Before the Wings

Watch an ant on the sidewalk for a minute and you can see its whole world at once. You know where the crumb is and which way home is. You could pick it up and set it down anywhere you like.

The ant has no idea you're there. You're too big for it to take in, the way you can't see a whole mountain while you're standing on it. To the ant, you're a passing shadow or a shake in the ground. If you lifted it and set it down across the sidewalk, it wouldn't feel carried. It would find itself somewhere new and keep walking.

The ant is also very good at what it does. A colony can find the shortest path to your picnic with nobody in charge. Inside its own world, it's an expert. It just can't see past the edges of that world, and it doesn't know the edges are there.

That seems to be true for every living thing, us included. Smaller lives are easy to understand from above, and whatever is bigger than us passes by mostly unseen. We'd notice it about as well as the ant notices us, as a shadow, or as a feeling we can't explain.

Now picture a caterpillar who thinks the way you do.

He's born on a leaf and starts doing what anyone would. He looks around and measures himself against the others like him, because they're the only ruler he has. The beetles and aphids seem a little dim. Nobody tends the forest the way caterpillars do, and nobody eats more leaves. From where he sits, it's reasonable to assume he's at the top.

His days are full and small. He eats and looks after his family, and he doesn't think much past the next branch. Neither does anyone around him.

Then, near the end of his life, he starts to feel a pull he can't explain, and he begins to spin. He couldn't tell you why. He just knows he has to, the way you sometimes know a thing long before you have words for it.

To the other caterpillars, this is death.

They watch him seal himself in. They hold a funeral. A few come back a week later to visit, and if they could see inside, they'd find soup. This part is literal. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar's body breaks itself down into something close to liquid, and nothing in there looks like the friend they knew.

There are stories in the colony that are harder to talk about. Once or twice, someone went back and the shell was empty. Nobody knows what to do with that, so mostly they leave it alone. They return to their leaves, and every one of them is quietly afraid of the day they'll feel the pull too.

I had a dream about this last night, and I woke up knowing it was about us.

We're caterpillars who believe we're at the top. We measure ourselves against each other because there's nothing else in view. And we treat death the way the colony treats the cocoon. When someone at dinner starts to talk about God, or about what might be behind all of this, people look at their plates and wait for the subject to change.

Seen from the leaf, the cocoon is the worst thing that can happen. It is also the only door out. The soup is how a crawling thing becomes a flying one, and a caterpillar who refuses it stays on the branch for good, which sounds safe until you remember what he was built for.

This changes what the caterpillar years are for. Every leaf he eats goes into the wings. The butterfly is made from what the caterpillar gathered, so those slow, ordinary days on the branch turn out to be the whole supply for what comes next.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Being human is a rare thing to be handed, and most of us carry it the way a kid carries a full glass across a room, too worried about spilling to look at what's inside. We do most of what we do without knowing why.

Every so often in history, a butterfly comes back.

He remembers the colony and lands on the old branch to tell them. It's real, he says. There's more after the shell, and you can get there too. They look at the strange colours and the wings and can't find their friend in any of it. Most of them laugh, and a few get angry. In some of the old stories they kill him, because whatever he is now, he's no longer one of them, and that's harder to forgive than a lie.

The ones who turn on him are scared, and the fear makes sense from where they stand. All they've ever seen of the cocoon is the outside.

Somewhere above the branch, out of sight, the air is full of things that used to crawl.