There is a couple of patterns that we have been exploring with participants of these retreats. Although we do not focus on exploring theories, we obviously are alert of the patterns and insights that come out of our time together. The conversations around the role we are playing in this world and how we are playing this role are central themes of our dialogues. Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D., evolution biologist, lecturer and author of EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution We will also see how important it is to link with each other in the effort, to recognize how many different kinds of imaginal cells it will take to build a butterfly with all its capabilities and colors. If we see ourselves as imaginal discs working to build the butterfly of a better world, we will understand that we are launching a new ‘genome’ of values and practices to replace that of the current unsustainable system. ![]() It took a long time for biologists to understand the reason for the immune system attack on the incipient butterfly cells, but eventually they discovered that the butterfly has its own unique genome, carried by the caterpillar, inherited from long ago in evolution, yet not part of it as such (Margulis & Sagan, Acquiring Genomes 2002). But they keep coming faster and faster, then linking up with each other.Įventually the caterpillar’s immune system fails from the stress and the disks become imaginal cells that build the butterfly by feeding on the soupy meltdown of the caterpillar’s body. Not recognizing the newcomers, the caterpillar’s immune system snuffs them as they arise. Inside this chrysalis, deep in the caterpillar’s body, tiny things biologists call ‘imaginal disks’ begin to form. It goes like this: A caterpillar crunches its way through its ecosystem, cutting a swath of destruction by eating as much as hundreds of times its weight in a day, until it is too bloated to continue and hangs itself up, its skin then hardening into a chrysalis. ![]() My favorite metaphor for the current world transition, first pointed out to me by Norie Huddle (Butterfly, 1990), is that of a butterfly in metamorphosis. She shared a version of the Butterfly Story which we then obviously explored in our program: When I told Elisabet Sahtouris that we were having a retreat program called Butterfly Connection in her native Greece in 2009, she wrote back saying “it is interesting that your message downloaded right after I wrote two emails on butterfly metamorphosis.” Good timing!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |