The month of November we celebrated Brother Butterfly in two very special ceremonies. One was at our Unitarian Universalist Church, and another at a Hindu temple. At first glance, the bones of each ceremony couldn't be more different. Afterall, in one ceremony we blessed Brother Butterfly with water from the Pacific Ocean, our home, and the congregation, a chalice lit before us. The sermon was in English and filled with poetry and a special message from Reverend Nina. The other ceremony a stack of bananas laid at our feet, twenty one pounds to be exact, and a scale blessed with flowers and turmeric sat before the Gods. There was an Ayya speaking Sanskrit, and with the sound of a bell and a twinkle in his eye, he gently asked us to repeat phrases and place Brother Butterfly and the bananas on the scale for a blessing.
Yet the heart of each ceremony, the heart parelleled one another. In each, we blessed Brother Butterfly with our family and community of friends, and celebrated him being a gift that brings new life and hope into the world. While bones can be as contrasting as snowflakes, hearts all have warmth, and love. With that we all stood together and shared in committing ourselves to nurturing this whole person, wishing him a happy and healthy life.
If you'd like, here are the poems we chose for one ceremony. A special thanks to my dear friend Heather, who beautifully read two of them. And to Theo and my brother in law Bhuvanesh who took many of these photos.
Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe,
A moment that will never be again…
And what do we teach our children?
We should say to each of them: do you know what you are?
You are a marvel. You are unique.
In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you.
Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move.
You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven,
You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel.
— Pablo Casals
Children Chapter IV
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and the daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you, and though they are with you they belong not to you. You may give them your love, but not their thought, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies, but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you, for life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. The Archer see the mark upon the path of the infinite, and bends you with might that the arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness.
— Kahlil Gibran
Unending Love
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.
-- Tagore
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