Why the butterfly?

 

We all know logically that butterflies are insects. But human nature being what it is, we don’t generally put them in the same mental category as cockroaches, mosquitos, fleas.

 

We’re delighted to see butterflies, not dismayed or disgusted. We point them out to others when we see them fluttering about the flower garden, not swat them away or crush them under a heavy shoe.

 

When my kids were in elementary school, our family purchased a tabletop butterfly garden. The mesh habitat came with everything we needed to provide a safe and healthy environment.

 

We kept it on the counter in the kitchen, the room we spent the most time in, so we could watch the transformation while we ate meals or drank coffee, completed math homework, and opened mail.

 

Even the youngest Eric Carle fan knows that a caterpillar’s sole purpose is to eat for as long as it remains a caterpillar. And our five caterpillars gorged themselves with gusto.

 

Eventually, obeying a silent signal only they could sense, each caterpillar made its way up to the holding log, where it attached itself to hang, wriggling, upside down. We watched each slow down, grow motionless, and stiffen into a chrysalis pod.

 

The most intense transformation takes place inside the protective chrysalis. (There’s a reason we humans call being in our safe and happy places cocooning!) Like a drawn curtain, the opaque barriers blocked our view from the intense, crucial labor being performed.

 

One morning, my children noticed over their cereal bowls that one chrysalis had grown much darker in color than the others. Soon another did the same. The others followed. The chrysalides dripped a dark liquid. Something was happening!

 

As luck would have it, all four of us were watching when the first chrysalis burst apart. After the seemingly long and tedious wait, the emergence happened lightning fast, in the almost-literal blink of an eye.

 

Our first butterfly, streaky with fluid, clung to the log with its spindly legs. As the hours passed, the butterfly waved its wings slowly, both testing and drying them. Wings! it must have thought. I have wings! How perfectly astonishing and wonderful!

 

In their own time, its four brothers and sisters likewise emerged, completely changed yet authentically themselves, into the world.

 

Transformed. Full of purpose. Ready to take flight.

 

All four stages of butterfly transformation — caterpillar, chrysalis, emergence, and flight — are orderly, purposeful, and necessary. And the complete cycle, though it happens in plain sight, feels like magic.

 

So, too, does the art and science of creating language that resonates.

 

Writing begins in discovery and insight.

It’s crafted and evolved.

Refined and perfected.

Empowered to be the very best version of itself.

 

It might, as did our hatched butterflies, bring you to tears of joy.

 

My proprietary framework, the Butterfly Blueprint, transforms your copy into content that sounds exactly like you — only better.