Seekers
Last week, I became obsessed with a caterpillar.
I’d noticed their webs glistening in the morning sun, gossamer strands catching the light. Later that day on my porch, I saw one hanging from the nurse tree. This stump rises from the deck, increasingly covered in moss, mushrooms, and even blades of grass this year. Recently an enterprising woodpecker found his dinner by hammering large chunks from the offshooting branch that rises to nowhere. And now one newborn caterpillar probed the moss.
I watched her, mesmerized, as she quested for, I presume, an appropriate spot to cocoon. Barely bigger than a grain of rice, and an almost florescent light spring green, she made her careful way through the moss, sometimes slipping and being caught. Eventually she plummeted off the branch, catching herself with a web. I decided to help and returned her to moss. But she dropped again, and I believe now that she knew the nurse tree was not her proper home.
All this week, caterpillars confronted me whenever I walked down the street. They dangle from the branches like party streamers—perhaps seeking a lift from a favorable breeze?—and I duck and dodge to avoid decimating their delicate webs.
Caterpillars provide such an easy metaphor of growth, change, and becoming with their futures pre-ordained as winged moths or colorful butterflies. But then I admitted to myself that I knew nothing about these particular caterpillars beyond what I could see. Perhaps they grow into something deeply undesirable, at least from humans’ perspectives.
I searched online, trying to discover their species. I found lots of caterpillars native to my area, but none of them seemed quite right. Many were green but not this exact shade of vibrant, space-between-when-the-leak-is-white-and-when-it’s-dark-green green. It’s hard to tell size from a close-up photograph of a ’pillar sitting on a leaf, but all the pictures seemed too big to be the minuscule searchers hanging around my neighborhood.
In the end, can a caterpillar really be “good” or “bad”? These are human concepts and the caterpillars, so determined to follow their destiny, have no morality. They simply are, doing their thing, driven to live their best lives by surviving and reproducing. I can only assume their survival rate is not high, what with the trouble of finding a proper spot while hanging in the pathways of people, dogs, deer, and other ambulators. Yet I find them inspiring in and of themselves, regardless of what their futures hold. They know their goals but also rely on a series of happy accidents to achieve that fate. And so they quest on, both awaiting and seeking home.
