Thirty years ago after I went through spine surgery, a dear friend, Dr Curt Gruel came to visit me in the hospital with a gift of art papers and oil pastels to support my healing. I found a small post card that I had picked up in San Luis Obispo, California of monarch butterflies hovering from Eucalyptus leaves. It was so vibrant and beautiful that I drew the butterflies with his gift.
A few months later I developed nerve pain in my arms and was in desperate shape trying to sleep on ice packs while staying overnight with the Gruel family. The next morning before I was to return home, Curt’s brother Dr John Gruel, handed me an envelope with cash to create a painting for his family’s home of anything that inspired me. Though I could hardly breathe because of pain, I accepted the invitation because I had been given a vision of butterflies from all over the world hovering over a crown of thorns.
With all the questions of how I would paint within the pain threshold I was experiencing, I pursed the vision and consulted with an entomology supplier to purchase butterflies from all over the world, that had been dried, to become my subjects. Yes that was before the internet provided so many beautiful photographs I could have used today! When I received the butterflies, I hydrated them and opened their beautiful wings so that I could paint their colors and shapes to bring to life the vision I had been given.
During that time, there were many nights I could not sleep because of pain, so instead I would paint through the night, one butterfly at a time. As I drew and painted with the gifts the Gruel brothers had given me, I was transported into the realm of inner stillness that released me from suffering, even if just for moments and I was given the gift of hope. It was really quite powerful and honestly the best medicine I could have been given.
What a gift of grace and love these kinds of moments have been throughout my life, when the invitation to create became the invitation into a stillness that transcends sufferings of all kinds and brings forward treasures of dwelling in moments of peace.
My heart longs for this, for you as well. There is always hope and always promise in stillness with Divine love. I find it remarkable today that I was given this vision in the midst of such a storm, to discover that love is more powerful than suffering and that through love, suffering is transformed.
I wonder what experiences in life have helped you to discover the same?
These beautiful butterflies represent for me the many lives around the world that both long for and have discovered the same.