Butterfly Dreaming

The sun has entered Sagittarius, my own birth sign, causing me to feel a little like a butterfly emerging, moving toward the solstice, yet a month away.  It has become a truism for me that from, say, Labor Day, the season is one big wild roller coaster ride of thinking and effort, and this year, no different.  Travel (albeit both business and pleasure), home maintenance, health adjustments, office work...I need a little holiday, like maybe on a butterfly farm.

Which is exactly where I'm flying off to tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday.  The Rainbow Bridge House is somewhat famous, like a Maui Big Pink, for having been associated with a Jimi Hendrix event in 1970 when Jimi and countless other counterculture spiritualists and druggies did a concert and some movie production on Maui, just a few months before Jimi's death.  I didn't know this when we made the arrangements to stay at the house, which is co-located on a butterfly farm. And  I didn't know you could farm butterflies, but someone does, for release at weddings and other events, hopefully of a somewhat spiritual nature.  I would be very disturbed to find hordes of monarchs clouding the PowerPoint presentations of a business conference (like I just endured for two weeks on the chilly mainland).

And this all should come as no surprise--every time I do background research on some spiritual personality, musician or poet, it appears that they live on Maui, or one of the other Hawaiian Islands, for at least part of their lives.  Maui has a reputation for attracting spiritual types of all persuasions, from Chinese Taoists to Gaia goddesses, Buddhists, Sikhs, Sufis, and Catholic saints. Ram Dass and W.S. Merton both live on Maui, as did George Harrison. Master Alfred Huang, an expert on the I Ching and a teacher of Taoist philosophy, physical arts and meditation, lives on Maui.  (Hawaii as a whole has been home and host to an inordinate share of celebrities from sports, entertainment, and politics.)

While everyone else is hitting the malls on  Black Friday, or whatever they call it, maybe I will do some holiday shopping of my own.  You can buy butterfly kits!  I have slightly mixed feelings about this but maybe I'm just dreaming.  But I'll know better if I take a tour of the farm.  Wonder what kind of chores you do on a butterfly farm?  Tending the milkweed? 

I don't think the farm will mind that I share one of their beautiful images:

I am looking forward to this weekend.  Please let me know if you feel a disturbance in the force caused by butterflies flexing their wings atop a volcano in Hawaii.  In the meantime, please enjoy this little butterfly dream:

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!