We are the Butterfly

"Forgive them, for they believe that the customs of their tribe are the laws of nature." 

-George Bernard Shaw

 

(From the Flower Child's Garden Planet:)

Elizabeth Satoris says we humans of the Earth are currently in a stage like a butterfly forming in a cocoon. The cocoon contains all of today's apparent chaos even as the caterpillar is taking itself apart and reassembling all of its pieces into the butterfly. 

The previous ways of this world of caterpillarness served us until now, but will no longer do. And as we realize how precious and limited our cocoon-planet actually is, we begin to seek to transform our outmoded habits of voracious consumption of natural resources into more uplifting, elegant and beautiful structures and systems. 

Natural systems don't grow exponentially forever, but our money system assumes that it can. As Charles Eisenstein (author of Sacred Economics ) points out, proud parents relish the rapid growth of the baby, but when the child is grown, imagine if it continued to double its weight after that! You would have a monster. Or cancer.

So earth civilization is nearing a maturation point now. The chaos and stress of this stage is sure present. The kind of economics dependent upon the destruction of our environment for infinite growth is already obsolete. But even as the caterpillar is dismantled, we commence to build the butterfly.

 

We're starting to feel cramped and crowded. We dream of the sky and reach toward the sun. We begin to turn within for our growth. We long for simplicity. We begin to imagine and so create different structures.

Somehow amid the construction and the mess, life goes on. I wonder what the new emerging form will look like when the cocoon falls away.

(Disclaimer:) Of course there is no guarantee that this particular planet-cocoon will succeed. They don't all make it past this stage.

"Wandering, wondering, 

lost in time

Even before God was born

When the universe was packed into a small blue egg

And we were falling 

into the endless night;

Falling, falling.." -Omni, from Ant on a Sandwich