Once upon a planet, in a time far, far away, there lived a girl named June. She loved hiking and painting and watching the clouds drift by the moon. She lived on a fruit farm with flowing fields of wildflowers and a forest ful lof ferns, fungi and flowers. Her life was generally really good as she wondered and wandered around the wooden bird towers.

Every day, June made new discoveries as she explored the area deeper. She always came across something new — a critter or creature or crazy cool feature — and always befriended all the nature she met: A squirrel named Nut and an owl named Hoot and a very special oak tree named Sturdy, among all the others. 

And every night she’d watch the sun go down and the light around town drown into black and listen as the songs of chirping birds became windy whispers and the symphony of chatty crickets and toady ribbits and the blinking lights of faerieflies dancing. 

One night she as she was hiking home, she heard a holler coming up from below her. “STOPPPPPPPP!!! WATCH OUT!!!!!! DON’T STEP ON ME!!! Don’t step on meeeeeee!!” And she saw below her a frantic, frenzied fuzzy, leggy creature — a caterpillar!

“Watch where you are stepping!” The caterpillar yelled. “I’m down here, don’t you see! Please don’t hurt me!” 

“I’m sorry, you’re so tiny! I didn’t see you,” June said. “I was busy noticing the leaves on that tree, will you please forgive me?”

The caterpillar carefully and cleverly considered the gentle giant’s question. “It’s my last night here, so I suppose you’re forgiven, but only if you help me on my mission!”

June was filled with curiosity. She’d never spoken to a caterpillar before. “Why is it your last night here and what is this mission you envision even for?”

The caterpillar was filled with courage. “Well, my name is Luna,” she started, a little startled. She’d never spoken to a girl who could reply. “I need to find the perfect place for my cocoon,” she said. “Soon it’ll be my turn to fly!” 

June stared at the soft creature, with all its harry legs and none of its beautiful wings, and held out her fingers. “How do you fly?” She questioned. “You don’t have any flying things! Do your legs flap? Does your body start to float?”

“NO!” The caterpillar said in a huff, but stepped nonetheless onto the girl’s hand. “It’s much more complicated than that. In my cocoon, my body turns to a syrupy dust and then magically puts itself back together in a totally different form!”

“You turn to dust and then you transform?” June asked, aghast, bringing the caterpillar up to her eye, inspecting her closely. “That sounds so horrible! I can’t let you turn to dust! You must do something else!”

Luna shook her head. “It’s not my choice, it’s just my time,” she said. “Everything that lives, comes from some kind of dust and turns to some kind of dust. And then we all become something new, too! Everything works in a circle, everything continues in a different shape and form.

“But isn’t it painful?” June said. “Aren’t you scared? Don’t you worry it’s going to hurt? I’m scared for you! And then putting yourself back together — that seems like it must be some work! What if you get too tired? What if you make a mistake?”

“No, no, no!” Luna said. “I won’t be able to feel a thing, it’s a totally different sensation I’ll be living in! I won’t feel pain, only pleasure. I’ll never be hungry, I won’t have to think about food or drink or survival, I’ll just be a moth, resting in the dark, in search of love and light and flight. And it doesn’t take long; it’s just like a week’s vacation until the next adventure begins!”

June couldn’t believe all she heard. It sounded a bit like a trip to heaven, like her grandmother had taken after she’d gotten cancer, and that had been so sad, she had cried and cried for a week. “You’re lucky to be a caterpillar,” she said. “You know so much about what happens to you and where you go, won’t you miss all the other caterpillars you know?”

Luna shook her head. “They all come from where I come from and they’re all going where I’m going!” She said. “But that doesn’t make me lucky, silly! It’s true for everything in existence, from the trees to the lions to the flowers, and it’s true of you humans, too!”

June wrinkled her nose and rubbed her forehead, thinking deeply. “How do you know that?” June said, sitting down at her usual sitting spot under Sturdy. “I’ve never seen a tree become something else, or a lion. What do they come from and what do they become?”

“Well, a tree comes from a seed,” Luna said, “like the seeds on that tree!” She directed June toward Sturdy. “And hopefully one day, hundreds and hundreds of years from now, it will fall and decay and become soil. It’s moving on in its cycle.”

“A lion, a giraffe, an owl — they all come from the ancestry cloud of their parents — it’s a different part of what scientists call DNA,” she said. “And one day their spirits will rise and their bodies will decompose and feed the scavengers and the forest janitors and the rest will become the moss that allows all the trees and ground cover in the entire forest to speak to each other.”

“I’ve never seen a spirit rise!” June said. “And what happens to people?” She wondered. “People are buried in caskets or turned to ashes, or so I thought! We don’t feed the vultures or the forest janitors!” She shook her head, suddenly sad. “We’re not part of the forest.” 

“Butterflies can see it,” Luna said. “They see some things more easily than people do. And you could see it, too, one day. Maybe. But rest assured, people are like caterpillars,” she continued. “Only instead of a syrupy dust, you transform into a windy gas and put yourself back together as a cloud floating across the sky in search of love and light.”

“I become a cloud when I die?!” June gasped. “I wonder what that’s like, and why.”

“Well, lay down, and let’s look!” Luna replied, and they both laid down and gazed at the sky, observing the wisps of clouds strolling by. “I’d imagine It’s like you don’t have any weight and you don’t have any form but you’re 1,000 percent emotion and imagination and creation and you can blow yourself across the sky in all the shapes and sizes that come to your mind, and you can go on forever just like that or disappear into the ether and rest for a while,” Luna answered. “And you’re just a drop in the cloud. The cloud is made up of everyone you ever knew, anyone you ever met. You feel the cloud in you, right now, already, it’s just water. This is just … water becoming more of a cloud.”

“But what happens when the clouds go away and the sky is just a clear, sunny day?” June asked. “What if the nights and the stars are shining bright?”

“Then it’s on to the next adventure,” Luna shrugged. “A cloud becomes rain and seeps into the world’s pores, becoming one with the plants and the soil. Mother Nature takes you over, for a while. Until the next adventure, and the next.”

“How do you know all this?!” June pushed forward. “Moths don’t even have mouths, they can’t talk!”

“Don’t you talk to Sturdy?” Luna asked, pointing at the tree they had walked to and laid down under. “I’ve seen you here sitting on one of his trunks, always talking to him about your life.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t talk back,” June said. “Not in a way that I could hear. I just knew he was always listening.”

“Think of all the good thoughts you had when you were talking to that tree,” Luna said. “Where do you think they came from? They came from the tree!”

“My thoughts don’t come from the trees,” June giggled. “They come from me and my head!”

“Or telepathy!” Luna said. “Sometimes it’s the trees.”

“So moths can talk?” June pondered.

“Sure, we can talk, and we can sing and dance too!” Luna laughed. “Not everything needs a mouth to talk! Some things communicate through tapping and others through art, some things communicate with their hands and others talk by typing words on fake paper. Trees talk through telepathy and color theory and neural networks of moss across the ground! Moths talk with their minds and sing by the flapping of their wings, and dance by the directions they fly!” 

“I never thought about it like that before,” she said. “It all seems kind of magical, everything clicking together in a cycle like that.”

“It is,” Luna nodded. “I don’t know what it’s like to fly but I’ve waited a long time and I’m eager to try. I did everything I could do here to prepare and now I just want to feel the flap of my wings, the weightlessness of having nothing underfoot, what its like to be lighter than air.”

“What if I want to do feel that too?” June asked. “Can’t I go see my grandma now? She’s already a cloud and I miss her very much! I always thought dying was bad but you make it sound so nice!”

“No, no no!” Luna said. “You’ve got things you need to do! You’ve got a purpose even if you don’t know it, you’ve got to finish your mission and wait for your time to come, the rest of the world needs you because you’re in the circle.”

“But I don’t have a mission,” June said. “All I do is go to school and hike and paint out here in the fruit fields.

“That’s not all you do! You talk to the trees, you tell them your stories. You’re an ambassador! And you have a mission now, remember!” Luna said. “I MUST find the perfect place for my cocoon and I must do it quickly! Where will I be safe and where will I be happy?”

The two looked around and June looked at Sturdy. “What if you put your cocoon here? I know this tree and he’s as kind as can be. I come here often and I can have Hoot and Nut keep all the other creatures at bay.”

Luna looked around. They had walked to the middle of the woods, and she’d be surrounded by trees and when she emerged, she’d blend into the leaves as easy as can be. 

“This does look like a good spot, and you seem like a goof friend,” she said. “I think I’ll be happy and safe here while I work to transform, especially if you come here often and I can hear you and Sturdy talk while you’re out on your walks and then in three weeks you can see me emerge a luna moth!”

June felt honored that Luna wanted to keep her around even though they’d only known each other for one night. “I’ll definitely come back and check on you every chance I get!” She said. “It’s the least I can do for someone who has shown me so much in just a short while!”

Luna started feeling the tug of time pulling at her as if for the final time.

“I must go, I must begin! Thank you for all your help tonight, you’ve been a wonderful friend! Come back and say hello and I’ll see you on the other end!”

And June did come back often over the next three weeks; in fact, she came back every day to talk to Sturdy and Hoot and Nut and all the others, and when three weeks came, all the creatures gathered together, eager to say hello. And when Luna finally emerged with her giant shiny green wings, she flapped her wings around June’s face and landed on her finger just like she’d ridden on the night she’d met — but it just lasted only long enough for June to see that she was still as Luna and Luna could be.

Then Luna flittered off, dancing her way through the night, in search of light and love. Her flapping wings seemed to make a specific noise — “follow me! Follow me!” They sang.

And so June did. She followed Luna until she just … disappeared. 

For a minute, June was worried and sad. Where had Luna gone, what had happened to her, why couldn’t she find her? But she remembered what Luna had said — it wasn’t really over, it was just on to the next adventure.

From that day forward, June always stopped and talked to all the caterpillars in the forest. And somehow all of them reminded her of her friend Luna.