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"The barracks were full of them. The image was repeated over and over again. Butterflies. They were everywhere I looked. Some were crude. Others were quite detailed." In 1946 Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross visited the Maidenek concentration camp. The children's barracks were particularly sorrowful, with toys and shoes scattered and left from lives now gone. But there was something else, too. The walls were covered with hundreds of butterflies, scratched and etched with fingernails and pebbles.
Why butterflies? Kubler-Ross said it took her 25 years of working with dying patients to fully understand. I "get" how--on a physical level--the butterfly reminds us that at death we physically leave our bodies the way that butterflies leave their cocoons. Or, how--on a spiritual level--the butterfly reminds us of the potential for transformation that we go through on an ongoing basis, as we evolve, grow and change.
But this story goes way beyond that. These were children, living in camps where they knew they were going to die, and yet found something within them to leave a message of hope; while their bodies might not make it, the butterflies somehow represented their souls, and they would live on in a different form.
This is somber stuff. The kind of thing I prefer to talk about cerebrally, but am uneasy when it--quite literally--touches my heart and my life.
For the past week I have been at The SWAG, adjacent to the Smoky Mountain National Park--telling stories in the evening around a big fireplace, and leading hikes during the day, looking for pink Lady's Slippers and Jack-in-the-pulpit. The first few days were overcast and cool. On Saturday, the cloud cover opened and the sun bathed us, its warmth an invitation to bask and savor. On Saturday's hike, very unlike the previous days, butterflies (in colors of the rainbow) materialized, dozens of them, dancing, flitting, skipping, fluttering and darting. A tango or a ballet, I could not be certain. It reminded me of my childhood, on those first warm days of summer expending pent-up energy, running, laughing, playing tag and rolling in the grass until long past dusk.
Our hiking group stopped to marvel at--and to live vicariously through--the butterflies. A member of our group told us the story of the etchings on the concentration camp wall.
I'm first in line to hear any story about how butterflies are beautiful, how they remind us of our beauty and the need for beauty in our lives, and how they are symbolic of transformation, change, and connection. However, I'm not so keen on the part of the story reminding me that this transformation happens only when I embrace my life as temporal, fragile and ephemeral. (Ironic, in that I'm writing about this a few days after the "end of the world." That preacher's view was representative of the church of my youth, preparing us to stand quaking in the afterlife, trying in vain explaining--or clarifying--our life to a very unhappy and irritated Judge. No wonder I was afraid of heaven, and never wanted my life to end.)
These children knew that butterflies teach us about saying goodbye. And the realization that life is interwoven with loss, disappointment, pain and the bittersweet.
But here's the deal: I can pretend it doesn't hurt (telling myself that I can live without it or that it wasn't important or that it didn't really touch my heart), but I do so at the loss of the very beauty in life I so desperately seek.
So what if? What if embracing the temporal nature of our life--that butterfly nature within--is about the permission to fall shamelessly and wholeheartedly in love with this moment?
Whatever it may bring.
"When I was about fourteen I was seized by enormous waves of grief over my parents' breakup." Jean Houston writes. "I had read somewhere that running would help dispel anguish, so I began to run to school every day down Park Avenue in New York City. I was a great big overgrown girl (5 feet eleven by the age of eleven) and one day I ran into a rather frail old gentleman in his seventies and knocked the wind out of him. He laughed as I helped him to his feet and asked me in French-accented speech, "Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?" (Excerpts from Jean Houston's interactions with "Mr. Tayer"--Teilhard de Chardin)
"I will go with you," he informed me.
And thereafter, for about a year or so, the old gentleman and I would meet and walk together often several times a week in Central Park. He had a long French name but asked me to call him by the first part of it, which was "Mr. Tayer" as far as I could make out.
The walks were magical and full of delight. Not only did Mr. Tayer seem to have absolutely no self-consciousness, but he was always being seized by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things. He was constantly and literally falling into love. I remember one time when he suddenly fell on his knees, his long Gallic nose raking the ground, and exclaimed to me, "Jeanne, look at the caterpillar. Ahhhh!" I joined him on the ground to see what had evoked so profound a response that he was seized by the essence of caterpillar. "How beautiful it is", he remarked, "this little green being with its wonderful funny little feet. Exquisite! Little furry body, little green feet on the road to metamorphosis." He then regarded me with equal delight. "Jeanne, can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar?"
"Oh yes." I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply faced teenager.
"Then think of your own metamorphosis." he suggested. "What will you be when you become a butterfly, une papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of Jeanne?" (What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl!) His long, gothic, comic-tragic face would nod with wonder.
Old Mr. Tayer was truly diaphanous to every moment and being with him was like being in attendance at God's own party, a continuous celebration of life and its mysteries. But mostly Mr. Tayer was so full of vital sap and juice that he seemed to flow with everything.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mr. Tayer was the way that he would suddenly look at you. He looked at you with wonder and astonishment joined to unconditional love joined to a whimsical regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the holy one. I felt myself primed to the depths by such seeing. I felt evolutionary forces wake up in me by such seeing, every cell and thought and potential palpably changed. I was yeasted, greened, awakened by such seeing, and the defeats and denigrations of adolescence redeemed. I would go home and tell my mother, who was a little skeptical about my walking with an old man in the park so often, "Mother, I was with my old man again, and when I am with him, I leave my littleness behind."
(1) Kubler-Ross, The Wheel of Life - A Memoir of Living and Dying (1997)
(2) Jean Houston's blog
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