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Good Sunday Morning from Wisdom Masters Press. We have tried many times to post the next six parts of The Great Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, but it will not go through. The little wheel spins and spins, then the page goes to a message saying "this webpage is not available." So, we thought to post this short story by Michael. Hope you enjoy it. Have a wonderful Sunday!

The Butterfly

Butterflies that interlope by flitting indoors are not properly to be called butterflies; they do not excite that pleasant sense of bright summer days and warm breezes which the commonest yellow-wing resting amongst slim blades of grass never fails to rouse in us. Nevertheless, the present specimen I'm observing, with his wide hay-colored wings, decked with delicate designs, seems to be content with life.

It is a pleasant late day, mid-August, warm with a heavier moist breath than that of the winter months. The gardeners are scoring the lawn opposite the window and, where the mowers have been, the grass lays flat and gleams with moisture. Such vigor comes rolling in from the newly cut lawns and pasture beyond that it is difficult to keep the eyes away. The birds too are keeping to one of their festivities, soaring round the tree tops until it looks as if a vast net with hundreds of black knots in it has been cast up into the air, which, after a few moments, sinks slowly down upon the trees until every twig seems to have a knot at the end of it. Then suddenly the net is thrown into the air again, in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamor and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down upon the tree tops is a tremendously exciting experience.

The same energy which inspires the birds, the gardeners, the horses, and even, it seems, the distant pastures, sends the butterfly fluttering from side to side of his square of the windowpane. One cannot help watching him. One is, indeed, conscious of an odd feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seem this day so enormous and so various that to have only a butterfly’s part in life—and a day butterfly’s at that—appears a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full, seems pitiable. He flies vigorously to one corner of his compartment, then, after waiting there a second, flies across to the other. What remains for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That is all he can do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of farms and the quixotic voices, now and then, of the horses. What he can do he does. Watching him, it seems as if a fiber, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his diminutive body, so small in a Universe so unimaginably large. As often as he crosses the pane, I fancy that a thread of vital light becomes visible. He is little or nothing but life.

Yet, because he is so small, and so simple a form of the energy rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own mind, there is something marvelous about him. It is as if someone has taken a tiny bead of pure life, and decking it as lightly as possible with down and tiny feathers, has set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one cannot not get over the strangeness of it. One is apt to forget all about the inner light of life, seeing it humped and garnished and determined and encumbered so that it believes it must move with the greatest circumspection and dignity. Again, the thought of all that life might have been had he been born in any other shape causes one to view his simple activities with a kind of disappointment.

After a time, apparently tired by his dancing, he settles on the window ledge in the gloom and, the queer spectacle being at an end, I forget about him. Then, moments later, looking up, my eye is caught by him. He is trying to resume his dancing but seems either so stiff or so awkward that he can only flutter to the bottom of the windowpane; when he tries to fly across it he fails.

Being intent on other matters I watched those futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight as one waits for a machine that has stopped momentarily to start again, without considering the reason for its failure. After perhaps a seventh attempt he slips from the wooden ledge and falls, fluttering his wings, onto his back on the windowsill. The helplessness of his attitude rouses me. It flashes upon me that he is experiencing difficulties; he can no longer raise himself; his legs struggle vainly. But, as I stretch out a pencil meaning to help him right himself, it comes over me that the failure and awkwardness are the approach of death. I lay the pencil down.

The legs agitate themselves once more. I look as if for the enemy against which he struggles. I look out of doors. What has happened here? Presumably it is late, and work on the lawns had stopped. Stillness and quiet have replaced the previous animation. The birds have taken themselves off to feed by the canals. The horses stand still. Yet the power is there all the same, massed outside, indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it is opposed to the little hay-colored butterfly. It is useless to try to do anything. One can only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city; not merely a city, but masses of human beings—nothing, it would seem, has any chance against death. Nevertheless after a pause of exhaustion the legs flutter again. It is superb, this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeds at last in righting himself.

One’s sympathies, of course, are all on the side of life. Also, when there is nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little butterfly against a power of such magnitude to retain what no one else values or cares it to keep, moves one strangely. Again, somehow, one sees life, a pure bead, the light. I lift the pencil again, useless though I know it to be. But even as I do so, the unmistakable tokens of death show themselves. The body relaxes and quickly grows stiff. The struggle is over. The remarkable little creature now knows death. As I gaze at the dead butterfly, this tiny wayside triumph of so great a force over so determined an antagonist fills me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death is now as strange. The butterfly having righted himself now lies most decently and uncomplainingly composed. Oh yes, he seems to say, death is stronger than I am.

One wonders, where went the life, the power, the light, that pure bead of energy earlier so animating yet now so departed from the minuscule creature? What mystery is this, what riddle?

Night has arrived, in the softness of fading light, in the silence of emerging stars. The earlier sweep of high clouds has disappeared, the sky is perfect, the air heavy yet not oppressive. Despite the warmth of the deepening dusk, I light several small logs in the fire pit. They catch swiftly, crackling and sparking. Tiny embers spiral upward, dancing into the twilight of nature’s sky.

Always I have loved the vastness and beauty of nature, sensed some deep mystery there, some great and incomprehensibly profound meaning, as do many. One passes the great mountains and endless deserts, standing eternal like monumental impenetrable puzzles, inviting wonder and question. What is this vastness, what does it mean?—and the beauty, what is the cause of it? What makes it? What is this enormous energy of the world, the power, the life, the light?

From year to year one senses the mystery and attempts to read the riddle, to answer the question. For so long I traveled the wilderness, thinking how incomprehensible everything was; often dangerous, sometimes sad, sometimes joyful, yet always beautiful. Always very beautiful. For so long I went about as though I knew nothing. I lived and walked the mountains and traveled through forests, searching—and certain things looked so enchanting, so mysterious. Tongues of flame writhing against a black night; the eye of a cat; an eagle wheeling through the blue; a crystal lake set in emerald forest; a great white peak sailing on the sky; millions of stars scattered upon the night sky like so many cities of the gods. So often I gazed in wonder and awe, and once in a while a strange feeling would come over me, as though something never seen yet long anticipated was about to happen, that a veil was about to lift, that at last I would see into the mystery. Yes, into and beyond, far beyond. But then . . . then the moment would pass and nothing would happen, the dream continued, the riddle still unsolved, the secret unrevealed, the spell unbroken.

The mystery of death is the most inexorable feature of embodied life, yet it is paradoxical that death is thought of as the end of life when our lives are woven of it throughout, for in every moment our past dies to make room for new beginnings. The knife blade between past and future is so fabulously thin that it can barely be glimpsed; it is so close to a mathematical point that it seems scarcely to exist, yet it is all-that-is in being the only thing we directly experience—only the present is real—the past is gone and the future has yet to arrive.

I am inspired to imagine that our challenge lies neither in struggling with material reality, nor in confronting death, nor even in penetrating the awesome enigma of death, but rather in learning to live in that split-second of eternity that is the present. As is the butterfly, we are little or nothing but life, a thread of vital, eternal light. Our ultimate and enduring challenge is learning to live in Infinity.

Thanks for reading, Amber