The Lobster, Butterfly and Starfish

(My short opening talk at the beginning of our SF International Orff Course gathering.)

How do lobsters grow? The young lobster has a hard, rigid shell to protect it. As its soft body grows, the hard shell stays the same. So the lobster reaches a point of noticeable discomfort and finds a safe place to hide. There it sheds its shell and stays hidden until it grows a new one. After a time, the new one is too small for the growing body and it repeats the process—discomfort, retreating, shedding, growing a new shell.

 

So let us learn from the lobster. Feel the discomfort, don’t rush to mask it or ignore it or medicate it or fix it. Instead, find a safe haven to retreat to where you can shed the shell and start to grow the next one that fits your changing self. We hope this will be the place you can do that, in company with caring teachers and trusted friends. This can be the place to slough off the too-small covering, feel safe while the new one develops, away from the jeers and laughter and taunting of the cruel world. 

 

Then the butterfly. A compassionate person comes upon a butterfly struggling to break out of its chrysalis and thinking he’s performed a good Samaritan act, opens the casing to let the butterfly out. In so doing, he robs the butterfly of the struggle needed to gain the proper wing strength to fly and the butterfly cannot fly. We will help each other in all sorts of ways here, but we also have to leave space for each of us to struggle through the hard parts in our own way, with our own grit and determination. And there will be hard parts alongside the great fun and laughter. 

 

Now the starfish. A woman was walking down a beach filled with stranded starfish that had been washed up on the shore. Without water, she knew they would shrivel and die, so she began throwing them one by one back in the water. A man came from the other direction and asked her what she was doing and she explained the situation. “But don’t you know that there’s probably over a thousand stranded starfish on this beach? What you’re doing can’t possibly make any difference.”

 

She reached down, picked up a starfish, threw it in the sea and said, “It made a difference to that one.”

 

The lobster, the butterfly and the starfish.  Good reminders for us all.