The Butterfly's Flight  

A Story

Written in Memory of

Michael Ford

by Andrew Mearns

"I remember back when I was just a caterpillar, everything was very different," said the butterfly.  "When we were caterpillars we thought we had it pretty good; we would spend all of our time in the garden munching on leaves and making friends with all the other caterpillars in the garden." 

The butterfly continued his story: "Every so often, each of us caterpillars would decide to go exploring to find a new garden with more leaves and more caterpillars to be friends with.  It was a wonderful life, because every time we would go to a new garden, we would make new friends; but the great thing was that our old friends always invited us to come back to visit them.  Pretty soon, we each had all the gardens and friends we could ever want." 

"Then something changed.  One of our best caterpillar friends couldn’t visit the other gardens anymore; he was in a cocoon.  We were sad because he couldn’t do the same things that he had done with us before, and we really wanted him to come out of the cocoon."

"One day we found the cocoon empty, and we didn't understand what had happened.  We thought we would never be able to be with our friend anymore and we missed him very much."

"Soon after that all of us caterpillars noticed a butterfly that would come fly around and land in each of our gardens.  It was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen and all of us agreed that we wished our missing friend could see it.  Pretty soon the butterfly reminded us of our friend, and every time we saw it we wished we could share its beauty with our friend." 

"Then, one by one, we each transformed and grew to become butterflies and we came to understand what a 'metamorphosis' is; it is just a really big change.  Only by going through this ourselves could we possibly understand what our friend went though when he was in his cocoon changing into a butterfly. " 

"Now we are all together again, and we look back and laugh.  What we thought was an ending was really just a new beginning.  Our friend never really went away at all, he was right there with us in our gardens the whole time; we were looking right at him not knowing that it was him and he was just watching and smiling at us!" 

"We had assumed that we would always be caterpillars.  It never occurred to us that we could someday transform into something completely different.  It makes sense when we think about it now because nothing else we know of has only a beginning and an end; everything simply changes in cycles.  Night becomes day, clouds become rain, students become teachers, winter becomes summer and sadness becomes happiness.   But there was no way for any of us to understand the transformation until we went through it ourselves.  Now we are together again but it's much better than before because we can all fly together, to whichever garden we want to visit." 

 "And now," the butterfly concluded "we can't wait for whatever it is that we all will be able to transform into next."