Mabel the Butterfly Who Grew by Resting
In a sunny garden full of flowers, there fluttered a little butterfly named Mabel, with wings like painted stained glass — orange and gold, edged with the softest blue.
All day long, Mabel flew. She drifted from the roses to the lavender, from the lavender to the tall pink hollyhocks. She danced on the warm breeze and floated through the golden light, sipping sweet nectar and saying hello to the busy bees. It was a beautiful day, and Mabel fluttered through every moment of it.
But as the sun sank low and the garden filled with long soft shadows, Mabel's wings began to feel tired. Her fluttering slowed. It was time, she knew, to find a quiet place to rest.
She drifted down to a broad green leaf, tucked away beneath a rose, safe from the evening breeze. And there she settled, and folded her beautiful wings up gently, closing them together like the pages of a tiny book.
As she grew still, Mabel remembered something. She remembered that once, not so very long ago, she hadn't been a butterfly at all. She had been a little caterpillar. And she had wrapped herself up, snug and quiet, in a cosy cocoon — and she had rested. She had rested, and rested, and while she rested, something magical had happened. Slowly, quietly, in the stillness, she had grown her beautiful wings.
"That's the secret," Mabel thought sleepily, tucked safe beneath her leaf. "Resting isn't doing nothing at all. When I rest, I grow. When I'm quiet and still, wonderful things happen — deep inside, where I can't even see them."
The garden grew dark and hushed around her. The flowers closed their petals. The first stars blinked awake above the leaves. And Mabel, safe on her cosy leaf with her painted wings folded softly closed, felt herself growing calm, and warm, and wonderfully sleepy.
And the little butterfly, resting quietly in the sleeping garden — growing, in all the quiet secret ways that resting makes us grow — drifted gently off to sleep.