beautiful as butterflies

Recently a couple friends and I went to a sort-of-local butterfly garden. Although it wasn't as big as we expected, it was as pretty as we expected. All the butterflies were beautiful; moths too, even though slightly creeping ones sleeping in the shadows (like the one in the last picture below). Nonetheless we were reminded of how fearfully delicate these painfully beautiful creatures are.

I asked myself, 'what would it be like to be as beautiful as a butterfly'? I always thought of myself as a bit incomplete, or a bit unready for life and whatever it had to throw at me. But sometimes (or most of the time) you don't have a choice. A caterpillar will become a pupa whether it likes to or not because its life depends on it. Just as we have to change whether we like it or not. Our lives, our growth depends on it. We owe it to ourselves. People often admire the butterfly, but seldom acknowledge the work the caterpillar had to put into becoming one; and only to live for a few weeks as something so beautiful. And the point of being a butterfly - in my opinion, is for the creature to fly, to soar, to live. A butterfly needs its wings to suvive and to thrive. Being beautiful is only the icing on the cake; unnecessary, but something to appreciate.

Dreaming, staring, admiring beauty, in a cynical point of view, is a trivial and useless thing. But it's part of what makes life worth living - to see, hear, feel beautiful things. Caterpillars don't become beautiful butterflies for others to admire them. They do so for themselves. They need to in order to survive. I think that's something we humans need to think about more. How beauty is only skin deep at times, and beauty is something we should practice in ourselves for ourselves. For us, beauty is not a means of survival, but something we can do for ourselves to make mere surviving into fully thriving. Whatever we each define as beautiful is what we deserve for ourselves; the wings we picture for ourselves that we must earn through the means we must believe in ourselves to overcome. Even if we are not as beautiful as butterflies, we deserve to give ourselves the chance to try.

“I think humans might be like butterflies; people die every day without many other people knowing about them, seeing their colors, hearing their stories... and when humans are broken, they're like broken butterfly wings; suddenly there are so many beauties that are seen in different ways, so many thoughts and visions and possibilities that form, which couldn't form when the person wasn't broken! So it is not a very sad thing to be broken, after all! It's during the times of being broken, that you have all the opportunities to become things unforgettable! Just like the broken butterfly wing that I found, which has given me so many thoughts, in so many ways, has shown me so many words, and imaginations! But butterflies need to know, that it doesn't matter at all if the whole world saw their colors or not! But what matters is that they flew, they glided, they hovered, they saw, they felt, and they knew! And they loved the ones whom they flew with! And that is an existence worthwhile!” 
― C. JoyBell C.

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Have a wonderful, beautiful day!

-Chelle