HOW TO FEED BUTTERFLIES
It all started with a dream I had…
I’m walking through a dense forest coming into a clearing. The only thing I can see is a small pond filled with countless butterflies. The light beaming down on them through the trees catches my focus - their wings opening and closing giving the illusion of ripples across the water. I walk towards the water and as soon as I got close all the butterflies fluttered away snapping me back to the real world. The first thing I wrote down before getting out of bed was, “How to feed butterflies.”
The rest of the morning I tried to piece together what this meant. The world as we all knew it was changing so rapidly - the pandemic was just touching down on all of our lives. Jobs lost. People dying. Fear setting in that the worst was yet to come. Realizing that I had little power to change much I started looking within - asking what are the things I hold closest to me. My wife and I were exploring the idea of starting a family and moving into a new phase of life. Making sure that nothing held us back from the things that mattered most to our metamorphosis. As part of that understanding I started a kind of meditation photographing my wife everyday for the first 100 days of quarantine - looking at the changes that are occurring in the world around me and trying to find beauty in it all.
Through this process I started growing my own butterflies from caterpillars. Nurturing nature into a growth and transformation that began to make more sense to me. Just as these creatures were breaking free from their cocoon and transforming into something bigger and beautiful, I was also changing. Growing creatively, growing spiritually, growing closer with my family, and even growing to enjoy the change that brought us here in the first place...