Free To Fly-Or Tied In A Bottle ~ Early Morning Thoughts

This evening I was working at clearing out some of the "stuff" I've had around for awhile. And while going through old notes, class preparations, and some interesting nostalgia I ran across this. I have no idea how old the story it - but after I re-read it, I knew exactly why I held onto it. (This has been published on the web, along with two other stories attributed to him.) Sometimes, what can cause the deepest thoughts, come to us in child-like form.

Dream of a Butterfly

This story is from the gossip of the sparrows on my balcony this morning...

Once, there was a butterfly that lived in a bottle. It was a cowardly butterfly; when it was young, as a silkworm, it hid inside a bottle to avoid hungry sparrows. It only came out at night, eat some leafs, and returned into its bottle. Until one time, it slept very long through its metamorphic process in a silk cocoon, and turned into a butterfly.

After it had grown as a pretty butterfly, its wings were colorful but too wide to escape the bottle neck. Thus it lived in a bottle, laid under a bench on a park.

It survived only because little ants brought it food. But that was it, the price of staying in a comfortable place, without a challenge in life.

One day, the butterfly was found by a bottle-picker. He almost traded it for coins from a shop. Suddenly he saw something moving in it. Butterfly wings moved like hand clapping in slow motion.

"So what happened then?" I asked the sparrow. "Well, there was a wise spider that came helping," it answered. "The spider was the bottle picker's friend. It went into the bottle and tied the butterfly's wings with its fiber. Gentle spider. The wings
were somehow tied to the body that the butterfly could fit out the bottle neck."

Since that time, the butterfly became one of the bravest insects on earth. They roamed here and there, and you might even find some of them migrating in large number, known as Migrating Monarch. From North America to Mexico, every year, despite the challenge of wild nature...
--story written by Vahd Mulacela


Life without adventure
is like a book without page numbers.
We pass it all through -
read it day by day,
but we don't know where we are.
Here, or there, or
perhaps nowhere at all...
--Vahd Mulachela