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Bamboo Butterflies

by Marian Allen

The bamboo was dark green. Thick. Sturdy. Thrusting toward the sky in straight, rigid lines.

The butterflies were pale pink. Wings thin to transparency. Fragile. Fluttering everywhere but straight up, although they were sometimes, by random chance, higher than at other times.

Jason – or, as he called himself these days – Silence sat on a rock in the midst of the bamboo grove and thought of these things. He had thought of these things every day of his two week retreat (now in Day Six). It was his assignment. Every day. For two hours every day.

The rest of the time was spent in working in an already perfect garden, cleaning the retreat, and reading English translations of Lao Tzu’s TAO TE CHING. This was a small book which was page after page of “deep understanding” that was, apparently, too deep for Jason. The only bit he liked was the bit that said that if you understood, that meant you didn’t.

Today was different. Today, he had brought a pillow to sit on, because, it had been revealed to him, that damn rock was hard.

Today, in defiance of his assignment, he deliberately didn’t think about the damn bamboo and the damn butterflies. Today, he thought about how comfortable his couch was, and how entertaining THE GOOD PLACE was, no matter how many times he watched it. He got lessons from that, every time.

This retreat, this boring assignment, this hard rock. Was this The Good Place or The Bad Place? Did he have this stupid assignment because he was judged too dense to appreciate a better one, or because he was judged wise enough to learn something?

He wanted a hamburger with onions and bacon jam, he knew that.

A butterfly landed on his knee. He’d never had a butterfly on him before. It turned around, facing the way he was facing, and opened and shut its wings, over and over.

It was almost hypnotic. He watched it for as long as it stayed there, and was sorry when it fluttered off. He tried to follow it, but it was just like all the other butterflies once it mixed in with them, and he lost it.

Far, far in the distance, an ambulance wailed on one of the roads that bordered the retreat. Faintly, it approached, passed, vanished. That happened sometimes while he was sitting out here, frankly bored out of his skull. Or a huge truck with a heavy cargo rumbled and its tires hissed on wet asphalt.

Then that noise was gone, and there was nothing to listen to except the tops of the bamboo stalks clacking against one another up there in the wind. Down where he sat, he caught a rare downdraft, but it was mostly still and windless. It was just up where the new growth was and the bamboo was thin and flexible that they knocked against each other and the leaves fluttered and there was noise and agitation.

His timer went off. He was surprised that two hours had passed; he usually checked it and found that the time passed in five minute intervals, but he had only check four times this session.

Maybe he was getting used to being bored.

My nails today are a gradient of three greens with stamps of pink and dark green.

MY PROMPT FOR TODAY: My mani

MA