As the sun was setting on this steamy day, I felt so awake and overcome with silent euphoria that I went outside and stepped slowly to the field of grass across the street from my house. The twilight air was warm and refreshing. My two little boys joined me. We let our toes sink into the soil and watched the sky change colors.
A slew of butterflies, orange and brown, joined us, twirling around one another, meandering back and forth between the trees. One landed on the shirt of my four year old. His eyes lit up. “The butterfly loves me!” he said.
My six year old ran amok with his butterfly net. I wandered between them, stepping and breathing, being. This. Now. Everything is so… itself, like a silent motion picture, unnarrated.
The only narration was my reflection on my lack of narration, on the quiet bliss, on the opening, like waking up from a dream, steeping in the perfection of everything just as it is. And the moment, this beautiful moment… watching two adorable children chase bumbling butterflies in the sunset, giggling and making up songs about them. It was just a reflection of the bliss within.
This world is a mirror of our own minds. Everything we ask for comes into being. In New Age circles, they describe this as manifestation based on the Law of Attraction. In Buddhism, they describe it as the “wish fulfilling jewel.” In the beginning, we experiment with manifestation in some attempt to control the world, to bring what we want into our lives. At this point in my life, manifestation does not feel like control. In contrast, there is a profound powerlessness. It feels very much like dissolving into the movement of the cosmos, letting it manifest through me what it wants.
What power do we really have to make things happen? As I stood in the grass, I wondered what would happen if I chose to manifest something very specific… a butterfly in the palm of my hand. Why not? Could I really do that?
The idea was based on this sense of my individual self exerting power over something else, something not self. Things don’t work that way. I could hold out my hand and visualize all I want. No butterfly would magically land in my hand. Yet, magic happens all the time; this I know.
If the cosmos wanted to bring this experience into being, I thought, I would let it. That is all the power I have.
Less than five minutes later, I was standing in the grass with a butterfly in the palm of my hand. My six year old captured one in the grass with his net, and the net had bumped its wing. I pulled back the leaves under which the butterfly had crawled. I placed my finger beside it, and she quickly crawled onto my hand. I cradled her until she pulled herself together.
If you ask the universe for what you want, you don’t even need to hold out your hand. You don’t even need to ask. You don’t need to do anything at all but realize that you are not a hand, not a separate self. There is no giver and no receiver, only the movement of the Divine.
