The Butterfly's Meal

  When I looked at the butterfly in the park today, I thought about the simplicity of this creature's life, and how it eats the simplest things from the flowers, mates and dies. There is something about this kind of life that is touching and makes me reflect on how the mind overcomplicates things indeed. To live, is it not just to breathe, to have companions, to eat, and to pass onto another form altogether? Although this seems quite fleeting and meaningless, the fact that we are here to observe it means there is something deeper within that never dies. It is still, it is quiet, and it is capable of seeing the subtlest beauty in all things. 

    The mind that is deep within us does not need an image of itself to confirm its being, and nor does it require the support of stimulants or other kinds of things we use to keep ourselves awake. It is purely being without an object, a deep sense of connection that goes beyond self. It is the flow that I sometimes feel when I am able to do something purely guided by exploration rather than being distracted by so man events. And often I have these everyday reminders to confirm what I feel about that.

   If we forget, we only need think: what is the one social role, the one fabricated sense of "I", the one image of the self, that has stayed with me from the day of birth? Life goes on being in spite of all these changing images of the self and its numerous desires.