Category Odds & Ends

The mere thought—a museum facility for butterflies?—tickles the imagination. Especially so in the depths of January, the dark season of grudging light, offering back mere seconds daily toward the far-off abundance of spring.

But here it is, just blocks from my home, tucked in among the boundless trees, a wintry oasis of heat and humidity and the seemingly aimless flapping of wings, their bearers zigging and zagging through the weighty air, all sublime brilliance and self-possession, a purity of jazz in flight, never missing a beat…

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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. —Chuang Tzu

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Love is like a butterfly: It goes where it pleases and pleases wherever it goes.—Anonymous

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Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. —Muhammad Ali

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As my love gave chase to a butterfly/ So did I give chase to love/ Now here ...

“Everything flows and nothing stays,” said Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago, with those words and many thousands more that followed putting his stamp on the cosmic ledger as the “Philosopher of Flux.” He added a pleasing image by proclaiming we can never step into the same river twice, the waters displaced by that step already having worked their way downstream, so good luck finding those drops now.

Rivers may not always run deep, but Heraclitus most certainly did.

Bill noting the trajectory of their blooms’ fleeting life cycle by deadpanning: ‘And then it was over.’

“There really is no tomorrow, because when tomorrow comes, it’s today!” That was Mrs. Anderson, my kindly third grade teacher who seemed to my 8-year-old eyes to have been born in the age of Heraclitus, maybe even his wife, waxing philosophic with a mischievous smile on her face at the front of the class.

It sounded slightly...

Coming to the tail-end of its first winter in my front yard rather than in the pot where it had spent its infancy at the nursery, the red maple “October Glory” was tightly bound to its single stake. No wiggle room, unmoved and unbreakable by the wind.

Secure.

Its skinny stalk of a trunk suggests an egret’s leg, compared to the elephant leg of the stately catalpa tree it replaced on the day the catalpa met its end in December. It is not unworthy of note that the catalpa, despite its trunk’s several feet of circumference, was also subject to felling by the wind on that day it yielded its place to the maple, its trunk having hollowed with age, its sprawling root system no longer the fierce, proud bulwark against the incursions of winter storms.

The catalpa in its dotage, porous and wobbly with age, its replacement young maple wobbly with not enough of it.

But three months on and with spring winds ahead,...

“Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould. So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I reap.”
—From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, October 24, 1837

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March, 2014

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A year or two ago, I came across a passage, its source now slipped through the holes in my memory, in which the writer was talking about his grandfather who had received a terminal medical diagnosis and was forced to leave his home. The grandfather had been on the land his whole life, I think in Italy, with all that such long, deep immersion implies...

Don’t know about you, but I feel myself wearying of being in the dark thrall of a mad man. (Making that two words was intentional—he’s just angry, and thus engenders none of the empathy and understanding due someone who may be mentally ill.)

Knocked off balance by such brazen amorality and conniving, I have joined millions of others in groping toward a prudent response, but no amount or vehemence of thought or critique seems to suffice. Resist, yes, a solemn duty, but ultimately, it will likely be less outsiders’ resistance and more his self-immolation that will be the defining moment of this—and his—time.

Once again, Icarus flying high in his own fathomless self-regard, too close to the sun. It is a story as old as the first storytellers told.

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Meanwhile, what other stories might we access in this time of trial? How might we break free, toward brighter lights and better angels within and am...