Butterflies figure a lot in my conversation from time to time. They dance through my thoughts often, and when I need to smile they appear somewhere in my day when I least expect to see them. The other day I went to the botanical gardens near my home with my grand-daughter, Miss 4. We went on an adventure to look for butterflies among the flowers. After two hours we had seen one but the day was lovely and blue, the air fairly clear and the Japanese garden in full bloom. I think we took a photo of every shade of pink possible. it didn’t matter we smiled and talked about pretty things and big things as you do with Miss 4.

A friend shared a book with me (Hope for the Flowers, there’s a whole website), that was really written for children and adults as well if the audience is honest that asks the question about what it is we are here for and how we touch the sky. How dow we become the most we can be? As with all good narratives there was a setting of scene as two character meet: caterpillars of course who enjoy doing what caterpillars do before individually making their way to the towers of caterpillars that are seething their way to the sky, climbing on each other to reach beyond the clouds. As you would expect it is an ordeal to climb high when you a re climbing over other caterpillars looking up to the place beyond the clouds.

The two caterpillars meet there in the pillar and journey for a while together. After time and energy is spent they become disgruntled with the climb and return to earth to find a space in the garden to do what caterpillars do….then one day the male decides he needs to return to the pillar as he must be missing out on something but the female caterpillar stays in the garden and laments his going. He climbs, different now but still driven to the top, she explores the gardens and laments his absence meeting one day a butterfly who whispers to her to follow him…the butterfly takes her to a tree and she climbs high then without understanding how she knows to spin a cocoon around herself and does what caterpillars do.

In the passing of time he continues to climb getting higher and higher and wondering what it is he will find at the top. She becomes what caterpillars become as she emerges from the cocoon with her wings spreading to dry in the sun. Then she flies, flies within the sky. Touches the clouds and circles the pillar whispering to the male still climbing to come back down…at the top of the pillar is nothing but sky but sky can’t be touched at the top, only seen.

So as all good stories of meant to be end, he goes back down and she leads him to the tree where she spun her cocoon and he climbed that tree and did the same thing. Within the passing of the right time he too emerged to dry his wings and then….they flew within the sky together….sky can’t be touched or owned only flown in….as butterflies doing what caterpillars are meant to do in the end.

It has been like that every time I see a caterpillar, i smile and know I am simply doing what I should be doing….becoming who i am. Nothing to prove only a sky to fly within. Some days butterflies are everywhere, other days they are only in my drawings. This butterfly is part of a larger picture that I started to draw because a friend said if I designed a butterfly wing shaped trellis he would build it for a garden bed in a new project he is going to work on…beauty and whimsy belong everywhere. 🙂 The butterfly wing became the heart of a larger garden space in the picture. Only colour will make it evident if it is surrounded by leaves or light or rivers of water. So now I guess I had best draw the trellis shapes… thankfully the garden will begin as a caterpillar and the plants put in it will do what plants are supposed to do….grow.

Life is a gift and we get to live it. I still get unsure about how I am seen but I always know deep within once I pick up a pen, that it doesn’t matter what others see, only who i know me to be and that it is me flapping my wings in the breeze. When I draw I know who I am. Grateful for this gift, I do what it is I am meant to do.

Sandy