Gorilla in the Midst of Butterflies

Or yet another surgeon's NDE. This one has what is for me a very instructive coda about the cruelty of existence.

Thank you, Greg, Rick, and RPJ, for your welcoming words. After a lifetime immersed in studying anomalous phenomena, this one thing I know: Discernment, first and last, is pivotal. As such, I consider the Grail my personal Goldilocks zone in a world (-wide web) by and large gone more than slightly mad. Your trusted sister sites ain’t half bad habitable hangouts either :)

A few more flutterby associations (on the fly, so to speak):

– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross allegedly traced her life’s work back to an early experience concerning butterflies. The story goes that as a young volunteer in various war-torn communities after WWII, she was profoundly affected by a visit to the Maidanek concentration camp in Poland and the images of butterflies carved into some of the walls there. “In the crumbling barracks of the concentration camp, she found hundreds of butterflies which puzzled her. […] This was the place where they housed the children.” It is said that these butterfly wall carvings, the final works of art by those facing death, stayed with her for years and influenced her thinking about the end of life. [http://www.ccdsj.org/pdf/Hundreds_of_Butterflies_April2010.pdf]

– I am always somewhat saddened to see how the butterfly as symbol of change, transition, transformation, and transfiguration trips up even otherwise respected purveyors of High Literature: cheese, anyone? Emily Dickinson, ouch [http://www.bartleby.com/113/2007.html]. Joseph Conrad, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Andre Gides, Philip Larkin, Chekhov … the A-list of schmaltzy poetic utterances about butterflies is long. Slightly more palatable, perhaps, and closer to the theme of this thread, at least, is the last stanza of Ode to a Butterfly by Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

And yet the soul of man upon thy wings
Forever soars in aspiration; thou
His emblem of the new career that springs
When death’s arrest bids all his spirit bow.
He seeks his hope in thee
Of immortality.
Symbol of life, me with such faith endow!

Read the rest of the poem at your peril. Here: http://www.bartleby.com/248/444.html. Interesting also that we in the West often tend to symbolize the butterfly more narrowly, secularly, to indicate “being free,” without contextually extending the concept to Ultimate Release.

– Closer to home for us, one way or another:

Carl Sagan: “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
Robert Heinlein: “Butterflies are self propelled flowers.”
Bucky Fuller: “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
Chuang Tzu: “I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”

– A many or most of you know, there is a lot concerning butterflies to consider around (what happens to be one of my favorite areas of interest)the Trickster. This ranges from the popular Coyote tales (e.g., Coyote and the Laughing Butterflies, at http://www.amazon.com/Coyote-Laughing-Butterflies-Harriet-Taylor/dp/0027888460), a more recent rewriting in children’s literature of the classic “Coyote Goes for Salt”), to the depiction of Butterfly as the companion of Raven, the Creator-Trickster, by the Haida of the Canadian Pacific northwest. To illustrate the latter, I’ll end with this beautiful extract from The Trickster: Running for the People, Carrying Fire for the People,a research study by Lenore Keeshig-Tobias prepared for RCAP, 1994: [http://caid.ca/RRCAP1.15.pdf]

“The Anishnabe (Ojibway, Western Cree) relate that the first children would not try to get up and walk until there were butterflies:

“In the beginning, the animals took care of the first Anishnabe children. The animals provided everything for these babies — food, warmth and companionship. While the larger animals guarded the children and kept them safe and warm, the smaller animals played with the children, kept them happy and made them laugh.

“The children in return imitated the animals, their protectors and playmates, and crawled around on all fours. In fact, the children neither knew of nor tried other ways to get around.

“One day, Nanabush watched these children laugh, roll and tumble with their friends. He knew it was time for the children to know who they were, to know that they were Anishnabe, to grow up. Nanabush scooped up a handful of pebbles and cast them into the air.

“The pebbles turned into butterflies — butterflies of all sizes, of all colours, fluttering here and there. The children looked up and saw the beautiful celestial winged creatures. And for the first time, they stood up on their legs and ran laughing, chasing the butterflies.”

Stay inspired,
et cetera