My gramma helped raise me. I spent most of my childhood with her. She loved butterflies, and her yard was wonderous and wild and beautiful, full of flowers, trees, meadows, gardens. She was a serious woman, but sometimes we had tea parties with the gnomes and fairies, and we slept under the stars in the summer, with the smells of catalpa, lilacs, apple blossoms, poppies, grape hyacinth, lilies.
She was Norwegian, but I studied Spanish. Someone gave me an album the summer before college (cassette tape actually) “Nada Como el Sol” by Sting. I heard the song “Mariposa Libre” and it felt like my soul song, who I wanted to be. It was many years later before I discovered there was an English version.
“Butterflies and zebras and moonbeams, and fairytales. That’s all she ever thinks about, riding with the wind. When I’m sad, she comes to me; with a thousand smiles, she gives to me free. It’s alright, she said, it’s alright. Take anything you want from me, anything… anything… fly on little wing.”
I felt like I could possibly be a butterfly, mariposa, and longed for that magical world with moonbeams and fairytales and forests.
25 years later, deep in my spiritual journey, I was working with a Medicine Woman who sent me a video with a Shaman doing an exercise to breathe intention into an energy ball created in your hands. Put a good wish into the energy ball, and send it out to the universe, then ask for a sign that the wish was received; something you would rarely see in real life, like a blue feather. My son and I shrugged our shoulders and blew our wishes out to the universe.
For weeks I saw blue butterflies, in many random ways. We laughed and laughed, she patted my head and said, “almost, grasshopper”.
Later that summer, her Shaman friend (a different Shaman) came to visit and offer meditations. His staff was covered in blue feathers. All signs I was on the right path after all (even though most of the time I feel befuddled and have no idea what I’m doing)
The blue butterfly became one of my spirit guides, showing me a light hearted reminder that the universe has a sense of humor, and to keep the wonder.
And like a butterfly, I have metamorphosed several times over, melting and dissolving and losing everything including myself, losing myself into nothing, and reforming again. Not like a fiery fierce phoenix, but gentle… a butterfly. It has become my sacred path.