An Imaginal Butterfly Effect 

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            She offers music to the world at dawn each morning, a long trill of a wooden flute, as if the music is a tonic, an elixir that vitalizes the skin of grasses and trees, the stone backbone, the arteries of river and stream.   She offers music as an intentional participation in the world’s dreaming, as if the breathing of the flute enlivens not only her body but the body of Earth in such a contagious way that at the other end of the morning, a man might stop still and notice a kind of pulsing of the air or meadow, a palpable happiness that is breathed into the man and in such a way that he begins to notice the shimmering color and texture of the grass or sky and his heart breaks open in gratitude and his own gratitude is absorbed by the world and excites the world again and on the other end of the day a woman notices how the sky has come alive with the mad buzzing of bees drunk on the nectar of weeds she was just about to poison and she stops to listen and feels her own body vibrate sympathetically and it is a kind of ecstasy and she moves, almost like a dance – a bee dance – and the world notices and quivers in response and on the other side of the sky a child squishes her toes in the trembling mud and laughs with delight and the world notices and transmits the delight from one being to another and a man almost paralyzed with rage notices a peculiar quality, an attentive aliveness in the scraggly trees in the sad park where he is waiting to hurt the first person who looks at him with disgust, or who looks at him at all, and he notices the trees flushed with presence, unashamed of their scrawniness, bursting with presence as if they are witnessing him, maybe even with kindness, and he hears a faint, faint music, a distant song that reminds him of something once long ago when he was a child of wonder and the sound buckles his knees and he weeps for remembering the world’s terrible beauty and his weeping waters the rhythmic heart of Earth, waters the stream, waters the great river traveling to the great mother ocean that covers the world who breathes sunlight and sky and begins again the green growing of life…

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Geneen Marie Haugen (by kind permission)