Wednesday afternoon I drove to get Michaela...a friend agreed to pick her up from school and she tagged along to a girl scout meeting. My mind was not on traffic or work or all the things I needed to do. The weather was beautiful, the breeze cool, white puffy clouds filled the sky...and I was in the afterglow of a lovely afternoon with my sweetheart. This is the exquisite part of being in the physical.
I arrived at the playground, shaded by trees...the sun was getting lower and it was that time of day when the light and the shadows are most beautiful, almost other-worldly. As I came into the courtyard I saw Michaela chasing after a young toddler and a couple of other children running around. I breathed in this magical setting and after the usual greetings I noticed a young boy by the bushes, mesmerized by all the butterflies. He gasped as his fingers brushed against a wing. Still floating in the essence of my lover’s touch, I walked over and stretched out my hand as another butterfly flew just beyond my reach as they danced on the air above us. I bent down to smell the blossoms that Linden pointed out. My senses were full in these sweetest of moments.
I met the troop leader, the mother of the young boy and the baby girl playing with Michaela. She reached to greet me with hands still covered in paint from the project they had been working on...and we laughed when I said mine often look the same.
This very woman would awaken the next morning to find her baby daughter lying motionless, having thrown up during the night and asphyxiated on her own vomit. When I learned of this later in the day, I tried impossibly to imagine the unspeakable grief and shock this woman must be enduring now. I, however, am left with the hauntingly beautiful and surreal image of her son touching butterflies only hours before.
A friend says I was in the numenosity...the time when the veil between the physical world and the spirit world is most thin; the time when the ego self steps aside and the soul self moves forward to absorb life; the time when there is no time, when everything else falls away and these moments are somehow suspended, held in slow motion and encapsulated in a magic and mysterious bubble.
It had to be palpable in the air, this great soul preparing to leave this tiny body, as if the angels and guides were sweeping ever closer to her, preparing to usher her from one world to another. Perhaps the butterflies were a gift to this young boy...to help soften the senses in preparation for the harsh event yet to follow.
As his fingers had touched the wing, so too did the bubble surrounding me touch briefly into the bubble surrounding her, and for a moment a veil was pierced and there was a magic, but I knew not why.
But now, for the mother, for the family, there is the unimaginable loss...despair...darkness. Only Time and GodSource can possibly reveal a greater meaning in this otherwise senseless tragedy. Only the Great Mother will be able to soothe this raw wound...her everpresent and undying Love like a salve for our earthbound souls.
As we go through the mysteries of Life and Death, Beginnings and Endings, it is Butterfly, the great teacher of transformation, who shows us that we are, in any given moment, the caterpillar....the jelly mass inside the cocoon....even the cocoon itself...as well as the beautiful winged creature.
Now it is time for the mother of this child to be wrapped in the cocoon...no longer the caterpillar, yet not ready to emerge from the darkness of the void. She is an undulating, formless mass deep in the process of her own creation. And when Time is right, and she has reached the Perfect moment of completion, it is Butterfly who will lift her up. For then she is the butterfly, dancing on the air, and through her new eyes she will see the gift of her daughter’s life, like ripples on the water from a stone’s toss...circling into infinity.
For now she too has transformed, like her daughter before her....
and she will know how the world was
touched by a butterfly.