Two Gestures

                                                                 1.

Someone is burying a butterfly in the earth. Her small eyes and hands have found this lying on the ground, two windowpanes of orange and black-veined pollen which could have reached another continent. Except they didn't.

                                                                2.

Someone is performing open heart surgery. It is winter and the operating room is filled with warm bodies. The gift lies open before this gathering of distantly related beings. The sense of family might emerge in human crisis. This might happen between people who are all, every single body on earth, sixteenth cousins.The ribs have a sort of symmetry that might remind someone of butterfly wings.

                                                              3.

It's a child who buries the butterfly in cold earth. It's not a child whose gloved hand closes around the surfaced human heart. We are told that one gesture is science and the other is what, mythology? Religion? The child's hands digging a hole and placing the winged thing into what is believed to be a pocket of sleep. Restorative sleep. One covers. One opens. The human essentials of healing.

                                                             4.

Both these gestures have mysteries in their origins. We will never know who was the first to bury a butterfly in the earth. We will never know who was first to open the human body to remove the heart. These are both sacred gestures now, but in the beginning they were some sort of stumbling, strange instinct, a clumsiness of the heart. Ideas of salvation began in divine stumbling. One, we are told, is science. And the other is darker,  more hopeless.  But equally beautiful. A horror is discovered to protect us from a greater horror. It is called art or science. They both wing it like the butterfly.


                                                           5.

It is not a surgeon burying the butterfly in the earth, covering it up with comforting fragments of brown and black, granules with tiny sparks flashing through them. But the child may do this with the warm precision of a surgeon. It's not a child breaking the petals of human ribs to reach the red human flower that hides in its membrane from the unliving air. But the surgeon may feel like a child kneeling on the cold earth, digging with her mother's spoon in something that might as well be winter earth like frozen coffee crystals. The sense of the intractable is the divine sense. Some fix the broken thing with stents. Some do it with the hopeless glue of metaphor. The important thing is to touch the intractable. The impossible is the only thing worth our time and the one thing we all have in common. Divine stumbling gives us a sense that an accident might occur which will be salvation. That there is a word salvation. That it flies like a butterfly which can cross continents and, possibly, interstellar spaces. This is why the small child is a surgeon. This is why the best heart surgeon is a priest of hopeless butterflies.