~ Gabriel García Márquez
If we watch a maturing monarch caterpillar — that large black-and-yellow creature bristling with black hairs — we will be amazed by the way it carves at the edges of the swan plant’s leaves in a kind of culminating ‘feeding frenzy’. At a certain point, its body seems to become slightly indistinct — we rub our eyes in order to focus, but it is as though a slight haze is shrouding the caterpillar… Then, quite suddenly it fastens itself from its hindquarters, hangs in the form of a ‘J’, and — we probably have looked away at just this point, distracted, perhaps because we are in the presence of a mystery — a short while later there is a plump chrysalis, spring-green with a series of golden dots around its rim.
The chrysalis seems unchanging for the first week or so. But if we were to cut it open, we would find no caterpillar, nor yet a butterfly — just a fluid mush.
Once free, it sits in sunlight, wings pulsating gently. The butterfly is pumping them up into their full expansive glory… Then it takes to the air and light and warmth of late summer.
Birth is like this. It is a struggle. We know how difficult the first birth can be, and unfortunately this struggle is often avoided today by mothers fearing the pain of childbirth, or even thinking cosmetically. But while it is sometimes necessary, the choice of a caesarian will have its consequences. With vaginal birth, in its difficult passage through the birth-canal, the baby’s lungs are compressed and all fluids are expelled; the caesarian-born baby, however, often has to be separated from its mother and placed into an ‘isolette’, due to Respiratory Distress Syndrome. Antibiotics may then be necessary. Thus, the avoidance of one experience of pain can engender another.
The second birth around the seventh year can be accompanied by typical childhood illnesses, and often the child seems to regress in its development for a while, becoming insecure and ‘clingy’, and apparently weak, wanting to return to the safety and comfort of the mother’s life-sustaining presence. The suppression of illness at this time through immunisation is another form of well-meaning avoidance, yet some research suggests there may be consequences in later health problems. However, this second birth is generally less spectacular, and might pass un-noticed; life as such is a quiet process, in just the same way that metamorphosis in plants, or indeed in butterflies, is quiet.
With the third birth there is a lot to notice! The pain is apparent in all its manifestations. The adolescent’s soul is a ‘reaction body’, and from the inside, all this pain seems to be inflicted by others — hence the tendency to blame everyone else. There is a strong compulsion to take ‘pain-killers’ — any drug which medicates those adolescent conditions of anxiety and loneliness. Here the analogy with the butterfly is most apt: we may note the feeding frenzy, the increase in body size, the spinning of a cocoon of brooding emotion — which, if we should peel it open, reveals some real ‘mush’! — and then the struggle to emerge… And we feel powerless to help, perhaps realising the struggle is necessary.
The fourth birth is also often accompanied by pain, a raw exposure to the apparent indifference of existence, as though the soul-butterfly, now free to fly, doubts the wind and the dark and the cold, and the purpose of it all. In adolescence and young adulthood, an instinct to flutter in flocks creates some feeling of security, but there is an underlying tension — the uncompromising presence of individuality, sustained by awareness of winter upon winter of discontent, an existential pain — the angst of an isolated being in an apparently alien universe.
At each of these stages, the butterfly image is a true imagination of birth, and of struggle.
