It was the spring of 2019, the largest butterfly migration Utah had seen since 1991.
They came north in the hundreds and the thousands, painted ladies riding a current I could not see, and they landed on my arms. They swarmed every flower that had opened, the tulips, the iris, anything in bloom. Their wings were the orange of the desert itself, deep in the center and lighter at the edges, as if the rust earth of the south had been lifted up and painted onto something living. I would go still and let them land, and something about being touched that softly, that many times over, called me back into the whole of myself, the parts I thought the winter had taken.
It was hard to drive that spring. There were so many that you could not help but catch some against the windshield, and every one that died made me feel so sad. It felt as though each one carried a small prayer of peace as it passed.
I felt that there was a huge message these butterflies were bringing us. I felt it as plainly as I have felt anything. It was the same thing we hear at Eastertime, that all is risen. That is what the whole sky was saying that spring, wing after wing after wing. I am risen and you will rise too!
Butterfly medicine is the medicine of becoming. Not the flight, but the dissolving that comes first, the long dark work inside the chrysalis where the old self breaks down almost completely, so that something more alive can take its shape.
I was a year and a half out from the end of my marriage.
The cocoon after a marriage ends
I have come to believe that a divorce is a kind of death. The family unit as everyone understood it dies. The visions you held die, the dreams and the hopes you built alongside another person, all of it dies, and there is no funeral for any of it. What there is instead is the slow dissolving.
When a marriage comes apart, it comes apart in layers. First the blame and the projection, then underneath that the shame. Why did we not work? Why could I not hold this together? Those questions do not stay questions for long. They harden into a heavy armor of resentment and anger and betrayal and heartache, and you wear it because you do not yet know how to set it down.
And you are not carrying it alone, which is the part no one warns you about. You are watching your own grief show up in smaller bodies, in your children, as they try to make sense of the same thing. Was I not enough? Was I the problem? I had to feel all of it in myself and witness all of it in them at the same time.
That was the cocoon. Not a season. Years.
The dissolving no one sees
I did not know until later what actually happens inside a chrysalis, and when I learned it, I wept, because it was the truest picture of those years with my children.
Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar does not simply sprout wings. It dissolves. Its body breaks down almost entirely into a kind of fluid, until there is very little left of the creature that crawled in. And yet it is not empty in there. All along, since it was a caterpillar, it has carried tiny hidden clusters of cells, the pattern of the wings it had never used, and those survive the dissolving. They are what the fluid rebuilds. The old body becomes the raw material for the new one.
That is what forgiveness was for me. It was the dissolving. Layer by layer I worked through the anger I carried toward him, and layer by layer I worked through the shame I carried toward myself, and there were long stretches where I could not have told you what was left of me. But something was still in there, holding the pattern of a self I had not yet become.
The hardest part was never my own grief
I went to the river to rage. I went to cry, and to be sad, and to let the water take what I could not carry back up the bank. Those days were hard, but they were not the hardest.
The hardest was holding space for my children. It was sitting with the rage and the sadness and the chaos as it moved through them, letting them come completely undone in front of me, watching the hurt in their eyes and not looking away from it. I understood, even then, that what I was witnessing was their wild animal part, the part that has to be allowed to shake and cry and roar before it can settle. So I let them have it. I gave them room, and I did not leave them. I stayed at the edge of it, watching the way you stay near a fire.
Those were the tender unfoldings of their hearts that a therapist would never see, the pieces I doubt they ever felt safe enough to show anywhere else. To be trusted with that was the hardest and the holiest work of the whole cocoon.
The spring the painted ladies came
By the spring of 2019 I had stopped asking the dark when it would end. I had made a kind of peace with not knowing, and then the answer arrived without my asking, in the one language I could never miss.
It was my first trip with my wild woman pack, a weekend at Lava Hot Springs, and the butterflies were everywhere, not only the real ones filling the sky back home, but their image, following me. There was butterfly art in our hotel room. There was butterfly art on the sidewalk. Then the next morning the waitress who brought our breakfast had a butterfly tattoo on her arm. My friends watched me notice the third one, because they know what I know. When a thing comes once it is chance. When it comes three times, you stop, and you pay attention.
I had been talking all weekend about the metamorphosis I was in, and here was the whole world answering me in the one language it knew I would understand, symbols.
I found out later why the real butterflies had come in such numbers that year, and somehow the reason made it more sacred to me, not less. Heavy winter rains had fallen far to the south, in the deserts of the Mojave, and the rain had broken the desert open into a superbloom, and the bloom had fed more caterpillars than the land had seen in years. Everything I was standing in the middle of had been written months earlier, by water, in a desert I never saw. The flood had to come first. The abundance was made of it.
There is one more thing about these butterflies. Their migration is so long that it takes many generations to finish, each one flying as far as it can, breeding, and dying, handing the rest of the way to the next. The butterfly that arrives is never the one that set out. It takes a lineage to complete the flight.
That morning, over breakfast, I picked up a pen and I began to draw.
The name that became the butterfly
Let me take you back to a girl of nine or ten, in a bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, with her mother. I loved that store. I would flip through books of every kind, and one day I opened a book of names and found mine. Vanessa. There was one word beside it, butterfly. I remember how special it felt, that other people simply liked butterflies, and I got to be one.
I built a quiet life on that. I wore the butterfly jewelry. I carried the knowing for decades.
Here is what I only learned much later, the truth that is more beautiful than the one in the book. The name Vanessa did not come down through the ages meaning butterfly. A poet named Jonathan Swift invented it around 1713, for a woman he loved. It did not mean anything at all until he made it mean her. And then, nearly a hundred years later, in 1807, a scientist looked at the most far wandering butterfly on the whole earth, the one that crosses deserts and seas across many lifetimes to finish a single flight, and he reached for that invented name and gave it to her. Vanessa cardui. The painted lady. Cardui means of the thistle, for the humble, prickly plant she is willing to grow up out of.
So I was not born meaning butterfly. The name became the butterfly. The way I did.
Where she lives on me now
We drove down from Lava Hot Springs to find a tattoo shop open on a Sunday, in Salt Lake, that same day. My friends kept asking, are you sure, is this the day? I kept saying yes, this is exactly the day, this feels important. A gifted woman artist inked her for me, the painted lady butterfly, because that was the one filling the sky in the thousands, the one that carries my name. I also wanted the phases of the moon around her, because I already understood something I did not yet have words for. You do not enter the cocoon only once. There are many of these thresholds in a lifetime, and each big turning asks you back into the dark to become again.
She lives on the back of my left shoulder, the feminine side, the side that receives. You cannot usually see my Vanessa cardui tattoo. Through the cold months she stays covered under sleeves, and then once spring comes, the tank tops come out, and then summer with swimsuits. She emerges into the open air as if on her own schedule. My own skin keeps the same calendar the butterflies keep.
Winter is when we go inward. We slow down, we let things digest, we cannot yet see what is forming. Spring is when we lift our heads after all that slow sitting and finally see clearly what we have become. Every year she rises again on my shoulder to remind me. Whatever winter you have been inside of, there is a rising on the other side of it.
If you are in the cocoon now
If you are in the dark middle of your own becoming, in the years after a marriage ends or a faith falls away or a life you planned quietly dissolves, I want to offer you the one thing the butterfly taught me.
You do not have to know what your wings will look like. The caterpillar never does. It dissolves anyway, trusting a pattern it cannot see. So let this be your practice when the not knowing gets loud. Place a hand on your own left shoulder, the side that receives, and breathe there, and let yourself soften around everything you cannot yet see. You do not have to force the wings. You only have to let the old shape go, and trust that something in you has been holding the blueprint all along.
You are not broken. You are dissolving into what comes next.
Questions people ask
What does the painted lady butterfly symbolize? For me the painted lady carries the medicine of becoming through surrender. She is the transformation that comes after a hard winter, the beauty that emerges only once something old has fully dissolved. She is also resilience, one of the most far traveling butterflies on earth, carried forward across many lifetimes.
What does it mean when a butterfly keeps appearing? In many traditions the butterfly is a sign of transformation and rebirth, a message that an old self is dissolving and a new one is on its way. For me, painted ladies filled the sky the spring after my marriage ended, and their image followed me everywhere until I understood I was being remade. When the butterfly keeps returning, something in you is changing shape. You are not falling apart. You are becoming.
A gentle note. I am a somatic and energy healing practitioner, not a licensed therapist. What I share here is my own lived experience and the medicine I have found in it, offered as companionship, not as clinical or medical advice.
If you are moving through a threshold like this one, a divorce, a leaving, the slow undoing of a life you thought you would keep, this is the exact work I hold with people in challenging transitions. If it would help to be witnessed in yours, you are welcome to reach out for a free discovery call. No pressure, and no fixing. Just a place to be met while you become.
The flood came first. And you will rise too.
