hatch and we have a daily ritual of naming the newly hatched butterfly (my daughter has learn’t how to sex them) and of setting them free.   So the Monarch has become something of a tradition in our family – and that being the case – I found the following article very moving:

One day a small opening appeared in a cocoon, a man sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force it’s body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress, it appeared to get as far as it could and could not go any further.

So the man decided to help the butterfly, he took a pair of scissors and opened the cocoon.

The butterfly then emerged easily, but it had a withered body, it was tiny and had shriveled wings. He continued to watch because he expected that at any moment the wings would open and expand and enlarge to be able to support the butterfly’s body and become firm.

Neither happened, in fact the butterfly spent the rest of its short life crawling around with a withered body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly. What the man in his kindness and goodwill did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required by the butterfly to get through the tiny opening, was natures way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved it’s freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life, if we were allowed to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as we could have been. Never be able to fly.

Inspiration: the BUtterfly effect