'Butterflies in Florence'

In Greek, the word for butterfly and the word for soul are the same: psyche. This was not accidental naming. The Greeks observed the caterpillar dissolve entirely inside its chrysalis — not transform gradually, but dissolve, becoming liquid, losing all its previous structure — and then reassemble into something categorically different. They decided this was what the soul looked like when it was in motion. Not gradual self-improvement. Complete dissolution followed by emergence as something that had not previously existed.

Florence in the fifteenth century underwent a similar dissolution. The medieval world — its rigid hierarchy, its suspicion of beauty, its fear of the body — gave way slowly and then suddenly to the Renaissance. The city became a chrysalis. What emerged was Leonardo, Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo — a concentrated outpouring of human beauty that had never happened before in that density and has not happened since in quite that way.

Transformation is not gradual. It is a dissolving and a becoming. The butterfly does not remember being a caterpillar. The emerging self does not carry the fear of the dissolved one.

This is for the woman mid-dissolution — who does not yet know what she is becoming, and is learning to trust the process anyway.