butterfliesI have a dream. I dreamed of lilies and wildflowers that have begun to spring on the dry desert sands of the gloomy northwest.

The immaculate smell of freshness fills the waterless air that roamed the land for centuries, reinvigorating it with new flavor and crispness like raindrops till the arid wasteland.

I could hear the whispers of the wind as it changes its vibrant colors each and every time it turns. Like an endless array of colorful pageantry, it seems it was trying to shake things up slowly but quite beautifully. Like a high-tech display of natural beauty, it was flaunting its way into the dullness of the scorching hot desert.

Instead of sandstorms, an early morning fog gracefully dances beneath the endless sheets of the mounds and dunes a mile away, slowly caressing the fine layer of sands that stretches more than a mile beneath.

The fine dust particles of the earth slowly mix themselves with the whiteness bloom that flows suspended right above it. My eyes couldn’t see where it all started or where it had ended. The whole picturesque spectacle fills my very limited panoramic sense.

For a while, I couldn’t quite see beyond the haze of the cloud-like fog. It was like looking through a formation of cloud. Your eyes could not get pass through, you just let the cloud get through you.

Bewildered, excited and quite curious, the few minutes it took seemed like a few decades and ominous. Then I heard a sound. Beyond the wisps of the crispness of the fog, I heard a tiny flap. Then another. And another. And another. And another…

When the cloud-like fog finally spreads itself all over me and I can finally see through it, I immediately saw the sources of those flapping sounds.

Little butterflies! Little heavenly critters coming out from the sands, flapping their tiny wings into life. They are literally springing themselves into life. The sight was astoundingly marvelous. I knew it was a dream. It can only be. Butterflies in the desert? No such beauty ever existed in reality.

I tried to catch one of them and put it in my hand. I zoomed in one particular butterfly with the color of steel and tried to catch it in mid-air. I caught it. But as soon as I touched it…  it rang.

It was my stupid phone alarm waking me up. Nyet.