We Are the Imaginal Cells

On heatwaves, transformation, and what we are building for our children

London is in a heatwave.

We’ve been here for a week or so, and I’ll admit, I didn’t expect it to hit me this hard. We live in Southern California. We know heat. But city heat is a different creature entirely. The buildings trap it. The tube holds it. The streets offer almost no shade and very little mercy. We’re staying at my parents’ house, which like most London homes has no air conditioning, and I am twenty-six weeks pregnant.

Elio has not complained once. Not once. He has moved through this week with the kind of easy, animal acceptance that toddlers have and adults spend years trying to reclaim. Meanwhile I have been a sweaty, heavy, humbled mess.

I’ve been watching him and thinking: he is already more adapted to this world than I am.

Extreme weather does something to me emotionally that I haven’t always known how to name. It sits heavy. Not as abstract worry about a future problem, because this is not a future problem anymore. People died in France this week from the heat. This is now. And sitting with that knowledge whilst also trying to stay present, stay functional, stay joyful with a toddler in tow, that tension is something I imagine many of you know well.

But I don’t want to write about climate grief today, exactly. I want to write about what comes after it. Or rather what lives inside it.

This week I went to a women in climate event as part of London Climate Action Week. There was an artist speaking who shared an image that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.

She talked about where we are right now — as a society, as a species — as the moment between a caterpillar and a butterfly. That strange, formless in-between. Most people know a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but fewer know what actually happens inside the chrysalis. The caterpillar doesn’t gently rearrange itself. It dissolves. It becomes, almost entirely, mush.

But within that mush, certain cells survive. They’re called imaginal cells. And they carry the blueprint. They are the reason the mush becomes something with wings.

She said: right now, we are the imaginal cells.

I’ve been sitting with that ever since. Because it doesn’t minimize how hard this moment is — the mush is real, the dissolution is real. But it reframes what we are doing inside it. We are not failing to become the butterfly. We are in the necessary, uncomfortable, formless stage that precedes it. And we are holding the blueprint for what comes next.

Becoming a parent felt like mush too.

I don’t think I fully understood that until someone described it to me that way. You dissolve. The person you were — your rhythms, your certainties, your sense of your own edges. All of it becomes unrecognisable for a while. You are stripped back to almost nothing and asked to rebuild, except now you are rebuilding around another human who needs you completely.

The moments I am most aware of still being in the mush are the moments my attention fractures. When I am half-present, half-somewhere-else, doing three things without truly doing any of them. When I want to rush through an experience rather than be inside it. Being genuinely present with Elio is simultaneously the hardest thing I do and the most clarifying. He doesn’t need my performance of presence. He needs the real thing. And the real thing requires me to keep dissolving the parts of myself that still want to be somewhere else.

Here is what I keep coming back to though: the imaginal cells don’t work alone.

They are collective. They find each other in the mush and together they hold the pattern for what the whole thing is becoming. No single cell carries the full blueprint, it exists between them.

I think about this when I think about what Hello Earthling is trying to do. Not to tell families what nature connection should look like, but to be part of a community of people who are already oriented towards it. Already sensing that our children belong to the living world and that belonging is something worth protecting and nurturing. We are building something together. A different kind of blueprint for childhood. One rooted in wonder, in slowness, in the understanding that the natural world is not a backdrop to our lives but the very thing our lives are part of.

When I see parents choosing the ladybug over the schedule. When I see children given the space to be bored outside until they build something out of rocks and sticks. When I hear the language shifting, people talking about the living world rather than the environment, about belonging rather than sustainability, I feel the imaginal cells at work.

Tonight Elio fell asleep easily, which felt like a small miracle given the heat. I lay beside him for a while in the dark, listening to him breathe.

He hasn’t complained once this week. Not about the heat, not about the walking, not about any of it. He has just been here, noticing things, collecting things, moving through the world with that easy animal trust that the world is worth being in.

I am still learning that. Still in the mush of it, some days. But I am more sure than I have ever been that we are moving in a new direction and that the fact that you are here, reading this, means you are part of building it too.

We are the imaginal cells.

Now we build.

If this kind of thinking is what brings you to Hello Earthling, the Earthling Kids Club is where we put it into practice — tangible activities, nature connection ideas and a community of parents doing this alongside you. You can find out more here.