Hunting Butterflies Dreams
Hunting Butterflies Dreams
Hunting butterflies dreams and so much more beyond my imagining, I used to spend summer afternoons with my neighborhood friends. I was raised in the warm citrus valley called the “Inland Empire” of California. The little town had a fantastic family feel much like the one where I now live in the midwest. My friends Jenny and Kathy were war orphans adopted by neighbors from Cambodia. Jenny was my best friend – at least for hunting butterflies.
Jenny had a cleft palette and mild manner and a great imagination. We would be sleuths, hunting carefully for butterflies and our greatest prize – a beautiful cocoon. You had to look carefully for those. It was easier to find the caterpillars crawling around the oleander bushes in my back yard. But when we discovered a little cocoon, we would venture our guess if it still contained life. These moments filled my imagination when writing this poem, called “Rattling Life”:
Each prize was a cocoon
daubed with earth,
rattling life.
A paper tomb.
We spied on safari
as children stalking dreams –
she the matahari,
I the peaceful king.
Sunsets filled with wonder
as we prepared for royalty.
Colored monarchs for our sky.
Then gently we placed our hope
in jars made clean by mother.
Waiting for resurrection.
“Rattling Life”
Its really a joy to enter the imagination as an adult and remember little scraps of memory. Of course, the idea of a cocoon and resurrection are so much more real as an adult. Little childhood disappointments of a butterfly lost or a caterpillar that is no longer a fuzzy friend – these have a deeper meaning when life takes its course with us. Hunting butterflies dreams is an apt title for this post. We hunt after dreams every day. Do we dare wonder about the content of dreams for a cocooned little caterpillar or a sleeping grizzly bear? I’m asked time and again about what we will see and experience in resurrection. Isn’t it a wondrous thing to imagine?
Footnotes:
Be sure to view other poems on Butterflies in the Montage portfolio gallery of Word❈Image❈Spirit.
I hope you enjoy the images of Odilon Redon, a symbolist painter whose works evoke such mystic wonder in me.
Another fantastic artist of butterflies is E.A. Seguy. Here is one of his paintings. Another is in the butterflies montage.
