Getting Off the Ground

I saw this butterfly one time and it looked really beat up.   This was at the Butterfly House I visited in Aruba, early this year.

I’ll never forget it because it effected me profoundly.

If you’ve been reading my writing you know the connection I have with butterflies.

I had been snapping pics of all different types of butterflies, all fluttering gaily, and then I saw this black one that looked like it had been through a war.  It was old, maybe dying.  It definitely looked like it had seen a thing or two. It looked defeated.   The emotion I felt from it, just looking at it, was incredibly real. I felt its sadness and its pain.

It was what I could become.

I realized, just because you’re a butterfly, doesn’t mean you have an easy life.  I mean, flying around isn’t always paradise.  You can get clobbered. You can get caught in a net or you can get steamrolled or you can get sprayed with pesticide.

You can lose a chunk of one wing, or you can have some kid wickedly pull one off.

When I was a kid, there was this boy in the school yard that used to torture butterflies. I used to try to protect them, of course.  He was the epitome of what I don’t like in this world.  It taught me about cruelty, at a young age.  Some people really don’t care. They laugh at the destruction of what is most sacred and precious to another.  And the butterflies – little yellow ones, I remember them to this day– lay there crushed on the blacktop.  The light of the universe, the breath of God, broken and destroyed for this kid to have something to do.

As for being a butterfly… it can teach this lesson:   Just because you’re a thing of beauty, doesn’t mean you get treated well.

And just because you’re divine, doesn’t mean you have it easy.  You can forget what you are.  You can just stop flying. One day you can just decide “I’ve failed.”  And you sit down, on a rock, and you just stay there.  You can isolate yourself from life.  You can decide to be still.

Then maybe your wings atrophy and you become an accountant.   And one day, someone reminds you of what you are, and says, why can’t you get off the ground?

 

But you’ve been so demoralized and denatured and destroyed…. That you don’t know. And you say, “What do you mean? I’m late for my job as an accountant.”

So this is what could happen.  Or you could be the yellow butterfly crushed on the pavement. Of you could be sitting on the rock thinking you’ve failed.

Point being….  Butterflies can’t just be the thing admired and praised.

They sometimes need to be saved.

How do you save a butterfly?  You remind it… that it can fly.

Lane DiBlasi

9/30/16

 

 

 

The Fortress

 

The Fortress

 

There once was a girl who lived in a tiny brick room in a huge fortress.

 

The fortress belonged to her, but she knew she was not the only owner.  Other people, whom she didn’t know, also lived in the fortress.  She mostly stayed to her little room, but somehow the fortress was growing larger.  Every day there were more and more rooms, hallways, and new sections.  The fortress was meant to keep out intruders, so it was built like a maze, with crooked hallways and strange arrangements of the rooms.

 

One day, after being in her room for quite some time, she tried to open her door, and couldn’t.  The door wouldn’t open. Someone had built a brick wall right outside of it and it would only budge an inch.  She found out that the newer rooms were being built around her room, and she couldn’t get out anymore.  She wondered how she could escape.  She couldn’t climb out the window because there was a deep chasm below it.  There was no explanation of why this was happening.   She couldn’t imagine why anyone would have done this.

 

Banished to her little room and with nothing to do, she began to write. She used all of her notebooks and even the walls, and she wrote thousands of stories. They were all about boundless fields and open landscapes, and wild people from other countries she’d never been to, who could roam anywhere they wanted. Meanwhile, the fortress kept growing around her.  She could hear them building.  There were new hallways, new stairways, and many new rooms every day. Yet the girl could not leave the room.  She still couldn’t even open the door.   She began to hate her surroundings and wish to destroy everything in sight.

 

When there was no more paper or wall space to write on, she began to sing.  She invented songs and poems about being free and escaping from the fortress. She slept more and more, dreaming about open fields, dreaming that she was outside the room and outside the fortress, looking in.

 

One day she woke up and realized that her room was different somehow. She looked around and finally knew what it was that was different – everything was closer together. Her window was smaller. Her door was smaller. She was so frightened that she started thinking about breaking the window and diving in to the chasm outside her window.   She knew she would surely die if she did this, but it would be better than being stuck here. But something told her that wouldn’t be right. Still, she spent more time than ever – all day and most of the night – singing and dreaming about other lands, far way meadows that stretched on forever, and she prayed to God to be rescued from the fortress. She chanted out words of being free and far away.

 

But the next day, her room was smaller still. And the next day it was smaller than that. Finally it was so small that there was just a tiny point of light for a window, and just enough space for her bed. She went to sleep that day and tried to leave her body. She tried to make all the walls disappear and give way to a tremendous landscape of hills and fields, with no buildings in sight.   But she would wake up, and the walls would be real as ever.

 

The girl kept sleeping, dreaming of freedom for an unknown period of time, until something very strange happened.   One day, she was dreaming about one of her landscapes and she saw something in the distance of her mind, among many trees and flowers, on a great plain. It was a large brick building. In her dream she began to walk towards it, and it grew bigger and bigger. She walked through the door and into winding hallways, through many endless brick rooms and up and down many stairways.   She wondered what this place was here for.  She wondered what it was supposed to protect against – certainly there was nothing in this idyllic place that could be dangerous.

 

Finally she found a wall, standing alone in front of a door to a small room.  The room was very hard and solid.  She sensed that behind this wall the room was closed in, and it was enclosed that way mistakenly.  She could not see in or get into it.  She noticed that there were no other people in the entire building, but she sensed there might be someone in this closed-in room. She noticed how efficiently it was held closed, and what a good job someone had done putting this obstruction there to close it off. She felt the bricks of the four outside walls of the room, and noticed how dense they were.

 

When the girl awoke from her dream, she could still see the vision of the outside of the room. And she wrote a song about how well the room was built, and how interesting the fortress was, with its many hallways and compartments. She took the stories she had written about escaping and tore them up. She cleaned the writings off the walls and looked at them for a long time. She decided that they were not bad walls, they were strong, good walls. They did a good job of keeping her here, safe from the outside world. She fell asleep thinking about all the parts of the huge fortress she was in.  Her fortress. She dreamed very vividly about every part of every stairway and every room.

 

When she woke up, she opened the door and stepped outside into the beautiful green field.

 

Lane K. Eddington

January 11, 1997

 

All we are is Love

Love is all we are.
Everything else, is onion skin
When peeled away…. it reveals the spicy/sweet
Nature of our hearts
When we love, we are spiritually un-clothed
When someone loves us, they are showing us their skin
Their deepest part,
Inside where the heart is so red it’s nothing but pure Life

But when we seek love,
We want to be complete, find the match that will attach
But we put on these layers of makeup, personality, clothes, masks, coats,
God no longer recognizes us and neither do we
If Love can’t see you, can YOU see you?
How can your Love find you, if you can’t find yourself?

And we wallow in the lower harmonics of emotion
Fear, hate, anger, pain,
Forgetting the beauty we are,
Forgetting to look at the stars
Forgetting to sing and dance
Being a walking lie in a trance,
When all we need to do is
Rise, like the tide,
And fall like rain from above.
All we are is Love.

Dreams

Your dreams were wrapped around you like

Invisible dinosaurs.

They had laid eggs in your heart,

but they were frozen there,

in the unkind winter of your

forgetfulness.

You stumbled one day upon an old idea –

“To Hope!”

but kicked it aside like newspaper

and it lay there, obedient,

until you slept.

When you slept, the dreams unwound themselves

And their night soldiers came out –

Ragged bits of old people from old centuries –

They marched around the room,

commanding furniture to move.

And it did.

Then, you woke to the sound and cried out,

“Stop!! I cannot have my dreams moving furniture!

They must stay put in their compartments,

in their beds, like me

until it is time to do their work.”

But the dreams would not obey.

They marched in circles and ordered wine

from the shadows,

where waiters from the heavens were

waiting for your command.

They had a party and danced

while you went back to sleep.

Silently you woke the next day,

and they had all faded into gray shapes,

tired from dancing and disgruntled at not being

able to convince you

of their importance.

While you went off to work that day,

they sat on the floor and slowly

became invisible.

But they were still alive…

And years later, in your deepest sleeps,

you still let them dance –

but only until dawn.

Copyright Lane Eddington. August 4, 2003. All Rights Reserved.

Photo by Grant Gannon.