stream of butterflies

I am sitting in the garden of the guest house, high in the hills here in Himachal Pradesh, in the north of India. It is springtime and it is mid morning. And at this time of year, there are many white butterflies. In the morning at around this time, they drift over the nearby ridge, and come down through the garden, before moving on down the valley. And I love seeing these butterflies. Individually they are beautiful, of course, as every butterfly is, the way they flit about, visiting flowers, moving a little bit randomly, it would seem. And yet there is a current to their movement. There are so many of them, it feels more like a stream of butterflies.

And this is what these butterflies are reminding me. We can always look at things in separation, individually, ourself included, but we are also part of a stream. And that stream is larger than our little self. It isn't comprised of oneself alone. We are part of the stream of humanity. But even larger than that, we are part of the stream of life. And even though our individual life, our individual story, might be as haphazard as the path of one of these butterflies, if we can but step back and look at the stream, we will see that we, too, are part of a great flow, that has a general direction to it. The typical analogy is more one of water, flowing to the ocean. But this morning, as I sit here watching these butterflies, I see they too are forming a stream, a flow, moving on down the valley. Whither they go I know not, and I do not need to know. But watching them, it is reminding me once more, that with everything in life our mind can separate, divide, and see little individual parts, or it can step back, and feel the greater flow of life.