They arrive when the veil is thin those fragile-winged messengers, dancing just at the edge of vision. Butterflies, they say, carry the souls of the dead.
They don’t speak in human words, but in colour and shimmer, in the near-weightless touch of air disturbed by flight. In the Season of Unravelling, kinship takes strange shapes. Not just the living people around us, also the trees, the creek, the wedge-tailed eagle spiralling above.
As well as the dead: those who have crossed, those we carry in our bones and stories, those whose names we don’t even know but who still leave fingerprints in the soil.
The butterfly has no voice, but the body knows. When it lands or circles, or appears at the moment you’re thinking of someone long gone. The skin tightens…the heart catches, something ancient inside you turns to face it.
Not every butterfly is a message, some are just butterflies, but some, some are the thin places made visible, the threshold kin reminding us that grief and beauty are never separate.
In this season, as we sit with endings, it’s worth remembering that the veil isn’t a wall.
It’s more like mist, something we pass through and return from, carrying traces on our skin. The dead are part of our kinship field too.
Not just ancestors by blood, but all those who once walked this land, who left stories in the water and the trees, who knew how to listen long before we forgot.
Some of them arrive on wings.
Find this in book form
The Season of Unravelling has its own home beyond Substack now. It’s the first in a four-part Almanac, the expanded long-form telling of this whole year-long inquiry, with Unravelling, Drifting, Seeding, and Resonance each becoming their own book.
This first one, The Season of Unravelling, is 59 pages: longer than a single Substack post, shorter than a commitment. It weaves the original posts into one fuller arc, with the threads, the practices, and the reflections that the weekly format never had room for. It’s available to purchase on Amazon.
The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.