Butterfly encounter offers spiritual release

Mental health patients find a spiritual release by raising monarchs
By Nicole Levy of the Journal Sentinel
Aug. 17, 2012

"And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude" - Vladimir Nabokov

John Eagan holds the dusty wings of a monarch butterfly between his fingers, just before he releases it into what the Rev. Ray Gurney has named a "transformation garden."

"Did I do that well enough?" Eagan asks Gurney.

"That was beautiful, beautiful, John."

Eagan, who is 33, identifies with the weeks-old monarch: after time as an egg, a caterpillar and a chrysalis, the butterfly has assumed its final identity; after a breakdown and 15-month recovery at the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Complex, Eagan has begun to counterpoise his life.

This is the second year that the facility's staff is helping patients - adults and children - raise and release monarchs. It was Gurney, the complex's spiritual integration coordinator, who approached its spiritual committee with the idea. For patients who have had difficulty with organized religion, the program may offer an alternative.

To Gurney, the miraculous transformation of the compact chrysalis to winged monarch "represents nature, which has nothing to do with an organized religion, but it's very spiritual and it means a lot to people," he says.

He collects monarch eggs from under the leaves of milkweed plants. They grow in the complex's triangular courtyard, which he hopes will soon be registered as an official monarch way station with the University of Kansas' Monarch Watch project. read more here

If you live in the Orlando area, check out Lukas Nursery just for an idea of how something like this could be a blessing.