Symbol of...

Transformation

“Butterfly is so elegant and beautiful she is the essence and embodiment, the spiritual symbol of the divine feminine. She teaches grace and tenderness and the awareness and energy of another way of being.”

Spiritual Universe Website

I keep putting butterflies on my fabric creations. As you can see, they feature prominently in this one along with a lovely young woman. Sometimes, when I am making a piece, I have no idea why I do what I do with the fabrics. I consider myself to be a technician of sorts—I simply arrange the elements. If you are a creative person, you know that there is not a traditional “thought process” involved in the making of something—you just do the next thing until something inside you says it's done. It is only at the “done” end of things that I ask, “What's this all about?” Or, as my mother would ask, “What does it mean, Jane?”

Here's what I learned when I did the research: Butterflies are, in symbolic terms, the embodiment of the divine feminine, and more than any other life form, the symbol of transformation. They have four distinct stages from egg to butterfly—egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly. They have at the caterpillar (larvae) stage, some cellular discs within them that hold the pattern for the body parts they will need as butterflies—antenna, wings, legs—all the parts they don't have as a caterpillar. Once they have eaten and grown enough, they spin themselves into a chrysalis, and spend several weeks hanging from a twig, seemingly inanimate. During that period, they digest themselves and everything caterpillar is dissolved except for those disc cells holding the butterfly pattern. If you were to split open a chrysalis, you would find only caterpillar soup—the dissolution is that complete. Then, they reconstitute themselves into a butterfly and break free of the chrysalis. The whole process is a true metamorphosis; transformation from one creature into another, from one that can only crawl on a twig and eat leaves, to one that can spread its wings and fly away.

Transformation is a process of freeing what is within. First, however, we must go through the soup-stage. What is old and no longer useful, dissolves, and is replaced by something brand new. It's important to remember, especially if you're going through the soup-stage right now, that you carry the cells of transformation within you—the blueprint is right there. What we must do is trust the process. It helps to know, too, that it is a process in which all things change. Dissolution is one part of the transformational journey, but it is not the destination. The destination, my friends, has magnificent wings.

                                                          In the Spirit,

                                                               Jane