The Slow Way Newsletter: Butterfly Seeds, Blue Veins
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
“In all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: ‘Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this [God’s] love is found.'”
- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Butterfly Seeds, Blue Veins
Yesterday as I stood in the backyard, the dog running around me, my youngest son tummy-down on the swing, watching the ground rock below him, I heard a soft movement in the air and looked up to a cloud of seeds blowing toward my face in one gentle breeze. The seeds looked like hundreds of sandy butterflies, shimmering their wings toward me. It was like magic, like a movie, I thought, as they delicately twinkled in the sunshine, moving past me, on their way to land.
Some flit past my head and settled thirty feet behind me, cursed to live the rest of their days in the rain gutter, or the parking lot of the Catholic church behind my yard, or the crevice of the wooden fence. And some of the lucky ones dropped into my garden, where at least there’s soil, worms, old leaves, a place to break down and (perhaps) become something else. Whatever it is that the butterfly seed has always been intent on becoming.
After that I finished packing, and made my way to the airport, where I took a direct flight to Dallas, the home of my grandmother, whom I’ve visited at least a hundred times before. She’s ninety-nine and has only just begun to struggle to leave her bed. I haven’t seen her since the October before Covid and our reunion (a result of both of our vaccinations) is sweet.
When I was little I sat on her left side in the rocking loveseat, which she kept placed against the back wall of the living room, to the left of the opening that led to the kitchen. From her loveseat we had a clear view of the TV, and my grandfather in his easy chair on the right side of the room in the corner. We watched Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Walker Texas Ranger, and sometimes old repeats of Bosom Buddies. I would lean over her legs and and ask her to “scratch my back.”
“Tickle or scratch?” she’d ask.
“Both,” I’d say.
And she’d start with tickling, until I asked her to switch. I watched entire shows in her lap. And sometimes had to give up the precious space beside her to let my brothers have their turn: “Tickle or scratch?”
When I wasn’t sprawled across her I sat with her hand on my left palm so I could trace her veins with my right pointer finger. Her hands were almost transparent and thin, like mine are now, her veins somehow risen above the bone, blue roads that moved when pressed, tiny bridges across the thin layer of her skin. Her hands were old and mine were young.
Even then, 34 years ago, when I was seven and she was only 65, her hands seemed ancient, holding layers of stories.
Now, in moments beside my sons, my hand resting on cushion between us, our eyes at the screen, my boy says, “Mom, your hands.”
He takes his finger and presses down on my vein, risen slightly above the surface, next to some aging spots, and already, some wrinkles.
Those seeds came at me yesterday as if they were messengers, bringing news from a far-away land, deliberately spinning their bodies toward the soil, dreaming of all that would come. Thomas Merton said “every moment, every event” has the potential to plant something in us. The question is whether or not we’re ready to receive. Whether or not we’re paying attention.
“In all that happens,” Merton writes, “my one desire and my one joy should be to know: ‘Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him.’”
I’ll lean over my grandmother’s bed this weekend, and chat about what the kids are doing and the antics of the puppy. I’ll pull out my phone and show her pictures, and talk about the tulips I’ve been growing in the front yard.
And she’ll forget where she is from time to time, but her hands won’t. They’ll find me, her fingers clinging to mine, our veins blue, skin transparent. Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. We’re all like those seeds caught in the breeze, dancing from one place to another. Our act of faith, our act of prayer is to notice ourselves in the air being moved, and to think how beautiful we are, spinning our wings, moving from here to there. My hand in my grandmother’s. “Here is the thing God has willed for me. In this God’s love is found.”
a slow practice
Later in the same chapter, Merton talks about how the will of God can be found in the “requirements of work to be done.” Whatever work is before us, he says, we honor God by doing the work “carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of [the] task.” This love and respect for the work is what unites us to God’s will, he says. It’s the state of our hearts, our steady awareness of God’s goodness in the moment, that makes the work holy.
And what isn’t dedicated to God? “Unnatural, frantic, anxious work,” he says. “Work done under pressure of greed or fear…”
I spent a lot of years worried about God’s will, all while working at an unnatural, frantic pace. And what if what God had for me was the opposite? Perhaps it wasn’t that God had a secret plan I had to decipher in the clouds. Instead, my life was directed by a warm breeze to a whole path of possibilities, a life of work I could do with purpose and joy and steady awareness of the good. It just required I cease the frantic fear-driven-doing.
Today, take a moment to imagine your life, not as a straight line God has intended you to walk, but as a wide open meadow, full of possible choices. Are you missing out on the sunshine, the colors, the sweetness of spacious place ahead of you, simply because you are trying so urgently to stay on the line? What if God’s will has much more to do with your mental and spiritual presence in the moment than with your perfection?
Close your eyes and imagine your life as a seed, spinning through the sky from one place to another. If you are the fluttering seed, then God is the wind. Right now in your life, where is God moving you from? What “tree” have you been clinging to for a while? What was good about that tree? What wasn’t good about that tree?
Does it feel scary to have left the safety of the tree? Does your fluttering feel like chaos, like you don’t know where you’re going? Like you have no control? Is there any good to find in that feeling?
Now picture the place you’re heading. Where might you meet the ground? What will it feel like? What do you hope is waiting for you there? Is there anything you hope for that new place? Is there anything you’re afraid of?
Imagine that God is less concerned with where you land, and more concerned with the breeze that carries you. What do you want to notice about the breeze? What does it have for you in this moment?
Take some time to consider how the will of God might be found in how you interact with the places you land, rather than in the places themselves.
Close your time of prayer by imagining your flight again, from the tree to soil. Ask God to give you grace to love and respect the place you have landed.