Personal Statement – Reflections in the Garden
The butterfly garden has an ethereal quality about it. I have found a warm and quiet spot to sit. As I observe the little garden around me, I study its features to determine what gives it this special mood. Spring is arriving and I am grateful for the warmth of the sun on my back, through my jacket to my skin. It reminds me that warm weather and longer days are coming. Anticipation of better weather ahead lifts my mood. Perhaps even the butterflies and insects that fly around here are also excited for warm days ahead – they seem so, as they flit quickly around, dancing before deciding on the flower to land on. The flowers planted here are colorful, and from my limited knowledge of biology I guess they have been planted to specifically attract the butterflies. Their colors are delicate and magnificent. They remind me of a pastel-colored bead necklace that my mother used to wear. The leaves of the plants also have so many shades of green some small, some large, some pale and some dark. Butterflies are silent insects. I try to listen very, very carefully as they fly close to me but I hear nothing – they are like little puffs of wind. I imagine being an animal with much better hearing than humans have. I expect that the sound of a butterfly’s wings would be like the rhythmic ‘whoosh’ of a windmill that suddenly stops when the butterfly lands on a flower. They love the flowers and circle around them all, up high and down low, until one takes their interest and they land softly and sometimes clumsily, re-arranging their wings after landing. After a while of observing the garden, I get up and wander closer to the plants to see if they have any fragrance. I reach to smell the petals of the more colourful flowers, and if I inhale very very deeply, I can detect a faint and earthy scent, more pronounced if I close my eyes.
“Death in the Butterfly Garden”
While sitting and observing the butterfly garden, the warmth of the spring sun penetrates my jacket and for a moment I feel warmed, but then I quickly remember how fast the seasons change. In a short few months it will be cold again and the days miserably short! The butterflies are circling and they land on the flowers in the garden. I wonder how much energy it takes for them to find the plant they want to land on. The flowering plants are colourful but I am sure they have been strategically planted to entice and trick the butterflies into landing and feeding so that they can then go on to reproduce more butterflies for this garden which give so much pleasure to the visitors. Butterflies are beautiful but they have such a short life. I watch them flying and darting about and actually feel sorry for them because they will die soon. It is as if the whole world has tricked them. The pretty plants that lure them in are just a temporary illusion. I get up and look more closely at the plants and notice that so many of them have wilting leaves. It’s spring, yet death is very near for these plants and probably for so many of these butterflies that fly around me. I close my eyes in sadness and inhale deeply the smell of the plants around me. The scent is earthy, strong but smells of nothing. I capture a scent of fumes from the traffic a few hundred feet away and feel desperately sorry for these butterflies in the garden. I listen again and just hear noise of life.
“Rhetorical Analysis”
I was very careful to pay attention to what was going on around me in this small and beautiful space in the middle of the Kansas State University Gardens. I focused first on the beauty and simplicity of the surroundings, choosing a small bench to sit at so that I could observe really well the simple activities in the garden. While butterflies are beautiful, and everything they stand for is beautiful (including the plants and flowers that they choose to feed/rest upon) I was also mindful that everything has a beginning and also an end. Flowers and butterflies have an end. Life and seasons have an end. While I enjoyed the warmth of the spring and the beauty around me in a well-cared for and special environment, I was also very aware that these experiences would come to an end so fast. If I sat on the same chair in mid-June or July, I would probably see very few butterflies and I would be cold and miserable. When I wrote the two scenarios, I was careful to think about and articulate the differences in the two approaches – one was the happy, spring-like ethereal account of a very pretty garden when I felt warm and uplifted, and the second was to engage my thinking a little more than just a superficial experience and think more about the life-cycle of a butterfly and how the seasons change so quickly in this country. The comparisons I used to describe the two scenarios were helpful – my mother’s pastel necklace was something that sprang to mind immediately that I saw the flowers in the garden. And the “noise of life” I thought was a good description as sometimes, no matter how beautiful a place scene you are part of, you just cannot divorce yourself from the minutiae of a modern life.
