Float like a butterfly

Vladimir Nabokov ran from the communist revolution in Russia, then from Hitler, and finally came here to America.  If not for the revolution in 1917, Nabokov's parents might not have left Russia in 1919, when the author was a young man of twenty.  

An undergraduate program--with honors, of course--at Trinity College came next.  Then back to Berlin and then on to Paris.  And then to the US as a forty-year old man where Nabokov lived as a writer and as a faculty at the best institutions: Stanford, Harvard, Wellesley,and Cornell.  Finally, back to Europe--to Switzerland--in 1961 where he lived until his death in 1977. 

I wonder if he would have ever imagined that the Soviet Union would disintegrate a mere decade later.

Nabokov was a refugee and an immigrant more than once in his life.  And, yet, he prospered, leaving his mark on humanity in ways most of us are incapable of.

Nabokov was also an expert on butterflies.

In an interview in 1967, Nabokov said:

The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.

The longer I live, the more I understand that life is less defined by the paths that we chart for ourselves and created more by external forces that are beyond our control and imagination.  When I was getting into my teens, I would not have ever imagined that I would live my adult life in America.  Into my early fifties, I was on a path to retire as I neared 70, and yet here I am in retirement a decade earlier than planned.  We think we are in control of our lives, and rarely do we acknowledge that such a thought is nothing but an illusion.  A grand delusion, actually.

When we studied in high school biology about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, I had a tough time believing and imagining a wriggly worm becoming a colorful butterfly.  How magical, I thought.

These days, kids and adults rarely ever see butterflies in our urban lives.  We call this progress!

The Indian poet-mystic Rabindranath Tagore had a simple and yet profound poem in which he referred to the butterfly, in his Poems on Time.  Well, it is not really about the butterfly itself, as you can see:

The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.

Time is a wealth of change,
but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time
like dew on the tip of a leaf.

May you, too, have wealthy moments in your life!