🦋 The Wing Beat Begins: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
A movement is stirring – stitched in silk, painted in play, rooted in story.
Dear friends, seekers, co-dreamers,
There are moments in life when you look out from a place you never imagined you'd reach, and you realise you're not standing alone. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants—and the view is beautiful.
As I write this, a dress stands in a bookshop. . Not just any dress—but the Butterfly Dress, a living sculpture stitched from stories, sequins, schoolchildren’s laughter, and the echoes of a thousand questions whispered into the wings of books.
It has arrived. And with it, a movement.
What began as a quiet children’s book called The Butterfly Farmer has, quite unexpectedly, taken on wings of its own. It is no longer just a book. It is a becoming. It is a beat. A wingbeat. A shared pulse across schools, libraries, gardens, and imagination. And I can feel it—humming with the energy of hundreds of children now folded into its journey.
Each one has left their mark. Postcards to the Butterfly Farmer, painted wings, poems, forest-school musings, hands dipped in colour and hope. Eighty children alone will visit the Enchanted Gardens over June and July—sending qualitative data not as spreadsheets, but as artwork, stories, and soul-notes.
They are not participants. They are the wings.
I think of Tolkien often, and C.S. Lewis too.
Of how they never wrote "just" for children, and how they knew that stories must first honour the child within the adult. Their work was about metamorphosis—not just in narrative, but in the spirit.
The wardrobe. The Shire. The road that leads ever on.
These places weren't invented, they were remembered. Brought from a collective knowing we all once held before we forgot how to speak in metaphor.
And now, in a time of pressure and fragmentation, of reduced attention and heavy institutional frameworks, a simple story about a butterfly farmer has begun to recall that forgotten language.
This is how I see it:
The Wandering Lamb was the call.
The Butterfly Farmer is the response.
Hunter Moon (coming soon) will be the reckoning.
Each one exists as literature, yes—but also as offerings. As invitations. As gentle disruptions to a system that is sorely in need of rhythm, magic, and the radical tenderness of wonder.
The Butterfly Dress is not a costume.
It is a shrine.
It is made from school projects and spirit threads, from cardboard, glitter, mythology and forest dreams. It stands as a symbol that the sacred and the silly, the fragile and the fierce, are all part of the same cocoon.
The children get it. They always do.
They aren’t asking what it’s for.
They’re asking: “Can I try it on?” “Can I become it?”
And the answer is always yes.
As I look out over this movement, I see the SDH Research Centre and Angela's vision aligning beautifully with what’s emerging here. Not just research but a kind of living inquiry—where the data smells like lavender, crackles like paint, and rests gently in the palm of a small hand holding a postcard.
I believe we are planting something rare. And it is not too delicate to survive.
It is delicate enough to transform the world.
Watch the teaser. Look closely at the photo. But more than that—listen for the beat behind the wing.
It is the sound of story. Of solidarity. Of the sacred becoming visible.
And I, for one, am behind this 100%.
Like the heartbeat of the chaos that forms behind the cocoon.
Like a hobopoet with muddy boots, holding in a cherished hand
an ornate box filled with the promise of wings—ready to release.
Like Lewis and Tolkien on a good walk,
arguing about dragons and agreeing about God.
This is it.
This is the view.
With wonder and wingbeat,
Tom
#hobopoet
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