EMERGENCE

In about my seventh year I had an experience that made a profound impact on me -- a moment of numinous wonder.  It happened one day as I was playing in my backyard of my home.  It was in the late spring, when nature's glory was becoming evident again after a prolonged and frigid Kansas winter.  Spring has always had a magical effect on me, from my earliest years.  I had been playing by myself in my sandbox, where my imagination and creative abilities were allowed their full freedom.  Coming around the back of our screened in porch to go in the house for a drink, I suddenly saw a strange luminescent, emerald-colored jewel hanging from the bottom of the cement floor ledge that jutted out from the stone foundation of our porch.  At first I thought it must be a jewel as nothing I had ever seen in nature was of such exquisite beauty and color, certainly not within my tiny universe.  But what could it be, hanging there, suspended by a tiny thread.  Who could have planted such a precious gem there, in such an inconspicuous place, to be found by a child at play?  What a grand and unexpected mystery I had come upon.

When I ran to my mother in breathless delight, telling her about the strange thing out back, she came with me to see what had created such glee in her son.  She bent down to look at the source of my excitement, smiling at my discovery.  "You have found a beautiful product of nature," she told me. "It is a cocoon."  "What is a cocoon?" I asked in astonishment that my perplexing riddle had such a ready answer.  "It is the home of a butterfly being born," she said to me.  We both looked at it for a long time, searching for a sign of the creature inside.  Once I knew that it was not a precious stone, but a living thing, I felt an urge to see what was occurring inside.  I asked her if I could touch it.  Mom told me it might hurt the butterfly inside, so it was better not to bother it.  We should just watch it from day to day.  And, with luck, we might see it emerge from its home.  As days past, I would stoop to watch the miraculous creature, holding back my instinct to peer inside, to help the butterfly break free of its bondage.  As days went past I paid less attention to it.  Then one day, I discovered that the butterfly had emerged from its emerald cocoon, now a drooping sack, but still suspended by the tiny thread.  Still fascinated by this natural event, I had missed its emergence into the world.  But the wonder of this process never left me.

The Latin root of the word emergence is mergere, meaning to dip, immerse, or submerge.  The word mergus, means diver, a diving water bird is called a Merganser.  So the word's opposite, emergere, gave the reverse meaning--of coming up or returning from the depths.  Ever since the connection with nature in my seventh year, the butterfly has been a powerful image for me.  And the mystery of the beautiful creature emerging from its cocoon has become a living metaphor for the miracles in life.  Some forty years later I learned to that word for butterfly in Greek has a meaning that had become important for me at that stage of life.  Psyche means both butterfly and breath.  And the myth of Psyche, the immortal princess who came into divinity as the result of her love and the accomplishment of the tasks required of her, was the mythical embodiment of emergence.  As the caterpillar changes its state from a crawling, fuzzy being, devouring everything leafy in sight, it eventually stops one day for a long sleep.  And during this hibernation stage, within the safety and quiet of its cocoon, the caterpillar changes its form to something entirely different.  As the tiny acorn dissolved into the earth and emerges into an oak, and the shriveled rhizome becomes a plant, the caterpillar emerges from its isolation as a new being.  No longer a crawling, fuzzy creature, but now with wings; given the ability to fly above the earth on which it once crawled.  And as the caterpillar changes its form to one of beauty and freedom, so the Psyche emerges from its cocoon at the right time in the lives of our species.

I remember the disappointment I felt when my mother admonished me not to rush the process of the butterfly's emergence from the goo of its cocoon.  To do so would have meant the premature or perhaps fatal act upon the developing creature of flight.  Such intervention, far from being helpful, would have constituted an emergency, a fatal mistake, an interruption of the divine transformation in progress.  The best we can do to assist nature in this miraculous process is to let the gooey creature struggle on its own, confident that nature's course is unfolding as it should, that the wings are developing on their own timetable whether or not we understand what it happening.  And we can learn, with patience, that the divine is all around us...in us.  We assist the divine unfolding by seeing the sacred in the commonplace, remembering that "what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly."

Gregory M. Rieke  April 14, 2002