Does the snake miss its old skin? I’ve been looking at various traditions around rebirth and the symbols from nature that help us understand profound change. In many traditions, the snake is a powerful symbol of death and rebirth, due to its ability to renew itself by shedding its skin. I’ve always found snakes pretty creepy, but I’m trying to appreciate them, at least symbolically. And so I’m starting off with wondering what it feels like for a python to slip its skin. Maybe it’s like when a sunburn peels -- there’s no nerve activity between the old and new layers of skin, so there’s no pain involved. But does the snake look back and say, “Dang, that old stuff sure fit better”?

Then there’s the whole butterfly business they don’t tell you about in grade school. (Have you read this stuff? It’s a horror show.) Scientists have discovered that when the caterpillar forms the chrysalis, “butterfly” cells -- called imaginal discs -- begin to emerge, which the caterpillar’s immune system fights as if they were an infection, until the immune system eventually fails, and its body basically decomposes into “caterpillar soup.” Awesome. I’m so pissed I didn’t get to learn that in 6th grade. It would’ve been a thousand times creepier than dissecting worms.

But apparently these imaginal discs, which remain dormant while in the caterpillar stage but which carry the genetic material of the butterfly, then feed on that protein-rich soup much like a fertilized bird’s egg, rebuilding a new structure out of the old material.

There’s even been some evidence [[http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001736]] showing that the butterfly remembers some of what it learned in the later stages of its caterpillar life. Which suggests to me so very many things -- among them that, as different as the butterfly looks, behaves, and is perceived, we’re not talking about two different creatures here. The butterfly has the caterpillar’s memories, while the caterpillar has the butterfly’s dna.

But is there that moment, when the caterpillar has eaten all the leaves & gunk that it can hold, and knows it’s time to go hang upside down on a tree branch, and submit to its caterpillarey destiny, when it freaks out at the change it can feel coming? When it thinks -- But wait! I never learned how to fly!!

I ask, because lately I’ve been feeling a little like caterpillar soup. Like -- okay, so maybe there’s some butterfly dna in here, but all I know how to do is crawl around and eat leaves. There’s a really good chance I could screw this up.

Kafka, crystallizing the true dreariness of existentialism, nailed the alienation element of deep change -- both in the one who changes, and in those who perceive him. Gregor Samsa, traveling-salesman-turned-giant-bug, says to his family, “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” 

Gregor never found his wings -- Nabokov claims he’s a beetle rather than a cockroach -- but he never realized he could fly, instead, spending his buggy life hiding and lamenting the fact that he was no longer a bored-to-death textile salesman. And when his family ultimately couldn’t deal with the fact that he wouldn’t commit to being a man or a bug, he gave up and died. But I wonder what might’ve happened if one day, instead of hiding under the couch, he’d actually spread his wings and bust out the window, touring the neighborhood from the treetops.

There’s so much fear with change -- fear that we won’t know how to be the new version of ourselves, that we’ll lose what’s important to us, that there won’t be...happiness, health, love, acceptance, fill-in-the-blank...on the other side, that we’ll screw it up. And we often let that fear keep us from committing to being one or the other.

But I want to believe that moment of spreading your wings and touring the old neighborhood from your new perspective has got to be worth it. I’m counting on it being so. I’ll let you know.