The Dove & Ink Sandglass - No. 1

Happiness Is Like a Butterfly

HAPPINESS is like a butterfly,
The more you chase it,
The faster it flies.
But if you sit quietly,
It will come and sit softly 
on your shoulder.

The Poem

I was in third grade when Mrs. Dresser made us memorize this poem.

She was the kind of teacher you remember your whole life - not because she was strict or spectacular, but because she loved words the way some people love music, with her whole self, quietly and without apology. She taught us that a poem worth memorizing is a poem worth remembering. And so we memorized this one, and I have carried it ever since. 

It wasn't until many years later that I went looking for where it came from. 

What I found surprised me. The poem had been wandering the world for a very long time - shape-shifting gently as it traveled, the way beloved things do. The earliest known version was published anonymously - signed only with the single letter "L" - in The Daily Crescent, a New Orleans newspaper, on June 23, 1848. That original was brief, almost a definition: happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, seems always just beyond your grasp, but if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

From that seed the poem grew. Over the decades it was reprinted, paraphrased, elaborated upon, and passed from hand to hand - gathering warmth and new words as it went, losing its author's name entirely along the way, acquiring borrowed ones instead. Thoreau. Hawthorne. Neither wrote it. 

The version Mrs. Dresser taught us - with its "faster it flies" and its quiet instruction "to sit quietly" - is one of those beloved elaborations, a later flowering of the original 1848 seed. Whether she knew its history I cannot say. I suspect she simply knew it was true. 

That is the nature of a poem that earns its wandering. It outlasts its origins. It finds its way into third grade classrooms in New Jersey, and onto the walls of libraries, and eventually onto ivory cotton shirts and latte mugs, still telling the same quiet truth it told in New Orleans in 1848. 

Sit quietly. It will come. 

The Art

When I began designing the butterfly pieces for Dove & Ink, I knew immediately that I did not want illustrations that were merely decorative. The poem is too old, too quietly earned, for something generic. I wanted art with its own history - its own provenance  - art that had also, in its own way, been wandering the world waiting to find the right home. 

I found it in the work of Kamisaka Sekka. 

Sekka was a Japanese woodblock master, one of the last great practitioners of the Rinpa school - a tradition of decorative art stretching back to 17th century Kyoto, characterized by bold composition, exquisite pattern, and an almost devotional attention to the natural world. In 1904 he published Cho Senshu - One Thousand Butterflies - an artist's book containing some of the most extraordinary butterfly illustrations ever committed to paper. Each one is a small world - wings at times rendered in indigo and black and the palest blue, patterned with circles and flowers and geometric forms that seem to contain entire cosmologies. 

Sekka died in 1942. His butterflies are now in the public domain, free to travel.

But here is the part of the story that still stops me. 

My father - the same father whose Heritage Club books lined the shelves of my childhood, whose Sandglass inserts I read as carefully as the books themselves - gave me a facsimile copy of Sekka's butterfly book. Published in 1979 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Thames & Hudson, each page is connected, the entire collection of magnificent butterflies unfolding to thirty-one continuous feet of flying butterflies. Thirty-one feet of woodblock butterflies in all hues, each one more extraordinary than the last. 

He gave it to me because he knew I would love it. He was right!

The Design

When I sat down to bring the butterfly poem to life as a Dove & Ink piece, I had two things on my table - Sekka's butterflies and a poem from 1848. The question was how to honor both without crowding either. 

For the Happiness Is Like A Butterfly Boxy Tee, I chose a single large Sekka butterfly for the front - wings fully spread, rendered in his characteristic blue and black, commanding the fabric with quiet authority. Beneath it, the full poem in an italic serif that feels hand-lettered without being precious. And at the very bottom, almost as an afterthought - a second, smaller butterfly. The one that lands on your shoulder. The poem ends, and there it is. 

The shirt comes in ivory and white. I chose ivory as the primary colorway because it gives the blue butterflies warmth and age - they look as though they have been there for a long time, which in a sense they have. 

For the Happiness Is Like A Butterfly Latte Mug, I wanted something different - a piece that felt like an object of daily ritual rather than a statement. The latte mug shape, with its gentle cone and its invitation to be held with both hands, seemed exactly right. On one side, the butterflies cluster and rise toward the words Happiness is like a butterfly. Turn the mug, and there on the other side, quiet and smaller: sit quietly. The two phrases from the poem that contain everything. One observation, one instruction. A morning conversation with yourself. 

The palette throughout is blue and white - a nod to the great English ceramic tradition, that timeless marriage of indigo and ivory that has graced morning tables for three centuries. Sekka's woodblock blues translate into it as though they were always meant to be there. 

In Closing

Mrs Dresser retired long ago. I don't know if she ever learned the true origin of the poem she taught us - the anonymous New Orleans newspaper, the long wandering, the borrowed names. I hope she would be pleased to know that it has found yet another life, printed on ivory cotton and wrapped around ceramic mugs, still making its unhurried way through the world. 

Happiness is not a destination. It is a quality of attention. 

Sit quietly. It will come. 

- Janet Bennett, Dove & Ink