In a message dated 1/22/99 12:22:18 PM Pacific Standard Time, ANGELscrib
writes:
<< Can I run your butterfly story??? I want to do an animal series....thanks.
>>
Dear Angel,
Butterflies are free. Do what spirit dictates. I could help a bit if you
like. There is no question to me that angels exist and that soon this will
be, as they say, self-evident to almost everyone. Are you interested in
knowing one possible scenario? You may already know, but have you wondered
why this is happening now and how it may represent itself.
I keep meeting people with messages and experiences all pertaining to
butterflies. Wherever I go I find butterfly people with butterfly stories
concerning butterfly healings which appears to be leading us to a butterfly
smiley future as author Norie Huddle calls the Butterfly Era of Global
Civilization. There is butterfly essence raining down on us and on many
levels. We are awakening to ....who we may be......becoming. A very
prevelant theory says we are angels with amnesia. Brings a whole new meaning
to awakening. You will no doubt enjoy the last story I received from a
gentleman I had just met. He just loved knowing that his experience is a
common one. What is uncommon is the magnificent and enlightened style that he
used to tell his story to me. Please let me know what you think.
Here are a few things to note:
In February of 1998, Barbara Marx Hubbard released her new book, Conscious
Evolution, and advanced the butterfly theme to new heights. In her book she
writes:
"As people started waking up, they became imaginal disks in the body of
society. The environmental movement, the antiwar movement, the Apollo space
program, the women's movement, the civil rights and human rights movements,
new music, transcendental meditation, yoga, and mind-expanding substances all
encouraged a young generation to act as instruments of social change--striving
to birth the still-invisible societal butterfly. And often when new leaders
did step forward, they were attacked by society's immune system fighting to
maintain the old social order of the caterpillar: Witness the assassinations
of Ghandi, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr."
* *
*
"Like butterflies opening their wings to express their fragile beauty, we are
learning to open our hearts to express our love and compassion. The world will
be made anew when all humans are accepted as brothers and sisters of the human
family, joining as One to heal the scars of the past and create a better world
for all living, sentient beings on Earth."
"Beauty seems to be an intrinsic part of nature, and perhaps even the
organizing principle of reality. Scientists, in testing their theories,
invariably find that the simplest, most elegant, most beautiful equation, is
the correct one. Rainbows, butterflies, and the periodic table are some
examples of intrinsic beauty. The world will be saved by beauty."
(National Geographic Magazine)
"We may . . . come to see them as embodying all the beauty and complexity of
nature itself. It is said that a butterfly can, with a flap of its wings,
change the world . . . that the ripple it sends out can spawn a hurricane."
National Geographic Dec. 93)
"Could we have a genetically based affinity for butterflies, which are the
most salient demonstrations of metamorphosis present in the environments where
humans have evolved? If genetically encoded, does the expression of this
image require an environmental trigger? Could the archetype remain latent,
within our subconscious mind, until some element in our immediate environment
call it forth?" (Cultures of Habit by Gary Paul Nablan)
This is all my pleasure,
Alan
PS Sorry for what must have seemed to you a lot of infoglut before. Thanks
for hooking me up to Random Acts Of Kindness. It turns out that we are
practically neighbors.
Subj: Butterfly Story
Date: 1/20/99 10:40:24 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Scott Fossel)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
hey alan -
here's the essay i wrote about my experience with my brother's death
and the grace butterflies gave to it all. i think you'll enjoy...
- sapphire
Sometimes I have seen butterflies land upon webs, stay for a while then
gone, as if they had just come to rest. But then what separates them from
those, their brothers, rolled up now and dried, hanging but inches away, dried
but still moist in their death? How do we learn to land in such places, come
to perch right there on the rim, and still find the strength to lift? For to
fall out of awareness is to fall into oblivion, to become meshed in her
entangling web. And isn't this always the case? A boy casts his blue eyes to
the sky at the cry of his lost brother, just as the cab rounds the corner, and
before he knows it he's found him? We are never killed when we are looking,
only when we are looking away.
* * * * * *
Tottering on small legs through the red raspberry patch, I am grabbing
at their huge presences above me, grabbing and mouthing them juicy until I see
it, this thing, in front of me. Enormous against the sharp evening sky and
glowing an almost cankerous yellow, it awaits me, enveloped by a whining
shroud of the dark bright bodies of flies. And maybe I thought it was their
hive, or maybe something in me knew it was in truth an electric insect light,
but I can only tell you when first I saw it I think I only knew it as god, a
crackling, magical, mischeivous form, drawing me into its fold.
When we are children there are so many gods - gods of earth and night
and deep water, the bright citrous moss that glows in the darkness under the
church, the fat white numinous eggs in the chicken coop, the gods of tent
caterpillers, webform and wicked, a plague of evil mysteries in the green life
of trees. So many gods to call us out past where mother wouldn't go, places of
pitch black wildness, places of calm - crooning and beckoning us back into
them, promising to swallow us whole. For I believe we are born as pure
unknowing expansion, that we only slowly and most tremulously awaken from this
into a self we call ours, and that as we arise from this watery dream to our
many multiple dawns, the world works incessantly to seduce us back in, to
entrance us once more into its sleeping. That is to say, as children we are
god, the only secret is, we do not know it.
This is how I remember my beginnings, an endless round of sleepings
and wakings, a long deep dream of becoming. It is like I was a body of pure
desire whose flesh was the world, a body who knew no definition, and each
morning my instinct was to cram myself up through my shirtsleeves and into the
clothes of a boy, cram myself up through to the surface to catch a breath of
fresh air. And it was in these breathings I think, first gulps and then long
deep drafts, that I learned to know who I am, the meaning of this me. But as
I claimed myself, like drawing lines on paper in crayon, something happened:
the world wouldn't swallow me whole anymore. It had acquired teeth. I learned
to watch where I walked, to know where I am.
Someone asked me once, what are you letting kill you and what are you
willing to die for? I thought of a story I once heard of a man being stabbed
in the gut, never unlocking his gaze from that of his murderer, until his soul
poured straight out of his eyes. I thought of my brother, barely even
eighteen, drowning in four feet of water, one beautiful summer night on Walden
Pond. Were they willing to die or did they let themselves be killed? Someone
asked. I don't know.
It sounds crazy, but for weeks after my brother went, his girlfriend
had a butterfly event every day - appearing out of nowhere, alighting on her
palm - as if to say he was ok. That fall I was camping in the woods one
night, reading by the light of a candle, when out of nowhere a moth appeared,
fluttering and winging circles round my flame. Then before I knew it its wing
was singed, and before I knew it, it was like I was a child again, swallowed
whole into its burning and gone. We staggered round in a flame-drunken trance
for a moment, stumbled up the stalk of the candle, and hurled ourselves into
bright goodbye, then stillness - the only words, "Now I know I must go to
god".
I had cried at least two Walden ponds that summer, but that night,
alone in the forest, I'm sure I cried a third. It started with my brother,
but then it all just opened up and I cried for everything I know, everything
that holds me, everything that has come to define who I am. I cried until I
just didn't know, because he had died and I had lived, because no one should
die so young, because I didn't know how he had gone. What are you letting kill
you and what are you willing to die for?
I remember realizing afterwards, after feeling so small, so shrunken,
that we are all totally free, we just don't know who we are - that the
liberation we all seek is already ours, it just asks that we go right through
the center of ourselves to get there, right through the heart of our hearts,
and most of us can't bear the pain. It is so easy to let ourselves go, set
our heart aside and disappear into the flow of the world, but always we come
back and the heart reminds us, ruefully, with all the deep silence of long
suffering endured, that we are now further from home than ever.
You see, we curse so much this thick straightjacket of self, pinched
always between death and becoming - we bemoan our indulgences, suffer our
shames, and never let ourselves go free of the deep seated anxiety that we
have been too much, too little, or nothing at all. And yet what we forget, or
choose not to remember is that we chose this, we made this self, we are a
creation of our own pure desire. That is, there is no one to blame but us, no
one to turn to but ourselves. The terror of being the fullness of ourselves,
the self of our pure natural desire, shameless, without apologies, is so
powerful, so overwhelming, that we would rather give up this self, give it
into the hands of others, and let the heart go hang. I ask you: what are you
letting kill you and what are you willing to die for?
You see, we long ago gave up on trust, cast away the pure pulse of
being through which we originally desired a self, and settled for rules,
regulations, and meaninglessness. We bought the lie that if we were just to
trust ourselves, trust instinct, trust raw desire, we would rape and we would
kill, would turn back to wild beasts, and in so doing, we invited them to take
us. Come, we said, we are vulnerable, we will look away - come and kill us,
kill us and drag our bodies down this long dark night. For if we do not trust
desire as our root, how are we to trust the world? And if we do not, if desire
gives way to nothing but startled confusion, the self as a prisoner of its own
unknowing, how will we ever go to god? For the only way to true compassion, to
expand from the self into what is beyond, is ultimately, as so many teach, to
learn to be free from desire; but the only way to be free from desire is to
desire desirelessness so passionately that you become it, and only a pure
desire, the desire of one who knows themself whole, can muster any such
passion as this. And so one final time: what are you letting kill you and what
are you willing to die for?
And my answer? We can only die when we are looking, are killed when we
are looking away. For to be killed is to be sacrificed to the will of
another, and by their choosing, not yours. It is the root of all we despise in
ourselves, from beginning to end, cradle to grave. But to die in pure desire
for and unto something, unto the greater world, for we truly are so small, is
to be freed, to be liberated, is to look them straight in the eyes when they
come for you, to look ol' man death right straight in the eyes when he comes
to kill you, and never to look away. So we must seek to apprentice ourselves
to spider, to learn from her connection, unconsumed. And I, I must learn from
my brother, for at times I have seen butterflies land upon webs, stay for a
while then gone as if they had just come to rest.
