To become a butterfly, a caterpillar first digests itself. But certain groups of cells survive, turning the soup into eyes, wings, antennae and other adult structures

Ferris Jabr, Scientific American, 2012

It was born hungry. And because it believed it was alone, it ate and ate and ate. It ate the floor upon which it sat. And it grew. It ate the walls that protected it from the biting winds. It grew some more. It ate the roof that shaded it from the sharp rays of light. Of course, it grew and grew and grew. It ate the only home it had ever known.

On the inside, we imagined something different. Inside its body, we felt – not alone. We felt joined, resonant, alive. We believed in open skies and soft places upon which to alight. We knew we could eat without destroying our home. Inside the darkness, we gathered, we waited, we held the story in our hearts.

It couldn’t grow anymore. Nothing left to eat. Nowhere left to live. It was bloated, stagnant, uncomfortable in its own calcifying skin. And from deep inside it sensed an unsettling fluttering of wings. It turned itself upside down. It wrapped itself in a sticky thick blanket. It tried to quiet the fluttering, slow the beating, beating, beating rhythm of another life.

We felt the slowing, the darkening, the silencing. We felt the body around us turn upside down. Some of us also slowed, darkened, went silent. Some of us felt topsy-turvy, nauseous, confused. But many more of us raised our heads towards the future. This dimming, turning, quiet was not only an end, but also a beginning. We began to dance slowly at first, then faster and faster. We sang to each other. “It’s time! It’s time! “

It did not understand what was happening. It felt afraid. Its body was dissolving, disintegrating, disentangling the pieces of itself one from the other. Meaning to end the fluttering, it liquefied, made itself into a soup. It was no longer hungry. It could not eat. There was nothing left for it to do, to be, to want. So it waited to see what would happen next.

We danced and the body turned into a vast sea. Many of us wept in the water. We felt sad that the body around us was gone. We had to learn to swim. We had to find each other in new ways. Over time we learned that the sea was full of nourishment and possibility. We grew stronger inside the sea. We remembered the story of another body, graceful, life-giving, free. And slowly, steadily we, transformed the sea into something new.

I was reborn, in sunlight. I felt the warm breeze dry my body, still damp from the sea I used to be. My eyes showed me a thousand pieces of the world around me. The home my old self had eaten was one tiny leaf in an endless flowing river of soft swaying blues and yellows and pinks. I was hungry, ready to drink and dance, pollinate and migrate. With a push, I opened my wings, released my hold on the only home I had ever known and fell into the loving arms of the air around me.

“There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren’t, the cycles wouldn’t keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves.”

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower