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Dalton
Roberts |
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One recent day I sat at my computer looking out my big window on the world. Bird feeders swayed in the wind and the sun made the luscious green grass spring to life. Forgetting it was February, I thought I saw a butterfly fluttering in the grass. It was a work of art – so brown and luminous in the sunlight. I would return to my writing and hypnotically look again as it continued to remain in the same place fluttering. Finally my curiosity overcame me and I walked out to see if it was trapped. How surprised I was to see it was really a leaf! It had lodged in some thick grass and the wind kept it fluttering like a butterfly. I smiled as I returned to my window thinking of how mesmerized I become when I am writing. Then the question came to me, “Was the ‘butterfly’ that charmed you for a half hour any less beautiful because it turned out to be a leaf?” There’s a valuable life lesson for us in that question. All of our lives we are seeing things that are not what we think they are but we cheat ourselves when we strip them of their beauty. The way we see things is the way they are at that moment. If I had not gone out to check on the “butterfly,” and discovered it was not a butterfly, the rest of my life I would have periodically remembered “that beautiful brown butterfly in my back yard.” That memory would have brought me much joy, over and over. If seeing something you think is a butterfly is a joy to you, why lose the joy when you discover it is a dry leaf? Rejoice instead in the fact that a simple dry leaf can bring you such a sweet elevation of consciousness. Remember: the beauty was there even though it was not a butterfly. We can learn to trust our soul’s taste buds. They may not always report accurately and scientifically to our brain but that is not the job of a soul’s taste buds. They are only secondarily wired to our brain. They are primarily wired to our essence, our center, the permanent part of us we call the soul but we are acutely aware there is no word or phrase that completely describes it. Yet, we all experience it. We know when something is speaking directly to our real being. It is enough to experience it. When you experience it, it is no longer necessary to describe it. Why describe what you intimately know? Another beautiful truth is to not judge an experience by hindsight, using the new facts in your possession, but to return to the awareness you had at the time and re-realize it. Your re-realization may not be perfect but it does help you retain the value you gained in the moment of the initial experience. You may wish to find some souvenir of the happening. For example, I picked up the “butterfly leaf,” sprayed it, encased it in a plastic loose-leaf folder, and put it in my personal journal. Every year on the date it was preserved, I will recapture the beauty and all the lessons life taught me through the experience. As I pondered my “leaf butterfly,” I thought of how beautiful a person was to me when I first saw her. Like the leaf in the sunshine, she shimmered in my mind. She was not what I thought she was but still there was a beauty I saw that was real at the time. I wish to honor that beauty. I thank her for being my “leaf butterfly” that day. I will not lose the precious moments of my life. They are the kernels, all else is the shell. I have the power to regain and retain them and I will train myself to do that each day that I live.
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