Wings are For Flying

There was a time when I loved writing for the sanctuary.

I loved sitting down with my coffee, listening to the sounds of early morning all around me, and capturing intimate moments we frequently overlook.

Always, I could write about the changing weather and how it impacted the land. Or the forested Shire where the neon green grass grows soft around patinaed oak trees.

It came easily.

Until it didn't, when one day, the sanctuary's accountant, not unkindly, but not gently either, suggested I reconsider my content. Or was it my tone? The details blur now. What remains is the verdict: too flighty. Too untethered from our mission. Too much of one thing and not enough of another.

There was truth in it. So, I put my pen down.

No more gold light pooling across the pasture. No more black sage pods nudging your hand like they're keeping a secret they want to share but only with you.

The words just… stopped.

And the seasons, unbothered by my silence, kept moving through me.

Hard seasons.

Beautiful seasons.

Lonely seasons.

Seasons that left me entirely different than when they found me.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I wrote a book. I watched strangers fall into worlds and characters I had only ever carried inside myself. I started making jewelry. Small pieces patchworked from old things and new things. Broken things, repaired and transformed, made beautiful.

I changed.

Which brings me to butterflies. And, I suppose, a small vindication for our accountant.

At the sanctuary, butterfly season arrives without announcement. One day the garden takes in a deep breath. The next, it fully lets it go. And there they are. Weightless. Brilliant. Floating like living gems. If you go still enough, you will see that these creatures are both deeply strange and quietly miraculous.

Time and time again, they retreat, faithfully, into a hidden season. A season of total surrender where their entire form dissolves. What was, is unmade. Caught at its midpoint, the process would look far more like destruction than becoming. There is no recognizable creature in that in-between. Only radical, necessary undoing.

We humans resist this. We cling to older versions of ourselves the way we cling to anything familiar, because familiar feels good. Even when it isn't. We apologize for becoming. We compress our transformation into something portable and bite-sized and call it consideration. We call it love. We give it so many gracious flowery names.

The butterfly does not apologize for its becoming. Its messy dissolution is held as sacred. It understands, in whatever wordless way it moves through this world, that what looks like loss from the outside is, from the inside, the whole point.

And so, as I watch the first yellow wings flutter just outside my window, I listen carefully to what this small, extraordinary creature is saying.

Wings are for flying.

So to you, dear sanctuary friends, those who have loved this place and helped us carry it in one way or another, I say this: Do not apologize for the becoming.

Do not compress your particular shade of creativity into something manageable for others. Do not fold your biggest, most inconvenient dreams down to a size that fits more easily into their understanding. Even when they call it too flighty.

Especially when they call it too flighty.

Instead, fly!

Fly in the direction of the thing that will not leave your heart. Fly higher than what seems possible.

It is, after all, butterfly season.