immerse in God, emerge refreshed
Butterfly Riff #2:For more on this subject, click Exposed to Truth, Its Beautiful Sting
Ah, the siren call of the backyard rhododendron. Thick leaves gleam in the morning sun. I grab my camera, wedge my feet into black garden clogs, and squelch across lawn still bright with dew.
To my squeamish delight, this weird little bug appears, bright as a split lemon.
Will it bite? Does it fly?
I snap shot after shot, serenely transfixed. Spider or bug? What is it?
Two words swim up: Pay Attention. An order. A plea. A guiding phrase.
Unforgettable. Thanks to technology, Nat King Cole and daughter Natalie croon in duet—after his death. Across time and uncrossable space, two singular voices harmonize.
Might there be a hidden message for us?
Can I be honest? Out of shape and out of sorts, I’m edgy tonight. Worn down by the day’s relentless details. Dreading tomorrow. I’d sing, but I’m too busy whistling in the dark.
Held still much lately? Wish you could more often? I do. It’s an abiding passion of mine. And a challenge.
I was the tomboy sentenced to regular “sitting lessons” on my father’s lap. Gripped in Dad’s brawny, freckled arms, a featherweight could only flail so long.
Now I see enforced waiting was meant as a gift. Dad’s discipline established a baseline for social poise through quieter physicality, leaving my mind free to swing through the trees of imagination. To this day my thoughts flit, like the butterfly in overdrive hunting nectar or the rebound of that next silken petal, bobbing under its weight.
So here’s to the mercurial, slightly out-of-focus moment, not so long ago, when something intensely alive alighted on my hand:
My breath stuttered. The fingers inching my camera closer trembled, body on high alert . . .
as if each sense was a radar dish, registering color, weight, movement. Texture. And something else, harder to name, and as fleeting as the shadow of an antennae across my belly (which I would only see later, on playback, after the creature had risen and wafted aloft).
In a moment like this, surroundings dim, attention telescopes on sensation. Have you felt it?
Six multi-jointed legs the size of an eyelash taste with their feet, and when they traverse the human palm, they stab, like a mosquito, or Tom Thumb plying a micro-jeweler’s saw against the skin.
By comparison, I’m huge. How is it that something weighing in at less than one-fifth of an ounce has the muscle to alter my day? My outlook?
Even now, looking back on the photo of that brief encounter, I can ignore how old and homely my hands look; relive, instead, being “tasted,” tattooed by the wild.
“How many are your works, O Lord!” the Psalmist wrote. “In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures . . . living things both large and small” (Ps. 104:24, 25b).
The sudden sting of truth: arresting. Evanescent. On that day, beauty sought me out. My part was to sit quietly, take it in.