Tuesday, December 13, 2005

The wings of a butterfly

If, one day, you suffer just to the very depths of yourself, beyond tears and desperation, just until you howl in horror, until you claw the black earth with your bare fingers, and even beyond that, just until you don't know if your own life is still possible in this nightmare, that day you will know that there is neither God nor human to get you out of this, and you will be drowned in the maelstrom of pain, crushed, flattened. Maybe you will survive, and maybe not. And that has no importance. Suffering is neither an atonement, nor a purification. Even less a redemption. But larger is the heart that has been broken, and stronger is love for having been wounded. And at the heart of the greatest suffering lies the greatest love.

We are not what we have experienced, nor what we believe to possess. Our richness could only be woven from threads of life in all the colors of its palette. And when we are all dressed in white, it's because we have integrated all the colors of the rainbow.

Throughout all our lives, we have discovered one at a time, or all at once, happiness and joy, sorrow and tears. Heedless butterfly, who only knows laughter and flowers. Gloomy caterpillar, who gets stuck in mud and tears. But the one, like the other, are only two aspects of the same being, the one would not exist without the other, who wouldn't know how to survive without engendering once more the first.

The day that you will be a caterpillar, even if you don't believe in butterflies anymore, know only how to remain conscious that you are in a cocoon. The metamorphosis will take care of itself. All your efforts won't do a thing. Only time will come, here or elsewhere, to dry your tears.

And it takes a lot of colors to paint the wings of a butterfly...

Marie-Françoise Céré