Hey guys! I hope you all are having a nice week. I know a lot of us are preparing for the fall semester to begin next week, so I imagine some might be feeling the impending stress if it hasn’t already descended. I haven’t decided how to feel yet. While I think the change in pace will be nice, it’s hard to deal with not knowing how something will unfold. My coworkers and I have been talking a lot about this today. I think we all have a general idea of what is expected of us this coming semester – what classes we’ll be taking, our roles in various student organizations, work responsibilities – but none of us have any clue how much time and energy those things will require. Some of us who are more inclined to catastrophizing the unknown (myself included) are feeling a bit haunted by the expectation of change…
This week at work has had a certain theme. At the start of the week, we found a handful of monarch caterpillars in the herb garden, fattening themselves on milkweed. This is often an exciting sight for midwestern nature enthusiasts. Wednesday, we found two chrysalises. They were delicate, soft and blue green like the ocean, and adorned in gold jewelry; definitely belonging to monarch butterflies. The farm staff have been devotedly watching the chrysalids, waiting for changes and attempting to keep them safe. Each time I walk over to check on them, I expect the pupae to have changed drastically. I’m not sure why. I know that metamorphosis for these guys doesn’t happen in a day.
The first few days knowing that I am near something fragile undergoing a serious change are stressful. I NEED to know what’s going on and to feel prepared for what’s next. The idea that something might go wrong is a bit unbearable at times, so it only makes sense to revisit the thing over and over again. Is there something I can do to guarantee its success? For the observer, it’s impossible to see what’s going on behind the opaque green glass. Robert Macfarlane describes the process beautifully in his book ‘Is a River Alive’. “It is known that during chrysalism, the cells of the caterpillar become a kind of ‘soup’ within the hard case of the chrysalis, swirling around and somehow re-forming into the entirely other creature that is the butterfly.” He describes metamorphosis being Shrodinger’s Cat-like in nature. You can’t cut open the pupa to study its contents, or the creature will die, and the process will halt.
I’m very thankful that my coworkers and I don’t have to turn into soup before we start a new semester or graduate. But the feeling that the change itself is an unknowable process is very familiar. We can’t fully prepare ourselves for what is to come, but we can surely cope with it by making corny metaphors inspired by our environment.
This week’s photos include a few of the many monarch chrysalis photos we’ve taken, as well as a few other lepidopterans found on the student farm. If you’d like to keep up with a live update of all creatures found on the farm – butterflies included – you can explore our iNaturalist page Purdue Student Farm Biodiversity.
