Beneath the print of the giant green pear on the cafe wall, conversation bubbles.  Plates chime against each other, the chef’s knife knock-knock-knocks away the part from the whole, and every so often chairs whine against the floor as they change partners. Fiestaware plates make brightly colored polka dots on the tables.  Children too busy to eat prowl the crowded room in a game no one made up, and everyone enjoys.  It’s sunny, and almost spring.  It will always be almost spring when we are together for the last time.

Today, I came here with me, hoping for a chance to be seen by you.  It takes me a while to realize I have no idea what to say about where I have been, to acknowledge that what happens now will be the same-old-nothing-new of beauty and insecurity that it has ever been.

The 29 butterflies always lead me somewhere that is just beyond reach.  I watch the pink one for a while, as it floats along, then I follow the blue one, notice the orange one next.  Pretty soon (but I really can say how long), I find myself at the end of the beginning.  I have butterfly-ed the best I could.

The rest is up to you.

ps here is a slide show of the still photographs:

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Sometimes I wake up with words in my head.

“Now we are heading into the unknown, which is how things always are.”

Lead on, Butterfly.

Can you hear the ocean of butterflies, the vibrations of sunshine, the shimmer of leaves and petals?  If you listen, I am sure you can remember how.

“I want to give you a butterfly, honey,”  I distinctly heard her say.  “You have done so much to make them for me.”

It made me cry.  I think she sees what I have tried to let grow from my love for her, despite its flawed expression when she was alive.

This is what she gave me.  I do think she made me a butterfly.

You can hold butterflies in your hand for only so long.  No matter how gently you surround them, you can’t stop them rising into the breeze and floating towards unknown flowers.  It’s natural to want to clasp them to your heart, as if the butterfly’s beauty can be absorbed through your skin and flow through your veins with a new way of seeing the world.  And you know what?  It can.

Between the bookends, there has always been a butterfly balanced.  It’s like me focus on the rigid and unyielding elements of the story;  maybe you think that way, too.  But that hasn’t meant the butterfly wasn’t there, becoming and changing, continually unfolding.  Lately I am taking little peeks into the tender, iridescent wing-like pages.  What do I have to lose?

You can’t make a butterfly story just one way, but you also can’t make everything in one afternoon.  Sometimes an image is just a start, and I always hope they are open-ended.  Now that I have made this image, and decided to share it with you, other ways to tell the tale suggest themselves.  That’s why it takes at least 29 butterflies, maybe even more, to see what I have to say.

See what the wind scattered in?  Maybe you cast this butterfly spinning and dreaming towards me.  What a sweet gesture, I truly appreciate it!  Here we go now, stir the air and wave to the breeze, and the butterfly lifts off again on a whisper of thoughtful thoughts.  Where will it land next?  We can’t tell, but you can always visit it here, when you want to open the window for butterflies…

These are just some of the butterflies I have seen in my house.  Once you get going, they come fast and flurrious!

Please read the story Yvette shared in the comments on yesterday’s emergence.  Her son is a gifted butterfly finder, and I learned alot from reading about him!

See what a treasure your comments can be…leave me a little something!

When you are looking for butterflies, you have to look everywhere.  You have to look all over your untidy house, if you have one.  Maybe you have a tidy house.  If so, good luck.  You probably already know where all the butterflies are.  It’s easier to find them if you have to put on your butterfly viewfinder and look.

This composition is intended to show you how to find butterflies with a viewfinder.  It helps to see what to do.  Tomorrow, maybe, we’ll just take a look at the butterflies, but today, I liked seeing where they came from.  I hope you find some today, too!

If people are saints because we need them to be, what happens when we don’t need a saint anymore?

Marv carried us into  realms of wonder, showing us things he imagined were real, and things he didn’t realize we could see –  the way the world looked as we sat on his shoulder above the crowd, how to draw on a paper placemat, the right amount of peanut butter for a graham cracker.  But it was not always so benign.  If he didn’t like what he was seeing, he knew who to blame.  I guess I learned how to do that from him, too.

It was so hard for Marv to see by the light of his own butterfly.  We had to help him with that, Pammy and me.  But now the butterfly is emerging on our path together, flashing its wings out of the shadows.  Definitely, it is emerging, not disappearing.

In this picture, I’m not sure who is needing who.   And that’s the way it is with us, when presenting our butterflies for each other to see.