I’m in a kind of mood to pull the wings off a butterfly. It happens when I resist the world, the way it is.
My body, with its ompaired immune system reacts quite badly to sudden drops in barometric pressure. One’s body and the world are not-two, are one, from one important angle. So, today’s weather is tough; that is, if I’m wanting it to be some other way. I get grumpy.
How about I make it a ‘dragonfly,’ not a ‘butterfly’? When I was a boy in these mountains, dragonflies fascinated me, with their dancing colours. I’d like to paint one.
There’s a story about haiku master Baasho and his student Kikaku. He must have seen a red dragonfly. He imagined it like a pepper with wings, so he wrote this poem, and presented it to Basho:
pulling the wings off
a dragon-fly:
red pepper.
Basho, gentle as ever, wrote back:
adding wings
to the red pepper:
a dragon-fly.
They both see the dragon-fly. But Basho’s reminder helps me. Now, I say, “Come, let’s paint today, World!”