The Butterfly, The Moth

I once had a friend who was the most beautiful butterfly on the planet.

I first saw her when I was walking on the mountain.

As I gazed into the distance across the landscape, trying to pierce through the grey blanket of clouds obscuring the panorama, suddenly my eyes were caught by the flapping wings of a butterfly.

She seemed to flutter into my vision out of nowhere, filling it with the most beautiful colors of the painting on her wings.

The landscape no longer interested me.

Instead, I followed this butterfly down the mountain slope.

At first we were traveling companions looking at each other from a mild distance, but as I followed her and sat where she rested, she sometimes would fly towards me and sit on my hand.

I marveled at the beauty of her wings.

Never before had I seen this wild array of colors mingled together in such an expression of spontaneous exuberance.

It reminded me of my first day at school when I filled a blank drawing of a fish with a diverse palette of different colors to create the most beautiful painting I could imagine.

When I showed the teacher the result of my efforts, she shamelessly tore it up.

Yet here she was, my living painting, out of reach of the wicked teacher.

She flew out of my life when I first entered school.

And now, many years later, the painting returned in full splendor, a breath-taking sight and a miracle to behold.

She escaped from the teacher's brutal assassination.

And now she had come back to me as I was climbing the mountain.

I thought I had lost her forever, since my eyes clearly saw how the teacher tore up my drawing.

Yet here she had returned to me in the form of a butterfly, showing the entire world from the mountain an abundance of exuberant colors.

The fish became the butterfly.

This butterfly had a special gift.

She could paint word poems having the same wild array of colors as the painting on her wings.

She could string words together in a way nobody else was able to, using them like paint on an empty canvas.

Like me she did not care about coloring exactly within the lines.

She just wanted to create beautiful and colorful word paintings.

As we left the mountain the butterfly and I traveled passed a garden full of weeds.

Since I hated the sight of weeds and their ability to hurt with their caresses, I did not enter the garden, and neither did the butterfly.

In the garden we could see a great company of grey moths flying around.

As we were watching them, they began to shout at the butterfly, inviting her to come into the garden of weeds where they had made their homes.

With some trepidation the butterfly whirled sideways and back, zigzagging herself closer to the garden where the moths smiled at her and invited her in.

I spoke to the butterfly and warned her that this garden was not a good place.

I told her that I knew a place of much greater beauty where nobody could be hurt, a colorful exotic garden on the mountain where the other butterflies love to dwell, a place abounding with many different flowers where no weeds could grow.

It was a garden where the rain would feed the plants at night and where the sun caressed the flowers during the day.

But the attention of the butterfly was captured by the mesmerizing sound of the sweet words the moths spoke in the garden of weeds.

I was forced to witness how they lured her in by the flattering candy of their words.

And there was nothing I could do or say that would make her change her mind.

They had placed a hook in her mind by their false friendship and seductive words.

I could see how the moths held up a mirror to the butterfly, and how this mirror would show her a reflection of a an insect with soot-black wings, like a bat.

I cried out to her that this image in the mirror was not real, that it was just a projection of the moths.

But the butterfly was so overcome with grief over the image she beheld in the mirror that she could not hear my words.

She only could stare at the mirror and feel flooded with sadness over the image the mirror showed her.

Then the moths began to comfort her.

They offered her a solution which would take away all her pain and grief.

They brought the costume of a grey moth to the butterfly, telling her that if she would put on the moth costume, she would look just like the moths.

So, tortured by the image she saw in the mirror the butterfly put on the costume, unaware of the strings which were attached to it.

When the other moths showed her their mirror, all she could see was someone who was transformed from an ugly bat into a beautiful moth like the others.

The mirror did not show her the strings.

No matter how hard I tried to convince her that her costume was not real, that her idea of being a bat was a lie fabricated by the moths to lure her into their prison, I was unable to reach her heart any longer.

Her moth costume had built a wall around her heart, and I found myself standing on the outside with no gate in sight that I might be able to enter her heart and persuade her to turn back to the mountain, away from the moths.

The moths had captured her in the garden of weeds and desired to change her into a surrogate moth.

As time passed I noticed how the butterfly began to talk, think and act like the other moths.

Slowly her butterfly identity was replaced by a false moth identity.

She became the moth, even though I could see how her heart was still the heart of a butterfly.

In the midst of the garden a huge flame flared up into the sky, and it seemed to grow bigger with each new day.

Like the other moths, she was mesmerized by the light of the flame in the garden.

When the light of the sun would leave the premises and surrender its place to the darkness of the night, the flame in the garden lit up against the dark scenery.

The flame was beautiful and a powerful sight to behold as it stood in contrast with the surrounding darkness.

The beauty of its light beguiled the moths and drew them closer and closer.

The light of the flame became their beauty if they would gaze into the flame long enough.

They wanted to carry that light within them so that the darkness of the moth's heart would be overtaken by the light of the flame and illuminate their entire being.

Their desire was for the fire, and its light blinded them to its destructive power.

And so they were drawn closer and closer to the light, to drink of its beauty, and become the beauty.

But as they sought to immerse themselves in the light of the flame, the heat of the light would cause them pain.

Especially for a butterfly in a moth costume the pain would be unbearable in the close vicinity of the flame.

Yet the magnetic pull of the flame was too strong for them to resist.

The flame held out a promise for beauty, happiness and light, and all of them desired to fill their hearts with this false promise.

So the moths learned to see the pain as part of their transformation in the image of the flame.

Since they were becoming the light, they became the pain, and they surrendered their soul to the pain.

The flame became their identity.

The strings on their identities were tied to the flame, and they would draw them closer and closer to the flame until they were one with the flame's destruction, trapped in the flame forever.

The butterfly still strung her words together as paint on an empty canvas, but now that the moth had taken over, her poems spoke of the pain of the moth existence only.

She glorified the pain, wallowed in the pain, and painted her world in the gloomy monochrome shades of the pain.

Pain was all she knew now that she was mesmerized by the light of the flame, and so she had to keep running from the pain towards the promise of happiness held up by the image of the burning flame.
Once she would be one with the flame, its light of beauty and happiness would drive away the dark clouds of pain and suffering.

Where her poems used to be necklaces stringing strands of different colors together, they now had transmogrified into strings of shades of dark grey like the noose awaiting the condemned.

Never once did she bother to turn her eyes upward.

No matter how much I cried out to her to look up, pointing at the strings over her head, it was of no avail.

Her attention was captured by the other moths, and her vision was trapped in the horizontal pane, a pane which brought her pain and which led her to the trap of the flame.

I saw how she began to fly like a moth, act like a moth, talk like a moth, and imitate the moth in their insincere ways.

Yet she was not born as a moth.

She was a butterfly captured in the mold of the moth.

This is how the Shadow demons trap butterflies in their garden of secret despair.

I kept shouting warnings at her right up to the moment she disappeared out of my sight.

Suddenly everything was quiet, no moth in sight.

Just the sound of the wind rushing through the trees.

The silence was like the icy breath of the grave into which my words of warning had fallen.

Even though I never stopped warning her, one thing I was not able to do: I could not turn back her heart.

The butterfly chose to look away from the mountain and fix her gaze on the fake reality of the garden of weeds, she chose to believe the lying moths.

Her choice turned her in a prisoner of the garden where the flame of destruction beckons the moths to partake of its grandeur, and there was nothing I could do.

And so, I waited, hoping.

Hoping that maybe one day the pain would drive her to look up, and she would begin to see the truth before the strings could lead her into the destruction of the flame, before the growing flame would consume the entire garden.

Once the moth enters the flame, it is over.

She never was a moth to begin with, that was a lie held up by the moths to lure her into the garden of weeds.

I was forced to watch how my painting now was fluttering towards the hands of the teacher again, waiting with eager longing to tear her up a second time.

The butterfly had turned deaf to my voice and lost sight of the mountain.

Instead, she filled her head with the chitter-chatter of the moths and filled her vision with the lure of the flame in the midst of the garden where the weeds grow.

The teacher became the flame, and ordered the moths to change her form that the rule of this world might be enforced:

'Learn to color within the lines'!

The problem is that the color of the butterfly did not fit within the lines of the moth drawing.

How could I destroy my butterfly by painting within the lines of what the butterfly is not?

I could never do that, not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow.

And so, as I now walk on the mountain again, gazing across the distance, I hope that some way some day the butterfly with the color-poem on her wings will suddenly flutter into my vision again, drawing my eyes away from the blanket of clouds covering the land.
The butterfly may have left my vision, yet the color of hope has remained.

Butterflies thrive in the garden on the mountain.

They fade away in the garden of weeds where the moths have made their home, where the flame draws them into its destructive appetite by its false promises of beauty and happiness.

The moths never know they fly into their own graves until it is too late.