on a spirea twig

This tattered chrysalis turned up in a pile of cuttings on Sunday after my husband got out the loppers and hedged the seriously overgrown bush back when doldrums struck our stoop sale. I'd been wanting to come across one of these.

Next to this discovery, the best part of the sale was simply sitting in front of the house the entire day, inverting the status quo and getting to meet those sometimes most invisible creatures, the neighbors. One writes this blog, ecohearth. Good luck to him.

In honor of the only chrysalis I've come across since I can remember, here's an excerpt from Walter Otto by way of Marion Woodman's The Pregnant Virgin:

He who begets something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when he rises to the surface, there is a gleam of madness in his eyes because in those depths death lives cheek by jowl with life. The primal mystery is itself mad–the matrix of the duality, the unity of the disunity, ..The more alive this life becomes, the nearer death draws, until the supreme moment when something new is created–when death and life meet in an embrace of mad ecstasy. The rapture and terror of life are so profound because they are intoxicated with death. As often as life engenders itself anew the wall which separates it from death is momentarily destroyed...Life which has become sterile totters to meet its end, but love and death have welcomed and clung to one another passionately from the beginning.

Dionysus, page 151