Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Collecting Butterflies

Categories and Labels

We humans like to place people in neat categories. We believe that once we get an individual squarely into their category, we know the essence of them and it will not change. I don't think we do this because we are malicious, or have ill will toward another, but simply because it helps us to feel we have them pegged. We know who they are.

Remember when we were ten years old and made a butterfly collection for our science fair project? I do. We caught a butterfly and put it into a canning jar with a cotton ball soaked in ethyl alcohol. Once it was “good and dead” we stuck a couple of straight pins through it and pinned it to a board—hopefully with its wings spread so we didn't have to spoil them by forcing them open. Then we looked them up in the encyclopedia and made a label to stick underneath. The one who caught, pinned and labeled the most different species of butterflies won the blue ribbon. It was rather barbaric, actually. The pinned butterfly was nothing more than a good specimen, a point in time. It captured neither the caterpillar, nor the chrysalis, nor the transformation in between.

That's what our labels do. They pin the person to a category, at a point in time. They do not take into account what that person experienced in life to bring them to this moment, nor do they capture what changes may take place in future. Rainier Maria Rilke expressed it this way: “A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them—they are who they've been throughout your whole relationship.” If everyone we met hung their label on us, and we hung ours on them, we'd all be on our knees from the sheer weight of labels. Best not to hang them in the first place.

Today, let's practice abstinence from labeling (and leave the poor butterflies alone). We all need to lose that weight.

                                                             In the Spirit,

                                                                  Jane

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