Today, I used a periwinkle flower to transport a caterpillar from a beach boardwalk.
The fuzzy caterpillar clung onto the flower when I lowered it before him, latching on with a few of his feet. Maybe he felt it was a familiar swatch of earth amidst man-made flooring. Maybe it was the only logical move to make, considering I lowered the flower in his trajectory. Or maybe, this caterpillar couldn’t resist the temptation of a snack. Using the flower as a teleportation device, we walked to sand dunes a few yards away, and I left the fuzzy caterpillar and this periwinkle flower inside a fuchsia bloom.
I oftentimes think of #leavenotrace & #whitesaviorism and my place within these complexes. How this moment could be viewed from these lenses – it’s survival of the most fit, & who are you to be transporting caterpillars anyways? Leave no trace doesn’t anyways include simply carrying out trash, but leaving things as they are. Not upturning rocks and moving them for no reason. Not walking offtrail for the sake of individual exploration, on a hike that’s clearly marked to direct traffic flow from sensitive vegetation. As for white saviorism (the self inflated idea that your mission in life is to help the “less fortunate” by imposing your beliefs and your doings onto them), my caterpillar rescue was disrupting Darwinism at work.
But then I also think of how abrasive a beach boardwalk must be for a fuzzy caterpillar. How easily a life could be squashed by something heavier, and all the metaphors within that. How a lil caterpillar that lives could become a butterfly, and all the metaphors within that. And how this caterpillar-transporting-moment could mirror all the moments I’ve felt my angels pluck me from a dangerous situation and move me to the safety of an ice plant flower bush, even when the moving felt abrasive and confusing. And as much as we believe our path is within our control, life is really up to disruptions and a greater movement – if we have the openness to acknowledge mystery.
There’s a quote from a movie called I Origins, where a scientist and a shaman fall in love. The scientist was running tests on worms, hoping to stimulate the growth of an eye in worms. At some point during the movie, the shaman says something along the lines of this:
“That worm, without eyes, can’t perceive light, color or shape. There’s a whole world going on around the worm that it cannot see. Don’t you think that we humans could also lack a sense? That there is a whole world going on around us that we don’t have the ability to perceive?”
A worm and a caterpillar. A shaman and a scientist. A periwinkle flower and a fuchsia flower. Leave no trace & white saviorism. Mirrors, muses, microcosms within macrocosms. There’s so many angles to look at life through, and simultaneously our sense receptors limit our perception of this world.
But most of the time, there’s comfort in the mystery. There’s comfort in knowing that, as humans, we will never know it all – it’s impossible, egoic almost. And all I can really do sometimes is find the macro in the micro, narrow my scope to a caterpillar on concrete, and help him on his way to find fuchsia. And pray there’s something out there doing the same for me.