The Moths and the Flame

Above a white rooftop under a cloudy sky, the moon looks down and into herself.

Under a solitary streetlight, moths rush to meet the flame. They seem to wonder, lost, yet, know precisely what they’re doing.

Perhaps we are the ones who are lost.

Engulfed in the constant stream of thinking - as a highway heavy with the passing of cars - and pressed between a thought and a feeling, oblivious, it seems, we are, of the fact that the former transforms into the latter.

The world is made up of endless noise, it effortlessly makes one overlook the existence of silence. Even more effortlessly, it makes one defy the richness of solitude.

Yet, in the quietest of instances and the darkest of places that one might allow one's self to be, there is a whisper. It is subtle and soft, as a morning caressing the remains of last night’s sleep on one’s face.

It does not scream.

It does not shout.

It utters, under the breath, truths that one might want to escape, or is too frightened to acknowledge. As a butterfly awakening the fields and the valleys, with nothing but presence, so the soul awakens to it.

I look down from a balcony on the eighth floor. Two people eat dinner in the warm light. They laugh, and the summer air laughs with them.

Further up the street, in the shadows of the sidewalk, a man walks his dog. Two lovers pass them by, holding hands. And, sweetness, succulent and pure, takes hold of the heart.

It’s the sort of sweetness that one experiences at the beach, sitting under a shade, shying away from the sun’s heat, and eating peaches the colour of a sunset.

One bite, and the sweetness of that bite starts to run down the sides of the mouth. It’s sticky, messy, and human.

It escapes the eye and finds the heart.

And, perhaps life is in these little moments and unequivocal actions, glimmers of light in the ceaselessness of darkness.

Perhaps love truly is in our brokenness and the acceptance of the distortions that make us human.

Not the grand, perfunctory materializations of the ego, whose purpose is the heaping of insignificant, short-lived, and overall unnecessary, external validations for some made-up perfection.

There's no one to impress.

Becoming observant, one finds that there is only to be.