Mariposa….

My name, Vanesa, means a type of butterfly. Well, it’s really Vanessa, with two S’s, but I’m different. I’m Vanesa, with one S. That’s a another story all together.

Mariposa in Spanish means “butterfly”. Spanish is my native tongue, although I had to work at regaining it since English has been my first language for 30 plus years now, but again that’s a story for another time too.

I wanted to explain why I chose the name Mariposa Arts for my business. As you can imagine, by virtue of my given name, it has had some symbolism throughout my life. But it wasn’t until 2014, during a dark period, when I was diagnosed with cancer, that it evolved further to have a deeper meaning for me.

As I began to undergo treatments I started seeing that time as a “transformation” of sorts.

I wrote in my journal on Aug. 1, 2014:

“This is my metamorphosis. My physical form has changed. The structure of myself, my life, my form has been changed by a supernatural and divine means.”

I was strikingly altered by this point. I had lost all of my hair, I was weak, pale, needed blood transfusions, I couldn’t eat, I was turned inwards. I was living in the shadow of my former life wondering if I would see the rest of it come to fruition.

It felt supernatural and divine to me, because from the very beginning I recognized that I would never be who I was before cancer. Not supernatural and divine in that it was caused by the Divine, but that it would alter me forever. Alter my perspective in life, alter my body, alter my emotional being.

It was a metamorphosis.

At times I could mustard a little glimmer of hope that something beautiful could come out of this inward, lonely, fear and panic inducing time.

Mostly though, I feared dying and I had to make peace with that. At times, in the darkness and pain, I thought dying may be a relief.

But I desperately wanted to live and witness my children become who they will be and age with the love of my youth.

Day by day, I went inward, I coiled up inside of myself and bared the pain as best as I could. It was a joyless spring, summer, fall and a chilling winter. Darkness became a sort of holy ground for me, where I encountered all the parts of myself, my faith, my questions, my longings, my dreams that had been deferred for so long. I tangled up inside. In that tangling, I sought refuge in drawing tightly wound up patterns, and in writing the way that I do, fragmented. The writing that spilled onto my pages, the drawing that wound around itself started to untangle me ever so slowly, ever so gently.

Slowly. Gently.

Mariposa.

She emerged strikingly different….in form, in character and in circumstances. The beauty is not in what it looks like but in what it has persevered through.

It is not the process that I would have chosen for myself, to be transformed in this way but transformed I am.

I am the mariposa, I am the art. I am the Mariposa that Arts.