As a great lover of all things lovely, I couldn’t resist going to my local museum for a special butterfly exhibit when it came to town. Part of the exhibit featured glass cases where cocoons were carefully pinned at the tip so that the butterflies inside could hatch and then fly away.

One butterfly however wasn’t so lucky, its cocoon had been pinned too far down and its wing had been caught. I watched the butterfly struggle to free itself, but it was hopeless, that beautiful creature was dead before it was even fully born.

Something at first seemed unnatural about the situation. But then I realized I had seen this before, things dead before being born. My new cellphone that broke was dead before I had really gotten to use it. I had started a relationship once with a guy I knew was moving in 2 weeks, the relationship was dead before it was born. I had  bought a house in Texas and we moved to San Fran a few months later, it was gone before I had settled in and made it mine. In the end, duration is uncertain.

But still, even as I compiled the evidence in my head that this was just one more case of impermanence, of limited duration, I was getting more deeply upset. It just didn’t seem right that the the butterfly was so beautiful, had earned its beauty by struggling out of its cocoon, and was dying nonetheless.

Squiggly line flash back ———————-I had been at an event for donors at Zen Hospice several years before  and a story from one of the caregivers had really shaken me up. She had been caring for a young women, funny, beautiful, a porn star by occupation, and dead of a brain disease before she hit 30. It stuck with me all these years, because, like the butterfly, it didn’t seem right. Young and beautiful shouldn’t die.

In fact, in my mind, beauty is control and death is out of control. The two should be opposites. But the porn star, the butterfly, they were telling me a very uncomfortable truth. All my primping, exercising, lotions and potions, all my efforts to be and stay beautiful, can’t keep me safe. Like that butterfly, my duration is uncertain, my efforts don’t earn me a pass on death, my beauty, already fading anyway, is not an antidote to immpermacne.