Words for a Butterfly

poetry and other such pretty things

The copper flecks in your eyes
Reflect a danced light:
The same light that lets me know your face and
Tells me that we are both here, and that
This here - this present moment - bound
By a, now seemingly expanding, horizon,
Is deserving of the fullness of my attention,
Which again bends back to me
Through these tiny, copper,
Ouroboric stars.
Generated or reflected?
Both / And.

Were it not for the light whisps,
Those squinty infinity bridges
Pulled through liquid glass,
Welcomed,
Remembering,

I'd be made to rely solely on these fragile hairs
Foresting this unreliable body.
The ones l'd hope would subtly remind me
That a gentle unseen current is being breathed
Between us.
I'd need to inhabit the event of us fully.
Be with it all fully.
Unfold the creases and be met or missed fully.

But luckily I have the light whisps,
And I can see the in-between,
Even when my body is wood
And I can no longer feel the wind.

My body is a prayer as it bends back towards the earth.

This phrase stayed echoing through my body long after I had dried the mountain lake from my skin. The peace I had tried to action myself towards for so many moments now effortlessly mine.

More than most I would say I love words and thoughts, they’ve been my friends and my protectors and my bridge to the world. So when I used to try and commune with spirit it was often an exchange - a sharing and listening - of an internal language: abstract symbols and images strung together forming a beautiful poetry, a ritual, a mood, a need, an inspiration, or intuited direction. Words given from knees and zafus, traded with the unseen for more silent words to buzz a deafening chorus in the mind’s eye.

But as I stood in this lake in the rain, as clouds rolled and the rest of the human world of thoughts, symbols and abstractions fell away, I laughed.
I laughed a giddy boyish laugh, so loud and foolish.

I gave my body over to that lake, to that moment, and in so doing received something in return. It gave me back my body through the water shared, through the rain felt, through the wind and the silty sand.

I was of this lake, the part of it experiencing itself. I, in turn knew myself more in that moment through being known by this lake, through this laughing, wordless devotional exchange of bodies.

I gave my body to the earth as a prayer and it gave me back my body ensouled as a part of itself.

If you were a butterfly
I would be a warm wind
Cozying up under your wings
Lifting, caressing, holding
And being held and buffeted
and moved and changed
by the tiniest of movements.
The beginnings of
A beautiful hurricane.

You have a way about you,
like a forest lake in autumn.
There is a clarity to you,
and a quality of stillness;
a gentle welcoming
depth and timelessness.

In you
I see all the colors of the world reflected
without the distortions
or ripples made by
wind and weather.

Who you are
reminds me of a place
inside me I had visited
and loved and lost.

I’d like to build
my home there
and live with you
from that place
watching the seasons pass
together.

It’s been years too long
Since I’ve seen
The red leaf of a maple
Ready to let go and fall away,
No need to think of spring
Or doing or having or being.

I made myself a stranger
Only so that I could go home again.
I found my name written
In the leaves of a foreign forest.
Found the shape of my being
Reflected back to me in the face of
An unknown mountain lake.

I walked so far away it seems,
All so that I could sit here
By your lonely side,
Again for the first time
As myself.

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