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Don't get me started on the sound of crows. Oh, I know many people hate crows and their sound, seeing them as evil, seed-eating, eyeball-plucking vermin with wings. That may well be true, but those aren't MY crows. Mine filled my life until some 15 or 20 years ago. Every time I left the house they'd greet me from Nancy's tall maple across the street, a whole murder of them cawing to me and I'd always greet them: Hi, guys! And thank them for being there. Since the epidemic that wiped them out in the neighbourhood I've not seen any crows—not in High Park, not around the house, not in my dreams. But even in their absence they are my crows.
And now, manifesting what I want to talk about here, I will move on. Because what I need to talk about is the butterfly mind. We've all seen the flight of butterflies. Not the flight of the bumblebee, busy-busy and moving directly from A to B. But that of the butterfy, which is a marvel of inefficiency. In fact, the marvel is that a butterfly ever gets from A to B at all. I picture those clouds of monarchs flitting thousands of miles to over-winter in Mexico (in Mariposa, or did I make that up?). The distance, were a crow to fly it, may be thousands of miles, but as the butterfly flies it, the distance is doubled or tripled.
The connection here, of course, is how the workings of my brain, which was once as focused as the flight of the bumblebee, has become pure butterfly. Three wing-beats up, then four off to the right, then a straight drop down but then immediately back up to where I was at the beginning. Imagine trying to track a butterfly's trip and you'll see the kind of trip I'm on.
A thought arrives. I begin to explore it, either aloud or internally, and then my eye alights on a dust mote, say, and I see it dance in a sunbeam and my thought veers, pivots, goes off in another direction entirely. I could live with this, just barely, except that with the pivot the original thought disappears.
I might be discussing something important with DinoVino and he interrupts me, innocently, to clarify a point, and with that interruption my thought is gone. I can confidently say that almost all my thoughts disappear, sooner rather than later.
I used to say (I was 70 when I said this) that the mice were eating holes in my brain and were thus responsible for my loss of words. Now I would replace "mice" with something like nematodes, if that's who I'm thinking of: teeny, very slender worms. They've infested my brain by the hundreds and each one slowly eats a very skinny tunnel through the tissue, disrupting previous neural pathways and changing how my brain works, forever. Forever, in this case, is a very scary word.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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