I am a Butterfly

 

 Origami Butterflies in Cocoon Tent Creativity Project 2014
 Photo by Janice McGuigan

I am a butterfly, I believe. My wings I know are an iridescent blue. I know this because I've caught them sparkling in your blue eyes. Or wait...maybe it was the water I saw them reflected upon or the sky...yes that was it. I was flying on a cloudless sky and looked back...my wings glowed bluer than the truest blue...you couldn't tell where my wings and the sky (your eyes, the water) began, or ended. Yes, that was it.

I was, I've been told, once another, and while in that earlier self I identified as caterpillar. Like your body, and the notion of self you've developed which is intensely identifiable with your body, all the joys and sorrows of that bodily self, I had developed a sense of self informed by all my experiences as caterpillar.  In my present case my experiences  are ones that only butterflies are privy to. Or are they?

If I am the sum of all my experiences and yet  have moments when I seem to be so much more than the sum total of my identifiable, limited self who, or what am I in those moments?

I am flight; the wind that carries me on currents of delight.
I am resting; the soft petals, rough and beaten bark I light upon.
I am the sweet nectar I taste; life's energies unfolding.
I am the snag that caught my wing, and tore the ragged edge.
I am the ragged edge, the ghost I'm making of myself.


As soon as thought enters, I am lost to the fullness of the experience of what is... the blissful, wonder of cutting away thought, of letting it fall like hair that's been trimmed or nails that have been bitten and spat, or a cocoon that's been left behind. Yet the only way I can transcend the limited self is by acknowledging that that self exists, as an illusion with which I make my way.

Jill MacCormack

Love is When

With acknowledgements to Craig Raine's poem entitled A Martian Sends a Postcard Home


  Love is When
 
Blackout Poetry Tent-- Creativity Project Art in the Open 2014 
Photo by Alana Sprague
Salt is the old memory of licking your friend's arm after ocean swimming.

Tears are when sadness comes to roost upon the rafters of your heart.

Wind is the sweet thinness that breathes us and whistles through small openings.

Sand castles are the worlds you construct without a permit.

Hungry is when the cupboard's bare, the earth is parched and forks and plates are meaningless.

Twilight is the soft look your eyes give off at the end of day when the silence is okay.

Fiddleheads are when the earth unfurls in tender green spirals and you want to make pie of it.

Insomnia is when the world's shout is too near and you plug  your ears but the sounds won't stop.

Rivers are when the land has veins that carry our shared histories and hold our futures in their palms.

Fear is when the poison spider's bit your soul and you are paralyzed but still alive.

Joy is a cloudless sky looking down upon a frozen pond and you are there tying skates with cold fingers.

Love is when the whole world freezes crystalline as salt then melts your heart into a rainbow, one sweet dripping breath at a time.
Jill MacCormack

 Creativity Project 2014 Rainbow and Pennants Photo by Janice McGuigan

A Night Like This--August's Sweet Caress

   
                        Creativity Project--August 2014
                          Photos by Janice McGuigan           

        
There is something wholly wonderful to me about a night like this. An August night when the moon is high and clear in the face of a darkening sky. The humidity has let up, and the temperature dropped to a delightful, cool eighteen degrees. I feel alive. 


 I feel as though I've woken up from a heat induced slumber. From a dream of days when temperatures soared to heights mimicked only in the depth of winter by polar opposite lows. I slept walked those days too, desperate for relief that spring would bring. And now, early into August after cursing much of July's humid warmth I've found an evening with such keen perfection that I want to preserve it like summer's harvest. Saved for days not yet unfolded when my store's are low and I am in need of replenishment.

On evenings such as this one, I am no longer only me, with all my little cares and concerns, I am fully other. I become that which I encounter; the air I breathe, the sights I see. The boundaries between me and the world external dissolve into an experience of oneness I cannot fully explain.

I swell to overflowing with a grateful heart that I am alive and wrapped in skin to feel the cool caress of nighttime air as it descends, dew laden, onto me alongside the plants I'm tending. And happy too for eyes to see the majesty of all I am taking in. The delicate Queen Anne's Lace of considerable height in my front ditch, the tomatoes and peppers in our little south facing garden. 

And I am thankful too for a nose to drink in the heady fragrance of sweet clover as it intermingles with the creeping thyme I'm walking on, each in competition for the sunnier locales in our front yard. And for the scent the soil gives up each time I turn it over.

And on a night like this, as I walk and listen to the earth praying its mantra in cricket song, I am too full to recall all that was bothering me earlier in the day under the heat of the midday sun. I know the cares will still be with me in the morning, but perhaps I will have loosened my grip on them a little. Even that wolf in sheep's clothing, purple loosestrife, is a welcome sight as it tries once more to get a foothold in the ditch along the side of the yard.

And all the bright stars, so far away and cast upon the inky sea of night, give me a perspective I don't fully understand but am grateful for nonetheless. Why does everything feel more possible under such a sky on a night like this? 

Happy 67th Birthday to my dear mother Arlene, who taught me how to love a night like this.
Jill