The Imaginal Butterfly

“Thought life was destroying me, instead I was birthing wings.”

— Felicia Rose

“Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?”

— Rumi

“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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All week long, I have been seeing butterflies. At the same time, I have been watching images from Big Bend National Park in Texas, where bulldozers have begun moving through protected land as part of a border-security project along the Rio Grande. What struck me almost as much as the destruction were the people standing together to protect the land. Many might ordinarily find themselves on opposite sides, but here they seemed to recognize that what they were protecting belonged to more than one party, administration, or generation.

August marks the beginning of the fall migration of the eastern monarch, when a remarkable generation of butterflies begins traveling thousands of miles south toward Mexico. Later in the fall, monarchs funnel through Texas on their way to the forests where they spend the winter. The entire annual cycle spans generations; no individual butterfly experiences all of it. There was something striking to me about watching the controversy unfolding along the Texas-Mexico border just as another generation of monarchs was beginning a journey that has carried them freely across that landscape for generations.

Earlier this week, I listened to Oprah interview Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle Is the Way, about Stoicism. The title comes from an idea expressed by Marcus Aurelius: what stands in the way becomes the way. We cannot control much of what happens to us, but we have some choice about what we do with it. An obstacle does not necessarily mean we have left the path.

A few days later, I went on a long walk with a close friend and somehow, we ended up literally lost in a cornfield. The corn was so high that we couldn’t see where we were, and the walk had gone on far longer than either of us expected. We were hysterical, laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing as we kept walking. I kept telling her, “The obstacle is the way. This is the path we’re supposed to walk.”

Eventually we came out of the cornfield. Along the route we had never intended to take, I passed a house with a huge statue of a monarch butterfly on a stand in the yard. Given everything already swirling around in my head this week, I couldn’t help but notice it.

I have loved butterflies for as long as I can remember, and they have also appeared at significant moments in my life. Several years before I met Kathy, I stayed at the Siddha Yoga ashram in upstate New York, where I remember walking to Satsang, meditation, or chanting surrounded by hundreds of monarchs. To get there, I had to drive past the Highlands, where Kathy lived. I had no idea then who she was or the role she would eventually play in my spiritual life.

Then in 1999, the year before I met Kathy, I climbed Harney Peak in South Dakota, now called Black Elk Peak. At the top, several monarchs began circling me in a spiral. I stood there with my arms out, barely able to say my friend’s name. He looked at me and said, “I see.” We were awestruck.

That night we camped across from the mountain. I remember hearing the singing and drums of Native people across from where we were staying. Later, the sky turned purple and a storm unlike anything I had ever seen moved across it. Lightning came from two directions and seemed to intersect again and again above us. I don’t remember rain. I remember the purple sky, the thunder, and the feeling of that entire day and night.

Months later, shortly before I met Kathy, I had a vivid dream in which I was back on Harney Peak. A huge female wolf appeared beside me. The pine trees at the top of the mountain separated and revealed a decimated landscape, and the wolf communicated to me, “Chief Seattle tried to warn them.” After knowing Kathy and walking the spiritual path with her, I came to believe that the wolf beside me was Kathy.

More than twenty years later, while on retreat, the mountain appeared again. Kathy loved Joseph Campbell, and I happened to be listening to Campbell discuss Black Elk and that very peak. I stopped the recording and replayed it when I realized where he was talking about. Black Elk’s Great Vision brought him to a sacred mountain from which he saw the world beneath him as one great whole. The mountain where I had stood surrounded by monarchs, the dream of the wolf and devastated land, and Kathy’s love of Campbell suddenly touched one another across decades.

There was another strange convergence this week. I was telling a close friend what I had learned about the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly and asked if she knew about it. She told me that another friend had been talking to her about the same thing that morning and had been photographing the transformation as it happened. It was the same day as the cornfield and the enormous monarch statue. By then, I was paying attention.

Human beings have associated butterflies with spiritual transformation for centuries. In the ancient Greek world, psyche came to mean both soul and butterfly, while Christian tradition embraced the butterfly as an image of resurrection. But what fascinated me this week was the biology of metamorphosis.

I had always imagined that a caterpillar went into a cocoon and gradually grew wings. That isn’t what happens. Butterflies generally form a chrysalis; cocoons are more characteristic of moths. During metamorphosis, much of the caterpillar’s larval tissue is broken down and remodeled. Some organs and structures persist, but much of the body that made sense for the caterpillar is dismantled and repurposed.

Even before this begins, the caterpillar contains developmental tissues known as imaginal discs. These groups of cells participate in forming the adult insect’s wings, legs, eyes, and antennae. They aren’t tiny butterfly parts waiting to unfold, but they contain developmental instructions that allow another form to emerge. Before the caterpillar loses the body it knows, the possibility of what comes next already exists within it.

I don’t know that I have ever heard a better metaphor for the spiritual path. After all these years of meditation and studying mystics, I no longer believe spirituality means learning to speak softly, appear peaceful, or develop a recognizable spiritual personality. I don’t think it is about becoming a better-behaved version of ourselves. I think it is about disappearing enough that God can express Itself through us without our endlessly interfering.

Maybe that is why Jesus’ instruction to become like little children has always affected me. Young children scream, cry, laugh with their entire bodies, become furious, and then become fascinated by a bug. Before they learn how they are expected to present themselves, they are exactly who they are because they don’t yet know to be anything else. More than anything, they live in the moment.

Meditation has been trying to teach me something similar for decades. Anyone who has practiced seriously knows that meditation is rarely the experience people imagine. It is repeating the Names, focusing at the third-eye center, realizing the mind has wandered, and bringing it back. It is falling asleep, waking up, and beginning again. It is sitting through pain while the mind insists on going somewhere else.

I have meditated through heartbreak, broken bones, migraines, grief, and fear. I have also meditated with such longing for God that I thought I couldn’t stand it any longer. Paradoxically, that piercing longing can become something a meditator treasures. Kathy always told us it was God longing for Itself.

For years I thought these were obstacles I had to overcome to reach some deeper meditation. I believe something different now. The obstacle isn’t in the way of the path. The obstacle is the path. The wandering and returning, longing and waiting, discomfort and discipline are not interruptions in spiritual life. They are spiritual life. There is no route from caterpillar to butterfly that bypasses the chrysalis.

For much of my time on this path, I have gone to bed early so I can begin meditating around 3:00 in the morning, during the predawn period our tradition considers especially conducive to meditation. Kathy often spoke about creating an atmosphere for meditation by sitting in the same place at the same time every day. Eventually the place, the hour, and the repetition begin to draw you inward. Even a little meditation later in the day helps me maintain that continuity.

Sometimes during those early hours, I picture other people in my spiritual group whom I know are probably meditating too. I may picture the Master before me or within me, and then the circle widens to meditators I will never meet, scattered across the world while much of it sleeps. It creates a sense of solidarity and oneness. It stops being my meditation or my longing. It becomes God turning toward God through thousands of apparently separate lives.

Gratitude has become inseparable from this for me. I don’t mean pretending everything is wonderful or using spirituality to talk ourselves out of grief or fear. I mean paying enough attention to recognize how astonishing it is that any of this is here at all: someone we love answering the phone, water when we are thirsty, light through the trees, an animal sleeping beside us. Gratitude brings us back to what is here, and it asks something of us. If I experience a tree, water, another human life, or a butterfly as a gift, it becomes harder to treat them as disposable. We protect what we have learned to recognize as precious.

That brings me back to what I have been watching this week: young people crying over fires, drought, disappearing species, and the future they are inheriting, while public lands are being torn apart and data centers are being built around the world to support AI and our expanding digital lives. These centers require electricity, land and, in many cases, water. Technology is woven into my own life and work, as it is for most of us. I benefit from these systems every day. How do we embrace what technology makes possible while remaining conscious of what it requires from the world that sustains us?

All of this has brought me back to the dream I had more than twenty-five years ago: the trees separating, the devastated land, and the wolf beside me telling me we had been warned. The question isn’t whether technology or progress is evil, or whether one political party will save us from another. The question is older than that: What are we becoming, and what are we willing to destroy while becoming it?

Perhaps the people standing together to protect Big Bend themselves are something imaginal: a glimpse of what we might become appearing inside what we are now. Perhaps the young person who refuses to become numb is too. Compassion, gratitude, solidarity, and the willingness to protect something beyond ourselves may be part of whatever comes next.

We love the butterfly because we know how the story ends. But if we could enter the chrysalis without knowing what would emerge, we might call what we saw catastrophe. The familiar is disappearing and there is no visible evidence yet of flight, while somewhere inside that apparent chaos is the architecture of wings.

Maybe we are living in an imaginal time, personally and collectively. The monarch crosses a border it does not know exists. Its migration continues across generations that will never see the entire journey. The caterpillar carries the possibility of a body it cannot imagine. And sometimes two women stand exhausted and laughing in a cornfield because they cannot see where the path goes next.

Meditation keeps teaching me what to do in that place: return, repeat the Names, pay attention, and be grateful. When the body hurts, the heart breaks, longing becomes unbearable, or the world frightens me, return, not because what is happening around us doesn’t matter, but because it does.

Maybe sometimes we aren’t lost at all. Maybe we’re just in the cornfield, unable to see the whole landscape yet. There is still ground beneath our feet, still things worth protecting, and people worth loving. And somewhere inside what looks like dissolution, the architecture of wings may already be forming.