With reference to a current post over at Making Light, called Butterfly Wings, exploring or even just sharing without further comment, the small thing happening in one's life, that had importance beyond all reasonable expectation.

This might be a point-of-view thing, because, man, I can come up with so many, while some of the posters were struggling to even come up with one.

Like the time early in our sojourn in Dublin - we lived on the South Side, and I often went for walks, hours and hours of walks, around the city center. The city was new and I wanted to really learn it, get it "in my feet", which is my gold-standard for knowing any place - that I can just think of where I'm heading and my feet can just turn the correct way. That's not a magical ability, at least not with me; it's a skill and it needs building up and feeding. Luckily, I don't find this at all unpleasant!

One of those walks took me past a city-center community place, and on the sidewalk was one of those advert boards, which was advertising aikido, accompanied by a strong black/white graphic of two figures, one rolling in a round way, the other directing rather than throwing.

It's possible that was only one wing of the butterfly - the other wing having been a stray comment from an old university friend, priming me to keep on the look-out for an opportunity to try this out. Our mutual friend rdkeir (I think!) was doing kendo, which while it was interesting (I have the vaguest recollection of having actually gone to view a demonstration), it didn't appeal to me quite the way that aikido's description of "redirecting an attacker's energy so that he falls over his own feet" did. I thought that was poetic justice, and even though I was far, far too busy in my final semester in university to consider also going to aikido then, the notion must have remained, laying dormant, until it sprang out at the sight of that city center sign years later.

(I have the vaguest notion, even vaguer than the memory of having witnessed a kendo demonstration while I was still in college, that I'd heard of aikido even earlier than my college years - it makes a pretty story, but caveat lector it's not a memory I can consider reliable, dove-tailing as it does into my desire for story-telling and meaning. All I have, now, is a vague recollection, from when oriental martial arts were quite faddish in the late 1970's. People would speak almost reverently about someone having "a black belt" - mind, in Japanese, the black belt category itself is divided up into dan, or degrees, and the first one is referred to not as the "first" degree, but as the "beginning" degree. Kinda puts one in one's place to know that, particularly if one can spend 10 years or more just attaining that first degree.... anyway, I digress. In the middle of all this cultural nattering about exotic martial arts from Ye Orient, I might have heard about aikido, enough for someone to have passed along its unique detail, but alas, also the news that its founder, all the way in Japan, was only teaching the art to people who had already attained a black belt in some other art. I have researched that part: yes, at various times, the founder was restricting aikido to select groups. But later on, the doors were thrown wide open because, in part, he'd felt he'd taught enough of his most advanced students that they could reliably and accurately pass that knowledge along. However, in the time my vague memory wants to come from, it was most certainly the case that he was still concentrating on instruction for people who already had a good grounding in the tradition of some other martial art. My memory was of feeling disappointed, that I certainly was no black-belt adept and for sure Japan was too far away for a girl of 12 or so to get to on her own. Anyway, that's what my butterfly-ridden brain is telling me.)

After thinking, and staring into space for awhile, I've decided that there are way too many butterfly moments posing as encounters with life-changing books. I'll only share the one: The Depression Book: depression as an opportunity for spiritual practice, which was laying on a sales table in a London bookshop run by the Society of Friends. (I'm thinking this was in the neighborhood of Euston Station? I had to hang out nearby because my bus for the airport was leaving from there.) Sparing the details, it came at the right time, and has remained something of a "best friend between covers" kind of book for the guts of 15 years.

Ha, but I can't round this off without sharing a butterfly moment supreme - the summer before high school, I'd found out about the local comics shop - it wasn't the comics themselves that had interested me, but the science fiction magazines. And not just the fictional pulps, but - oh wow! the stuff on Star Trek, which had been going in and out of daily broadcast in our area. And a new magazine, with a gorgeous cover painting of Kirk and Spock.

Because of the way my education in my early teens had been handled, incorporating a couple of cross-country moves as well as an intra-city move that wrested me from one school district to another, there were some kids I got to know when they were 10 or so, who I only saw again back in my first days of high school. In the hope (not really a realistic one, but still, a teen-aged hope) that one of these people might be interested, I took the special issue of the magazine to school, to show this ex-classmate at lunch.

She really had no interest in it, but just as I was deciding that I'd have to put it away, my elbow lurched away from my body, and suddenly a short girl with long-long blond hair was looking at the magazine, going, "Oooh! STAR TREK! Are you a fan, too?"

That would be OMM (short for "our mutual Mary"), with whom I've stayed fast friends since. The 30th anniversary of that meeting is probably sometime in the next 5 years or so.

Hee!