By PAUL HETZLER

When it comes to personal growth, the Wicked Witch of the West had the right idea. Quite possibly she got it from monarch butterflies, which must exist in Oz, since they are found worldwide except for the polar regions. Many times, the way to achieve our fullest potential involves a rearrangement of the self-image we have come to know. In my experience this is always hard, and seldom is it voluntary.

We commonly refer to difficult times, periods of grief or anguish, in terms of dissolution. You might hear someone say that they went to pieces, fell apart, dissolved in tears, were reduced to a puddle, or had a meltdown. This latter can describe things from a child’s tantrum to someone at work who loses composure due to stress. Meltdowns are short-lived.

A breakdown is longer term, lasting weeks, months, even years. A person in this state is generally not able to function well, if at all, in their job or relationship. Nearly all who have breakdowns recover, and afterward it is not unusual for them to seem different. Maybe they have a new perspective; they might choose a trajectory more in line with their dreams and talents. Oftentimes as a result of surviving a very dark time, and then shaping their life to better suit them, they report being happier than before.

In order to get so drastically rearranged from glorified maggots into flying machines, caterpillars have complete breakdowns, during which they melt down. Caterpillars are of course the juvenile stage of moths and butterflies, and most are stubby, cigar-shaped, soft-bodied crawly things that become gossamer-winged wonders. We know they enter a pupal stage to change costumes, but until fairly recently we knew more about what went on inside Clark Kent’s phone booth than what happened during pupation. Thanks to electron micrography and other fancy stuff, though, we now know a tiny bit more than a little.

Some caterpillars use silk they produce to weave cocoons in which to pupate. Others, for example the monarch, make pupal cases with a membranous “skin” around it, and this is called a chrysalis. Once housing is taken care of, the hard part begins. Or at least that is my human-centered take on it. Let’s take the monarch again. Ensconced in its regal, gold-flecked chrysalis, the cute, stripey chub of a caterpillar releases enzymes which dissolve its body. All of it. For a time, that elegant chrysalis is full of nothing but green caterpillar soup. Now that’s a meltdown.

Most of caterpillar’s cells burst open as it turns to liquid. That sounds like taking apart one Lego structure to create a different one, but instead of pulling blocks from one another, you smash them with a hammer. Apparently it works for insects. There are a few cells, though, which make it through the blender. These are akin to stem cells, and biologists have dubbed them “imaginal cells.” This is so wonderfully poetic, as if part of the caterpillar could always imagine flying. I had heard that the caterpillar’s immune system perceives these imaginal cells as foreign, and tries to eliminate them. This would have made an even stronger metaphor, because we all resist change at first, but alas, the science does not back up such an idea.

But imaginal cells do kind of imagine the future winged adult, as they contain its DNA, the butterfly blueprint. As far as I can tell, no one knows quite how imaginal cells take all those shards of Lego pieces and fashions new kinds of cells from them. It’s better than magic. There are a few other items to be found in caterpillar soup. From the time they hatch out, the larva has within its body a number of flat, round-ish structures called imaginal discs. Each imaginal disc telescopes out like, I don’t know, a telescope or something, to become the outer shell of an appendage such as a leg, wing or antenna. That is right handy and must save those hard-working imaginal cells a lot of effort.

By the time the pupal chamber unzips and an adult monarch emerges from its chrysalis, not a drop of caterpillar soup can be found—all of it was needed. Everything the caterpillar once was, now serves its new life as a butterfly. If the new butterfly is part of the fourth and last generation in the monarchs’ summer range, someone is going to have to break the news to it about the 3,000 mile trip south it will make shortly after it rubs the sleep from its eyes.

Writing about chrysali and butterflies just as the cold season is upon us may seem out of place, but like many, I have always viewed winter as a more reflective period, a time to ponder, to eat a lot of soup (but not caterpillar-flavored), and hopefully to imagine possibilities.

Paul Hetzler is a forester and a horticulture and natural resources educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County.