Alternate story of the Caterpillar

Sometime in the last two weeks I was sitting on my couch reading. A moving shadow kept distracting me from my reading, so I looked out the window. Outside on a branch of my Brugsmansia tree, was a small bird, with grey-blue feathers. It was eating bright green caterpillars. 

I had been thinking about a certain person, whom I have tried to inspire to follow their dreams. Days prior to this scene, I had started thinking about this person's possibility, as a caterpillar with potential to transform. You know, the typical caterpillar story, you go into your cocoon, liquefy your past self/ego and come out transformed. Yeah, we know the story well. But there is another Caterpillar story, and that is what I was shown.

I watched this beautiful bird eat several plump green caterpillars. It could almost be construed as sadistic what this bird did to the caterpillars before consuming them - but I am sure from the bird's perspective it was just making it's lunch especially tasty.

I was struck by their perfect bright green color. The skin was so smooth and plump but not in a over-fat plumpness. It was like a perfectly beautiful apple you search for at the grocery store. These caterpillars were beautiful and perfect in their form. 

The bird would pluck one from the leaf, then it would take it, dangling in it's mouth, to a nearby branch, where it would smack the other end of the caterpillar over and over on the edge of the branch - I surmised to stun it. Then the bird ran it's beak all along the soft body of the caterpillar, like you or I would run our teeth chomping an ear of corn. The bird wasn't eating yet, it was smushing all the internal parts of the caterpillar. It did this several times, back and forth along the caterpillar's body. Finally, the green body was slurped up through the beak. 

I was shocked by this show, doubly shocked when the bird returned to the same branch with a fresh caterpillar to watch again - the alternate story starting to sink in.

This story has stuck with me these past few weeks. I don't like the way it ends. I want all caterpillars to become butterflys. I want all of us to have our dreams come true. 

What the bird showed me, and I know it to be true, that some caterpillars are just food. They never get to the point where their dreams can come true.

Comments

[Chad May]

The cruelty of the Natural World, as it seems to me, is the hardest element of reality for me to put into the "Everything is in a state of evolving perfection" New Age wrapper. If I could ask Creation but one question, it would be "Why must gazelle's be eaten by lions?"
Why pain? Isn't there some other mechanism of evolving consciousness?

That said, I even feel a sense of survivors' guilt, knowing I don't worry about being eaten. And knowing that I just barely escaped the beak myself.