Butterfly landing on you
When a butterfly comes to rest on your arm, it can feel like being chosen. Most often it has found salt in your sweat or warmth on your skin, so the moment is really about what others may seek in you without your knowing.
What it may mean
A butterfly perched on your wrist on a hot afternoon is rarely admiring you. It has found salt. Sweat carries sodium and minerals that flowers do not supply, and many butterflies will sip it from skin, a cap or a damp T-shirt. Others land to warm up on a sunny shoulder or because your shirt looks like a big flower. The visit is about something you carry without knowing it. That is worth turning over in your own life: people may come to you for steadiness, humor or a listening ear you do not even count as a gift. Some traditions treat a butterfly that comes this close as a visit from someone who has died, others as plain good fortune; what you take from it is your own. Holding still for a minute costs nothing and may be the best part.
Depending on how you saw it
On your hand or arm on a hot day
The warmer the day and the harder you have been working, the more inviting your skin becomes to a thirsty butterfly. It will often stay until you move. Which of your ordinary qualities, the ones that come from hard work, do others seem to value more than you do?
On your shoulder while you sit still
Butterflies need warm flight muscles, and a dark shirt in the sun makes a fine basking spot. It chose you because you were not moving. Where does your stillness give others a safe place to rest?
On a brightly colored shirt or hat
Butterflies find flowers partly by color, and a red or orange print can draw a quick landing and an equally quick departure once it tastes fabric. Some attention is a case of mistaken identity. Where have you been approached for something you are not, and how did you set it right?
One that keeps landing on you again
A butterfly that returns after you shoo it away has found something worth coming back for, often a salty patch of skin. Persistent small visitors tend to want one simple thing. Who keeps coming back to you, and have you asked what they are looking for?
Why it happens in nature
Butterflies feed on nectar but also need salts and minerals, which they take from damp soil, dung and human sweat. They are cold-blooded and bask on warm surfaces to heat their flight muscles, and they find food partly by color, so bright clothes can draw them. A butterfly that lands on you is most often feeding or warming up and leaves when it is done.
What folk beliefs say
Ireland
One of the oddest Irish superstitions, a 1903 collection says, held that if you caught and imprisoned a butterfly, you had taken possession of your grandmother's soul.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 590. View the page
To reflect on
What do people seem to seek from you that you have never thought of as something you give?