Pass the potato salad at the Picnic of Chaos

It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.

Henry Miller in Of Art and the Future

Once again, Brain Pickings and Literary Jukebox boil it down to the bones.  Flux, we keep meeting like this.

My dreaming last night/this morning was of an estate on a river.  At first the river seemed slow and narrow but I walked with dream companions to other points where it was waterfalls, deep still pools and wide expanses with swift currents.  I thought about rivers when I woke up.  Water - flowing, changing, moving - and the closest I can come to a connection is that the river equals all of this, life as we live it out here in the world and inside, the universe(s) we contain and constant, continual metamorphosis.

I think at least some of our peace comes from letting go of the oars or tiller, acknowledging that we are of and with the flow of things much more vast than we.  In looking over our shoulders to be certain that whatever we just left is still there, fixed and unchanging, we find instead that the water is too fast, the point is much too far behind us and even if we could see it, it would be different than we expect.

This is not information I grew up knowing or even imagining.  Yet what I suspect is on a level of deeper awareness, this is not really news.  I have tried for much of my life to nail everything down, each corner, all the sides.  I've held the image of the picnic tablecloth spread on the ground, pegged down every two inches to keep any corner from lifting or the whole thing from taking flight.  The combination of denial and wishful thinking that I constructed has been evaporating until now only the memory of it remains, along with the reasonably enjoyable Picnic of Chaos, not really all that bad once you admit it is what we have, it is all we have.

Attributes of the moth

"Moths of Orange County, CA," photographed by Peter J. Bryant

A pair of comet moths, photo by Johan Nijenhuis

By now, which means after more than three years of blog writing,  some of my secrets have been pulled from under the couch cushions and put on the table.  Among these are the revelation that I find life to be teeming,  jumping with symbolism, that I willingly allow a representative portion of something to stand in for the still-to-come whole, that metaphor is my native language and very little is only what it seems.

In a short, perhaps five-minute segment of a recent podcast, there was a meditative exercise in which  listeners were directed to find a spirit guide.  The practitioner spoke of eagles, for the ability to fly would be required of the guide.  Mine arrived.  It was a moth.

It may be my most basic belief that we are here - wherever we are geographically, emotionally, physically in this moment - to be of assistance to each other.  Assistance, in this case, can mean anything.  Without rushing to Google, I thought of the moth, an extreme example of transformation, starting life as one form and becoming a different creature.  I am not who I used to be. Teachers, awareness and opportunities continue to find me, carrying me out of dimness, discouragement, into a brighter land.  Mulling and pondering - and daydreaming - are natural states, taking the measure of a situation, mostly by intuition, interpreting, perceiving, feeling.  Feeling my way toward knowledge, insight, information.

When I looked into what moth brings as a totem  I found: the ability to perceive with clarity, strong healing abilities, protection for traveling between darkness and the light, finding light in darkness, metamorphosis and, in common with the phoenix, rising from the ashes, in moth's case of the flames to which it is drawn.  What better sidekick?

The title above is one of those, "Quick, write this down," flashes that fill the scraps I mentioned in the previous post.  Attributes of the moth.  Forgive me, please, if I repeat myself.  Life as I have come to know it is fraught with meaning; likely it always was, but I had no skills.  These, too, are days of myth and fable, truths revealed in waking, walking dreams.  No wonder fiction explores parallel universes, wormholes, wrinkles in time.  How else to explain being conscious of treading the ordinary path of oil changes, bill paying, medical procedures, clothes that need washing or detecting an unpleasant odor in the refrigerator and, in the same moments, seeing the story within the story, the plan behind the random event, the bigger picture. 

For some of you, this will be like my talking in tongues.  That may be a fair comparison.  The best we can hope for is to know our own truths and to allow others to know theirs.  If we share common ground, there is much to discuss.  If not, I may be found in a somewhat unkempt state wearing soft clothes that feel like pajamas, pencil-callused fingers turning the pages in The Great Big Book of Moths.