Do you know how butterflies come to life? It’s more frightening than you might think.
Born crawling a caterpillar, close to the ground naïve to the sky simply existing, tasting the world leaf by leaf.
And then it begins. A hush inside the body, a quiet undoing. Behaviors shift, instincts sharpen, the soul sketches its wings in secret. The old self unravels.
Did you know that little caterpillar melts into goo? Not a creature in waiting just formless, floating cells. And from that a butterfly emerges, grown entirely from what was already there.
I’ve been stuck in that goo the nowhere between trauma and metamorphosis, neither alive nor lost, just suspended.
But this summer brought tears as ink, and from the scribbled ache came liberating wings fragile but certain, drawn from silence.
I've started flying. But I still glance down when I shouldn’t afraid that my pride and joy will be mistaken for arrogance. Yet I’m proud proud that I can love again. Proud that flying feels so familiar.
I like to land booping noses of dogs showing up beside strangers on quiet benches. To hear their voices for the very first time to sense the tremble of their own becoming. And when I look, I see it: a shimmer in their stillness, a whisper in their pause. The butterfly still hidden in its goo.
And I hope they’ll pass it on this softness, this seeing.
That ripple we call the butterfly effect
I like to imagine that at 60, I asked the stars for one more chance and recently, I woke up at 30.