The Butterfly On My Forehead
I see dragonflies all around!
My ink will run out
before I capture how
rapturously
this Beauty abounds.
I remember a day, many years ago, where I decided to attempt “manifesting” an idea into reality, a notion I had gathered from the book Illusions by Richard Bach. In the book, the main character, Richard, is taught by a retired messiah that, as long as he wishes and believes with strong clarity, and then lets go, his vision will come.
Richard chose to manifest a blue feather, which did, indeed, manifest synchronistically for him, exactly how he envisioned—just on a milk carton.
My idea: white butterflies. The ones that lilt about in summer. Every time I saw one, I’d smile at my foolish belief that such things were possible, but hid a secret satisfaction that it really did work.
A year later, however, I started regularly encountering what seemed like flocks of them, and spotting them as signs and paintings and tattoos, all in the same two-hour walk. My rational mind said it was selective perception, but then one day, it was too much to ignore. They were everywhere, in several flocks of four and five across a bridge in the small town I grew up in, and I had just passed several houses with them as decoration. I laughed uncontrollably. “What is this?” I thought.
“No. This is too much for me… It’s a little… eerie.” I had said. And I sort of stopped it right then and there, perhaps.
✶ ✶ ✶
My point is not about manifestation, or even synchronicity, though they are beautiful and mysterious events that, regardless of their origin (spirit, chance, psyche), bring a sense of joy and wonder to our lives. Rather, my point is about what I did when the Universe gave me confirmation that it was listening, that it wanted to help. Because I think we all do this, to varying degrees, with that which causes joy.
There is a shutdown; a laughter that we cannot control (a deep joy), and the following fear that catches our breath. “What just happened?” “Am I not in control?” and, subtly underneath, “I don’t trust myself to hold this beauty, or joy.”
Some don’t have such a response, or at least not as directly. I applaud them. Indeed, it takes great courage to open to Joy, though we might not think it at first. Especially for those deeply wounded by life, or who have had their joyous hopes and wonders crushed by the waves and rocks of existence.
It takes time. Patience. Eventually, we come around and can begin to open to joy and the many ways the Universe surprises us.
I find it helps to breathe. To take it all in: my joy and fear, both. And to have compassion for the one who learned it was wise to armor against the possibility of gladness rather than accept.
In time, it shifts.
✶ ✶ ✶
A few weeks ago, as I was biking around my town, zipping underneath the hot summer sun, I noticed the white butterflies again. My mom was in the hospital, and life had found a precarious new meaning. It mattered more, how I embraced myself and this life.
So I decided, then, to open to them again, and let their fluttering abound in waves of joy and delight. And it was subtly scary, like invoking an old magic that I had forbidden myself to use. Perhaps that’s exactly what it was.
But not too long after, one flew right into my (probably too fast) path, and though I swerved my bike to avoid it, it slammed right into my forehead, between my eyes.
It was a somewhat poetic event, I guess, laced with a cosmic humor and an internal fear that it was the Universe now telling me all my hopes and dreams were dead. I thought I had killed them in my haste.
But I do not think it so.
If any meaning must be assigned, it was more likely a psychic rebirth, the death and subsequent return of my deeper self, of my willingness to open to the mystery and stand in my power.
This is what is required of us if we are to return to joy. That we choose to open, to be afraid in the face of the Universe’s intelligence and still see the wonder and beauty inherent in it—perhaps because of its wonder and beauty, we are afraid, you see?
I like to think the butterfly kissed me before it died, blessing me and my choice to open again to life. And that its power gives me wings, strong enough to take me to heights where I can hold all with grace, my fear and doubt, my love and joy.
✶ ✶ ✶
Beyond all this, these are just moments, coalesced into a crystalline story of remembering that we are bigger than our fear.
Life is just a series of such moments, where we get to choose, again and again, to remember the sacredness of that truth.
And one day, soon, perhaps, we will hear it reflected in the chorus of birds in the morning, in the jarring sound of crow calls, bringing us to presence.
We will feel our joy made manifest in the grass beneath bare feet, and the breath of the wild heart that is our nature.
And perhaps it is not we who find this vision.
It is this vision that finds us,
sudden as
a butterfly
slammed upon your forehead.
So quick!
Before your ink runs out—
paint the sunset Eternal!
Suddenly,
you are;
Beauty,
abounding.