341 Monday musings: As the butterfly mourns

341 Monday musings: As the butterfly mourns

The butterfly was forlorn as she looked around. She was to go her usual garden visits tomorrow again, the last few times she would go there this season, for spring was coming to an end - and she was dreading the prospect of it. She has been visiting gardens all her life. She had come to know every tree, every shrub and every flower in the gardens she had been visiting. The trees, shrubs and the flowers knew her back. Knowing takes effort, she realised. Knowing deeply takes deeper efforts. It is easy to be carried away by the pretence of knowing. You could just scratch the surface and delude yourself that you know the other. The butterfly had come to know of such charades in her short life. As she flew past all the known flowers once again she could breathe the familiarity in the air – that familiarity which makes the onus of such flights easy. Today was different. There was more dread than joy in her wings. She knew all this familiarity was coming to an end – for the next spring will bring new blooms, new fragrance, may be better, but still not the old. The prospect of better is not half as good as the familiar.

The butterfly would hop from one flower to the next going through romanticism of her companionship and the exhilaration of creating the nectar of love between the two. What could be more sweet in the world than this routine. She thought of herself as the luckiest. It was years the butterfly going through these motions whose end result was always sweet. She wondered if the process itself was becoming jaded even though the nectar at the result of it still remained sweet. She thought to herself how things changed. It was not long ago when the outcome was more important to her – she would fret and fume if the nectar at the end of the day did not measure up to her expectations. The new gardens and new flowers and new flights almost paled into insignificance in comparison to the promise of the nectar. Here she was after all those years wondering if the nectar was indeed as important as she had always thought or were the gardens and the flowers and her flights even more important. The burden of her ambivalence on this remained heavy on her soul.

The flowers still bloomed and the nectar still happened and the garden still swayed in the morning breeze. The seasons changed and every time new flowers bloomed as they were destined to and old ones withered away when their time was up. She was used to this or least she thought so. Earlier she would not even notice it. She took it in her stride because she thought that was how it has always been and that is how it will always be. There is great comfort in our ability to explain things saying that ‘it has always been like that’ - as if the pain and anguish will go away just because we can give the pain a name, a description. This morning she knew she was beginning to recognise that the withering of the flowers and the changing of the season was not something she was able to ignore anymore without a tiny voice mourning for it. Mourning was new to her. No one had taught her to mourn.

Today when she had left home she knew she had to sit on many flowers to make the day worth the flight. Nothing was new - flowers were not new, neither was the garden, nor was the flight, neither the fact that this spring was coming to an end -but the feeling was. She could not place her finger on what that feeling was but she knew it for the way she felt it. The feeling rose through her heart, choked her and dragged the strength from her wings. She was dreading her flight because yet again she would go through the muddle of her feelings without recognising them and she had not yet developed the large heartedness to deal with a feeling she could not name. She knew from experience that naming the pain is the first step to dealing with it. It was always those feelings which cannot be ascertained and named properly which traumatises the most and longest. It did not matter if the name was wrong or the identification of that strand of feeling accurate – it just had to have a name. She had to name it even if she got the name wrong.

The butterfly flew past the gardens, sat on the flowers and went about doing what she was doing. The spring had one day less to its life. The butterfly knew it. The spring knew it. The flower knew it. They all pretended that spring will never end. No one had
told them that pretences that are shouldered to keep the painful hidden and away often pains the most.