The Caterpillar Exchange

My kids had two different spring breaks this year, which meant I got to spend some rare time solo with each of them. One day I took Chop (7) to marin for a walk in the woods. We sat in next to a dry creek bed and found a caterpillar. It was still for so long we wondered if it was alive. Then as we stayed longer it started moving. And at one point, it lifted the front of its body, with its antennae, and offered what looked like a conversation, or a dance, to us. It was so wild how much it looked like it was talking to us. Moments before we had walked through a butterfly haven, where we could barely step there were so many, close to flowing water. Some I had never seen before and each was shockingly beautiful.

This happened because we went, just to be there, without much agenda. Except for to designate time where we were in a place where butterflies and caterpillars live. Also oaks, rocks, so many other species I’ve never named.

This summer is making a container of time where I’m protecting it from being filled with formal names of what is being learned, apprehended, metabolized. It’s us being together, in some particular spaces, our home, outside of our home, in the pool in marin, in the park, at the beach, and wherever else we end up, for the purpose of existing and seeing what happens. Trusting that what happens within that will be valuable, because it is life.