Capturing butterflies and escaping the ordinary.

Thoughts, ideas, reminders, epiphanies are like butterflies. They flitter around you and if you don't capture them, they're gone. We've all been driving, listening to someone else, showering, mowing the lawn...and an idea hits us. Or a reminder of something we've been meaning to do. A birthday or event we've forgotten. For me, it's words and ideas. I'll be making dinner or folding laundry or driving home and an idea smacks me in the face. It can be for a blog post or a poem or a new perspective for a book I'm working on. Sometimes the ideas are jumbled. Sometimes they come in blocks of clarity. Simple ideas. Sometimes the blog post topics seem common sense. Sometimes prolific. Every once in a while, they appear basic but profound. And sometimes irrelevant. But they fly around my mind and I try to capture them. They can be beautiful like Monarch Butterflies with striking colors, but seemingly reverent and incapable of capture. Sometimes my ideas are like moths. Benign. Bothersome. Gray and petulant.

What inevitably happens is that by the time I get home or regain control of my computer from my kids, the idea is gone. Vanished. The imprint of its existence a nagging shadow in the back of my mind. This escape is frustrating because I believe these tiny pieces carry with them realization. Truth. Or an insight into my soul and who I truly am. Because they aren't forced. They appear out of nowhere from my subconscious and demand to be heard. If I ignore them, they disappear and I'm left with a tugging ache trying to recall them.

These thoughts and epiphanies are so honest because they're unsummoned. We don't force them. This often happens when we're debating something important to us. Nothing betrays our intricacies as much as the banter we pontificate in trying to prove a point. Nothing betrays who we truly are as much as the arguments we propound when confronted with the weaknesses in the things we hold dear. Believe in. In this world of banality, there is nothing more sacred. These moments of clarity that appear either when we're doing the mundane or when pushed to our philosophical limits force us to set aside the irrelevant and allow ourselves to realize and embrace all that is important to to us.