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.
Natural Proposition
Proposition I:
This world is far more beautiful than our hearts can perceive.
Proposition II:
We are the world.
Proposition III:
All is Beauty, coming to Be,
even through the stony walls of tragedy,
and through the opening of our heartbreak.
As I open to the sky, the vast statement of the Universe’s grandeur leaves me rudderless against waves of wonder and hope.
If Beauty such as this so clearly is, then what are we as humans doing, when we could so clearly be tending this beauty, partaking in the unfolding of life rather than its destruction?
Yet, we are the world. Are we, somehow, part of the unfolding beauty of the cosmos, regardless of our conscious participation? Is this some undeniable part of a natural cascading of ordered events, as lawful as the water’s movement to the Sea?
What I’m speaking of is our place in the Cosmos, so seemingly disrupted by our own pursuit of comfort and pleasure that we have forgotten what true contentment is. And so we seek perfection, a state of idyllic being where there is only comfort, only a dullness to the world we live in—but there is control, or the semblance of it.
You see, humanity still lives, to a large extent, in an omnipotent fantasy. As intelligent and powerful beings, we have allowed ourselves to pursue knowledge and power immodestly, rather than to deepen our relationship to what is.
Perhaps it is too much to say we believe we are omnipotent—but we are certainly striving for it. It would be our insurance against the turbidity of life, in all its mystery—dangerous, beautiful, alluring mystery. And, as soft, vulnerable creatures, our search for this knowledge is natural.
It is natural because fear is natural. It is natural because love dictates our wish to protect. But it is also misguided in the sense that it never truly protects or insulates us from the world. Instead, it puts us at odds with it, seeking subjugation and control instead of relating, listening, co-creating.
✶ ✶ ✶
Leaves are patterned. Water falls in forms that indicate a profound mystery. Clouds form and roll across the sky.
When we pay attention, Order is revealed. It is only birthed, however, from the Chaos we fear. A Mystery runs beneath Chaos; an intelligence, a soul-like point of brilliance, more primal than chance.
Is this, perhaps, why nature is so healing? We find our longing for sense, for intelligence, for Order out of Chaos, met in the way trees shimmer with wind and sunlight—only chaotic beauty at first, but we soon sense its Truth.
I would say it is poetically true. It reaches us in a way, a space, beyond the constantly problem-solving mind that seeks comfort and safety. Light trickling down the forest onto skin, dappled like the night sky, is chaos that makes sense. It feels right.
Likewise, perhaps, from some higher vantage point (a perspective I cannot always attain), our human struggles make a beautiful sort of sense—even the ones where we are causing our illness, and the planet's destruction.
But I am human, and my vantage point is only as high as the mountains I can summit, and the quality of my sight is only as clear as my heart.
✶ ✶ ✶
For Oceans will rise and fall, and our Earth has been formed and re-formed, like the minds of those who seek to love more fully, more skillfully, more beautifully. And perhaps our death is not a thing to fear, but that which we must embrace.
It could be said that our pursuit of comfort, of safety, of security, is all insurance against death. Against a lack of control. And so we seek omnipotence in that light. To create something perfect, where we will finally have freedom.
But to do so, we must be able to meet our endless desires. That is the requirement for perfection. For humans, we constantly crave something new, and so we must live in infinite possibility, an omnipotent fantasy.
Heidegger said, “Death is the possibility of absolute impossibility.”
And we are afraid to die.
So lies the crux of our current cultural malaise. I know it well within myself, too. We cannot choose. Every choice is a commitment that necessitates the death of all other possibilities. In our desire for insurance against the uncertainty of existence, and to live in perfect comfort, we do not feel we can shut the door on any potential path. We want it all.
But wooded paths must eventually part. Our choice to try not to choose is just that: a choice. While those paths may meet again, far along, they travel vastly different territories—those who walk them are shaped differently.
Nature feels beautiful, right, resplendent, because it knows the direction in which it travels: wholeness, life. It chooses, again and again, to accept its conditions and adapt to them.
Importantly, adaptation is not control. It is relationship—harmony with mystery. That is our medicine, but it can be a bitter pill to swallow.
And so we find ourselves here, with our propositions in hand. You see, don’t you? This world is more beautiful than our hearts can perceive. We cannot know it. It is a mystery.
We are that mystery. You can’t separate us from the world.
And when you get that, when you really, truly get that, you see that all is Beauty, coming to Be.
Because there is freedom. There is choice. The world is wide open! It is just that often, in our thinking we are creating more possibilities, we don’t see the trap we are setting for ourselves. This too, though, is a strange sort of beauty.
And we do not know where it will lead. That is our first principle, after all.
I leave you with a poem that I feel encapsulates the endeavor I am on, and many other brave souls:
What is required of us in our time
is that we go down
into uncertainty
where what is new is old as every morning
and what is well known is not known as well.
That we go down
into the most human
where living men have vanished
and the music of their meaning
has been trapped and sealed.
What is asked of us in our time
is that we break open
our blocked caves
and find each other.
Nothing less will heal the anguished spirit,
nor release the heart to act in love.
—From The Sound of Silence, by John Baughan