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I love butterflies. And one of the ways I can keep them near my heart is by wearing lovely butterfly jewelry . The other way would be by walking around in a Costa Rican rain forest. Since I live in North America, the first option is a little more practical! One of my favorite butterfly pendants is this azure blue sparkly butterfly necklace . I saw a friend of mine wearing it, and she directed me to this site, which happens to be one of my favorite online jewelry stores anyway.

Butterflies have been considered a symbol of rebirth for a very long time. It makes sense; you could even say they go through 3 rebirthing phases. There’s the “birth” of the caterpillar from a tiny egg, the pupa stage where the caterpillar “rests” for a number of weeks or months, while its body is undergoing the incredible transformation into the last glorious emergence.

When I was a child, finding a butterfly pupa in the autumn was such a gift. I’d keep it on my unheated but protected screened in porch, fantasizing about the changes going on inside that exotic package. I checked it several times a day, even in the dead of winter. But when spring came to my Illinois home, I could hardly wait to get home from school. I barely heard my teacher’s words, and during recess, my heart wasn’t into playing on the slide and chasing my classmates across the blacktop.

What if the butterfly emerged during math lesson? It wasn’t fair. I worried that the butterfly wouldn’t have room to fan its wings, and had terrible thoughts of a desperate but fatal attempt to escape the jar. How could I possibly pay attention to my teacher?

But I was lucky. When I got home from school on that balmy Tuesday in May, my precious pupa was just beginning to break open. I sat by it on a porch chair, transfixed. My mom didn’t even know I’d gotten home. “Julie, where are you?” she was carrying my after school milk and cookie snack. “Mom! The butterfly is coming out!”

I had the best mom. She quietly sat down the glass and saucer, joining me to watch. It took a while; I can’t remember how long that was now. But my next memory is of a glorious monarch sitting on the diagonal stick inside the jar, the limp wings pumping full of butterfly blood.  “It’s so pretty, mom!” She nodded solemnly.

We let the monarch go, holding the stick gently next to a birch tree in the front yard while it climbed off on spindly black legs. I watched over it until dusk and the next morning it was gone.

That was towards the beginning of my love affair with butterflies and butterfly jewelry!