My Word for 2008

10-13-3chalk5
Originally uploaded by seeshells.

Do you remember the story about the butterfly struggling to get out of it's cocoon? I went to look up the specifics of the story, and found several versions. The story includes a butterfly and a human. The butterfly was never described, use your own imagination, the human in the story either a man, a grandmother, or a kid, so the human is basically anyone.
The story goes that Anyone sees the butterfly working on shedding it's cocoon, and sees the struggle the butterfly is having, sees how extremely hard the butterfly is working. And Anyone, being the helpful human that they think they are, decides to help the butterfly get out of it's cocoon, and opens the hard shell for the bug.
Anyone went back later to see how the butterfly was doing, and it was not doing well. At all. It's wings were all shriveled up, and it could barely move them.
And Anyone researched butterflies and cocoons (on the internet or library or from a friendly teacher, depending on the version of the story), and learned that it is the struggle to remove the cocoon that helps the butterfly strengthen it's wings, that all the wiggling, and hard work, is essential to getting the blood into the wings, to make them strong enough to fly with.
So when Anyone was trying to help, they actually hurt the butterfly, but they learned a valuable lesson: Sometimes it is the struggle itself that makes us stronger, and sometimes there is no short cut to that struggle.
I have been feeling the last couple months like I am that butterfly working on getting it's wings strong enough to get out of the cocoon. And I don't know how much working it will take until my wings are strong enough, but I know they will get there, and I will fly.
So my word for 2008, or at least for right now, is:
Emerging.