Hope for my flowers

"Tell me, sir," Yellow asked, "what is a butterfly?"

"It's what you are meant to become. It flies with beautiful wings and joins the earth to heaven. It drinks only nectar from the flowers and carries the seeds of love from one flower to another. Without butterflies, the world would have fewer flowers."

This is one of my favorite lines from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus which I read three times or more.

My late dad who was a voracious reader gave me a copy of this book a few months before he was diagnosed of Acute Lymphoblastic Leaukemia. I took the book and tucked it in between other books in the book shelf.  I thought of it as a children's book. I was not interested to read it since I was hooked with Sidney Sheldon that time.

After a week, while I was cleaning up the shelf, I got attracted to the cover of this book. It was bright yellow and has a lovely butterfly design. I skimmed, scanned, and previewed the book. Until I found myself totally engrossed reading the contents and  enjoying the pictures. I finished it in 20 mins and I fell in love with it right away.

It is  the story of  how two catterpillars  prettily named "Yellow" and "Stripe"  discover what really matters in life. They struggled to climbed the top of caterpillar pillar only to find out that they were meant to fly. The struggles of the catterpillars are symbolic to the different struggles that human lives face everyday. It has something to do with the virtue of  patience, the need to sacrifice, the value of making mistakes and learning from it, the importance of decision-making and the eternal power of love.

Each one of us here is a butterfly. We are all butterflies of varied colors.

Soon after I finished reading the book, I knew the reason why dad gave it to me. In his eyes, I was a colorful , free-spirited butterfly who had to learn to live as an iron butterfly. Now that he's gone, I know he is happy in heaven seeing me that I give hope to the flowers ...my flowers...

Disclaimer: the picture is not mine