Seven White Butterflies

Seven white butterflies

delicate in a hurry look

how they bang the pages

of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow

and orange and plain

gold all eternity

is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such

wisdom in the agitated

motions of the mind seven

dancers floating

even as worms toward

paradise see how they banter

and riot and rise

to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into

the invisible wind weightless

lacy willing

to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles

down on a yellow thumb on a

grassy stem now

all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden towers who

would have thought it could be so easy?

What is the "it" that is so easy? I think perhaps the it is we, the beings of thoughts and agitated minds, worming ourselves towards paradise. What if instead of saying "this sucks" as the tag line of day to day living, we said instead, "How easy it is to love." We evolved to love and to give ourselves over to a better thing, to the universe. Our ivory towers of learning are not so different from the golden towers of summer's flowerful yield - sipping the nectar of the gods, of interconnection, of love.

I was recently reminded how easy it is to love. In fact, I was surprised. I have been watching a Desert Tortoise out my window all spring. She is digging a rather big hole in the middle of the yard and in between my writing and studying, I pause to glance at her digging and her sentinel like ways above her burrow. My spouse came home two evenings ago and said upon entering the house, "Is there a veterinarian in the house?" When I hear that I know that some animal has been injured or is sick. He led me unto the beginning of our driveway where we looked down on a tortoise who had obviously been crushed by a car that belongs to our household. I in turn was crushed. I turned the tortoise over - it was a female of about the same size as my friend of the back yard - and had died some time during the day. The rest of the day I kept looking at the tortoise burrow out back and not seeing "my" tortoise, I lapsed into tears and grief. Who knew I loved her so dearly? The next day though there she was, guarding her turf. So it was another that had died, no less lovely or loveable than the one I knew. How easy it is to love a tortoise. How easy it is to love each child of the universe.

How easy is it for you to love?

The Sea – March 12, 2010

Stroke by

Stroke my

Body remembers that life and cries for

The lost parts of itself-

Fins, gills

Opening like flowers into

The flesh…I swear I know

Just what the blue-gray scales

Shingling

The rest of me would

Feel like!

Paradise!

..the very bones! How

They long to give up the long trek inland, the brittle

Beauty of understanding,

And dive,

And simply

Become gain a flaming body

Of blind feeling…

Vanished like victory inside that

Insucking genesis, that

Roaring flamboyance, that

Perfect

Beginning and

Conclusion of our own.

In the last several poems Mary has written of the fire of union and here it is again. She is looking outside of being human, of her own body, to see the beauty without that lures her into melding into the great sea. She appears to look at being human as only a burden of love, of thinking as opposed to feeling and being. I am now on the lookout for any of her poems that are drawn to beauty from the existence of humanity, that surely has its own perfection beginning and conclusion of its own, because it is not separate from what we perceive as other, but which is ours to claim as ours. I want to be on the look out for human beauty in my own life, for it is my gift to see it, and my sin to not.

Do you resist accepting humans, either individually or as a whole, as perfect and belonging on this planet? What might you gain if you did accept and embody humans inherent worth and dignity?