butterfly mind
I sit on the rocking chair out front of my house. My right foot pressing into the warm glow of the sunlit stone beneath it. My left crossed atop, knees nestled into one another. I notice my face is tense. Squinting in the sunlight, flurrying about all morning, I have hardly taken a moment to bring softness back upon my body.
As the tensions of my muscles and mind release themselves at my wish, the expansiveness of my being has room once again to flow, I begin to notice the world alive beyond my own body. Drolling birdsong, a neighbor dog’s friendly bark, an airplane streaming in the distance.
A monarch sweeps by, like a piece of seaweed to the waves. I’m struck by how little control it has when the wind is upon it. Try as it might to steer its petalline body, the currents of the air rip it about heedlessly. Imagining the surrender it must require to live so dependent, so submissively, to the forces of the world, the thought works its way upon my own errs: perhaps I too have just about as much control or direction as even the most regal of the insect kingdom.
A moment later, the air has become still, almost absent, but it could never really be. The butterfly returns, in poised control this time, flying precisely as it aims. Over to the left beyond my view. Perhaps milkweed drawn, for their mating season is quickly approaching.
Thoughts, like the air bound creatures among me, don’t stay long. My mind mirrors the ecosystem of which I am a part. Mirrors, it seems, but the notion that are in fact one and the same, seemingly separate aspects of a single unified power feels ecstatically true in my body.
And yet even this enlightened thought doesn’t last long, as the shimmering of a spider silk strand catches my eye. It ripples off the buglike antennae of the gold minivan parked out front, stretching and flailing about like a cloth in the wind.
A swallowtail flies along, yellow, black and almost soaring in its flight. Birdlike, but not quite.
A white butterfly now too! This one flaps its way by, less graceful in its movements and so it hangs low. Skipping across the grasses and weeds. Tickling the hairs of the earth.
Laughter and cheers of children in the schoolyard down the street make their way through the maze of houses and paved streets of the neighborhood to my ears.
A chill climbs my skin as the once glowing spot I came to sit in has become absorbed by shade. Yet the skin of my legs, still submerged in light become the center of my awareness as I scan my body for the sweetest feeling.
I will rise in a moment, and carry on to the next enterprise, like a butterfly windbound to the next pocket of nectar. Floating along, dancing between control and surrender as the winds which move us, seemingly from within, diverge only imperceptibly, if at all, from the ones which animate our very environments. We too are animal, alive here in the habitat of the heart.
