Friday, April 28, 2017

Winged Flashes of Light and Insight

I can't remember the first time I saw a butterfly, but I do remember what my earliest impressions of them were.  Over the years, I have gradually learned more about butterflies, and with each step in learning, my thoughts about them have changed.  So also have butterflies been part of my changed thoughts about life itself.

Light and life.
A flash of bright, moving color in the sun.  That is my earliest recollection of a butterfly.  Even today, in the latter years of my adulthood, that is what first catches my eye.  It does seem to be an experience tuned to capture the interest of a young child:  The movement. The bright colors, something little kids seem to enjoy no matter whether it comes in butterflies or a box of crayons.  But nothing can quite duplicate a butterfly's tantalizing lure.  "Come and see me up close," it seems to say as it pauses on a flower not so far away.  But then it is off again, the direction it takes shifting unpredictably.  A beautiful combination of fragility and energy, a butterfly seems to be perfectly designed to encourage children to delight in life.

A seeming dead leaf, easily passed by.Like all children of elementary-school age, I soon learned about the connection between caterpillar and butterfly.  Even though the transitional state between the two was first described to me as a "cocoon," rather than the technically precise name of "chrysalis," I learned about the marvelous life cycles of these most beautiful insects:  Egg, larva (caterpillar), chrysalis, winged adult.  At some point I encountered how this almost unbelievable metamorphosis out of a dead-looking chrysalis has been a ready-made symbol for resurrection and rebirth.  The promise of new life and possibilities, even when death seems to have brought everything to an end.
A partnership of two delicate lives.
In more recent years, I have become intrigued by some additional scientific facts about these insects. Specifically, that the winged butterfly -- which we tend to think of as being the point of all this metamorphosis -- actually lives an average of only two weeks.  Moreover, in the wild, only one percent of individuals make it through the whole cycle in all its stages.  I remember a man whose son was born with a genetic illness that meant the boy was destined to live only into latter teens unless he could get successful marrow and liver transplants.  The family struggled over the course of years, stretching out the life of a boy whose biological life did not naturally stretch into adulthood.  After the son died at college age, the father said that the most comforting words any person said to him were, "Your son's life was not wasted."  This, then is the latest lesson the butterflies carry for me, if I remember how short the lives of all winged butterflies actually are. Who would want to declare their lives a waste?

Perhaps a butterfly in flight can lead us to even another insight.  Eighty years before the theologian Paul Tillich's book titled The Eternal Now made that phrase famous, the nature-mystic Richard Jefferies described an experience he had outdoors:
"It is eternity now.  I am in the midst of it.  It is about me in the sunshine;
 I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air.
  Nothing has to come; it is now.  Now is eternity."

~~~

Do you have any special recollection about butterflies?  What do you like about them?


(The Jefferies quote is from his book The Story of My Heart [1883].  Chap. 3.)
(The photo of the chrysalis is by "Pollinator at the English language Wikipedia,"
 and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Friday, April 14, 2017

Clearly, Before Chickens

Back when most Western painters were into realism, one classic challenge in learning how to paint was to depict nothing but a white egg resting on a white surface.  That challenge prevented novice painters from easily relying upon a contrast of colors between the egg and its background to depict dimensionality.  Instead, the painter had to represent the subtlest gradations from whites to near-whites to the lightest of grays made by sunlight as it faded around the eggs curvature.  Not to mention the subtle texture of the egg's surface.  I think it was an exercise fitting for an egg, which feels like a wondrous, beautifully polished stone when held in the hand.

Not satisfied with white, in so colorful a world.We encounter eggs as food early in our lives, and they can come packaged with learning.  What elementary-school child has not at some point encountered the riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"  Even when not yet old enough to engage in abstract thinking, a child can taste of that impossible mental task of thinking back into an infinite regress of time.

One side-benefit of our modern knowledge about the evolution of life on this planet is that we can now answer the chicken-or-egg riddle definitively, although the answer might seem like cheating to some. Clearly, there were eggs before there were chickens -- reptile eggs, that is. (Not to mention the eggs without shells laid by nearly countless species of fish.)  Evolutionary biologists estimate that reptiles, with their ability to lay land-worthy eggs, have been on this planet twice as long as any birds.

A cosmos out of which life seems to hatch.
ancient Egyptian god Ptah
creating cosmos as egg
on pottery wheel
Perceiving the potentiality that lies within eggs, faith-traditions in ancient times used the egg as a symbol for the cosmos.  In our highly secularized western societies, most people (even some ministers I have known) think of an Easter-egg hunt as just springtime fun.  But those Easter eggs (as well as rabbits, a prolific type) entered Christianity as symbols of new life.  Even today, a large porcelain egg or an ostrich egg hangs in some Coptic churches and mosques as a sign of rebirth and hope.

A peculiarity of chicken eggs many city-dwellers do not know about is that even though chicks come from eggs, hens can lay eggs without being fertilized by a rooster.  That seems counter-intuitive, given that the evolutionary value of fertilized eggs has been that of producing offspring.  Nevertheless, virtually all the chicken eggs marketed by grocers today in Western societies are infertile.  (In his early adulthood, Gandhi, staying in England, abstained from eating eggs so as to not take animal life -- until he was informed that those chicken eggs he was being offered could never have developed into a chick.)

Today, in watching nature shows on TV, I can experience something even more marvelous than being able to eat eggs while eating vegetarian.  I can watch as mother tortoises and other turtles use their clumsy-looking hind legs to dig a pit in the sand.  Then, out of their bodies emerge beautiful white ovals, looking so much like those familiar eggs we all know firsthand.  As part of a long line of reptiles, that mother turtles' usually private ritual dates back over 300 million years.

~~~

Do you have any childhood memories about Easter eggs, other eggs, chicks, or chickens?