Where the Butterflies Belong(Charles E.J. Moulton) Where the Butterflies Belong

A Spiritual Story by Charles E.J. Moulton


I am not sure if this was lucid dreaming. For all I knew, it might have been as much. Whatever it was, it mesmerized me exactly because I had not expected to be here at all. I did not know the place, at least not to my recollection. I could not imagine where on Earth this was. Maybe it was a fantasy landscape, something my brain had dreamt up.
Lucid dreaming, I hear you say, a dream-state controlled by the dreamer. Yes, well, the extraordinary thing in this case was that my mind was not controlling it. This dream seemed to be coming from way deeper in my soul. This dream was controlled by beings way off into a spiritual realm I had never heard of, let alone ever really believed in. But this felt as real as my own house and home, more so, even.
But what about the emotions this place conjured up? I mean, this felt totally spiritual. I walked around this forest and really felt like the whole place vibrated. It was alive. The grass seemed richer and fuller. The plants had brighter colors. The sun had a warmer glow. And it wasn’t just that. Everything seemed to possess a consciousness. Somehow, every straw, every flower, every leaf on every tree, every pigment of every air molecule seemed to be a conscious being filled with cosmic intelligence. Every particle watched me, but it was not a weird and spooky gazing. It was a gazing filled with a tender awe. It felt like coming home.
The first things I thought of were the Celtic matt paintings from the ambient music videos, green and gorgeous. Long twisted branches and little furry animals jumping from tree to tree, watching me, the stranger that walked past them into unknown territory. The stranger that they knew so well, the lost son returning home at last.
I strode a lightly beaten path through woodlands filled to the brim with luscious greens. The gorgeous additions to this landscape was that it was devoid of any debree or bare branches. Every part of this place bloomed with greens of every shade from the dark savoy cabbage to the light and tender birch leaf. Every shade elegantly blessed with butterflies dancing in the sweet sunlight.
The woman that appeared in the midst of all of this was tall and yellow-haired. She seemed like the kind of woman that I would have fallen in love with in my youth, glowingly beautiful with a very transparent skin, her locks so long they reached her hips.
She seemed to be at home here, her long and transparent white negligée blowing in the breeze. Locks of her hair swayed in the breeze like the curtains of a Georgian bed room with open windows. It seemed her energy made love to the butterflies that danced around her, butterflies of every single color and every single color very deep and very intense, every color of every rainbow in each of its pores.
This lovemaking was not sexual. It was spiritual lovemaking, the mother of all lovemaking. Far more were these streams of consciousness a quantum play of particles mingling with particles. She gave each butterfly a dainty half-smile, speaking to them in a language I had never heard or believed I had never heard. But I had. The words were as soft as orchid leaves and as loving and warm as a summer breeze.
I remember standing there in my forest – it was mine, was it not? – looking at this gorgeous creature playing a kind of an open hide and seek with the butterflies. It seemed this game of exhanging energies was all that mattered to her. I felt like a caveman that watched a supreme being making love to her own soul. Plato’s allegory of the caveman realizing he had been looking at the shadows of the real people on his cave wall all his life? Man, that legend really made sense now.
She looked up at me, her eyes the tinge of turquoise water, a kind of color I had only seen in Maledives water on pictures. She tilted her head in a way that touched me deeply. This was more than love. It seemed her aura was all I wanted, all I needed. In fact, her whole persona seemed to be the mirror image of everything I had ever strived for in my own love, every misunderstood love affair, every raging intoxication, every jealous striving for every affection, every career move. They all seemed to originate in the fact that I was looking and longing for her, my guardian angel.
She didn’t speak, although I heard her say something.
“You have arrived.”
I shook my head in confusion.
She smiled and I heard laughter, although her lips did not move.
“No?” she giggled. “But you are here, so why do you say that you are not?”
“Am I dreaming this?” I replied, looking around for any indication for holographic hiccups, some glitch in the system that would reveal that I was in a holodeck at the Enterprise or something.
She shook her head, looking back at the butterflies.
“No, my dear. It is you that is dreaming.”
“What?” I whispered tenderly. “I asked you ...”
Her stare was more adamant now that she looked up at me. It was not an angry stare, it was just more decisive, as if she really tried to make it clear to me what she was actually telling me, as if her energy depended on it. There was no anger, just a surge of energy. That was what it was, her energy moving toward me without any strain or frustration. Her mood was the wind in the trees.
“Your real world is not so real after all.”
As she twisted and turned in pirouettes, I took a few steps up toward her as she stood there on the hill between two lovely birch trees. I looked around the forest hill as I approached her.
“Where am I?”
Now the woman lowered her hands, cocking her head this time in frustration. Her gaze seemed to tell me: “Oh, really. You don’t have to ask that!”
“What?” I joked. “I really don’t know where I am.”
Now I heard the a very faint and high stream of giggles. I had no idea where these giggles came from until I realized that the butterflies were laughing. They sounded like a bunch of first graders hip-skipping off the schoolyard after their first day at school.
The angel looked at the butterflies, pursing her lips and shaking her head. “He says he does not know where he is.”
The butterflies laughed again.
The beautiful creature, so feminine and so androgenous at the same time, looked over at me, taking a moment’s pause before stretching forward her long fingers. It was then that I saw how transparently glowing her digits were, as if they were not skin and bones and flesh at all. I realized this first to its full gamut when I understood that I was in the presence of someone’s ethereal body. This was an energy consciousness.
I looked up at the creature into her fantastic looking eyes. She waved her imaginary eyebrows, so like the creatures I had seen in the film “Avatar”, gently inspiring me to take her hand.
I lift my hand and touched hers. The result was a surge of magnetism. Electromagnetism. The energy literally shot through my fingers into my body, reaching my toes and then shooting up toward my heart and head. I felt an amazing sensation of a being actually making love to me by the sheer force of her own spiritual power. My spiritual power.
I took what seemed like three or four steps up toward the small hill she was standing on, her long hand pulling me up toward her. Slowly, as the vast landscape, field upon field and lake upon lake, came into view, I realized I knew the place better than I thought.
Now, this was not intellectual memory. It was emotional memory. Like the kind of recollections we have when we remember what kind of feelings we had when we had sex the first time, when we remember how proud we were when our fathers told us that we did a great job in the school musical or when our grandmothers gave us our first ice-cream even if our parents did not know about it. Sheer joy. Giving love in order to receive the same.
The landscape was even more abundant than the forest had been. Greener, if such a thing ever was possible. The sky bluer than the sky in my own world. Every animal more colorful. Every tree fertile beyond anything I had ever seen.
“You are home,” she said again without moving her lips.
“Wait,” I chirped, my head shaking.
Before I even could continue, she lift her gorgeously glowing ethereal finger and held it against my mouth.
“There are only answers here, no real questions.”
I gazed back at the world I saw before me.
“If this is reality, where am I living in my own world?”
The woman sighed. Strange to see how someone could sigh without opening her lips.
With a swift gesture made with both hands, she seemed to blow away all the butterflies, who agreed to leave.
“Take a walk with me, George,” she said.
I nodded, knowing that I was in the presence of sheer spiritual beauty here. This was a woman that I could trust, a being that loved me so unconditionally that only God himself could love me more. On the other hand, she might even be God herself.
We walked hand in hand for about one hour in total silence. I had many questions to ask, but I figured that she was my angel. She would know all my questions and would answer them in due time. This was like the first stroll we had all taken with our first girlfriend or boyfriend, virile with excitement, after we decided to go steady. As we walked about this landscape, hand in hand, past elegant giraffes in beautiful savannahs and what even looked penguines in arctic surroundings, I realized something. Every girlfriend I had ever had was an effort to replace this woman: my guardian angel. I felt more safe and secure with this woman than with any other human being I had ever met.
“Are you my guardian angel?” I asked her finally, quite close to what seemed to be a quietly and swiftly rushing stream in Colorado-like surroundings. A few beavers were building a dam here and they seemed to be speaking to each other in the same language the woman had used to speak to the butterflies.
It was Enochian. I just remember that because we had an extra credit seminar at the college, more for fun than anything else. But the woman that taught the course was very clear and precise about it. I ended up writing a poem in that supposedly ancient language. I now heard these beavers discussing what seemed to be how big to build their construction. It had been ten years now since I learned the basics of that angelic tongue, so I did not understand much of what they said. I got the hang of the meaning of their conversation, though.
“Do we build this big or do we build it small?” the beavers said.
I saw the woman smile very much like I myself smiled. As I looked over at her, her facial expression echoing my own.
My angel smiled at me. “I am you.”
My eyes opened wide in awe. As I did, her wide-eyed gaze mirrored mine. It scared me a bit to see that her face now mimicked mine, even becoming mine for a bit, but as soon as she reacted like I did, I realized that this woman had my features, just in a feminine way.
“You are ... me?”
“Your Yin,” she said, now moving her lips, “to your Yang.”
I sat down on the stone by the stream, the beavers looking up at me with a startled expression. Apparantly, not many startled souls came here to their territory.
My angel, uhm, my “Other Me”, sata down on the large stone next to me. “Every soul has a counterpart, a Yin to their Yang,” she gestured sideways, tilting her head in that familiar way that I realized was my way, “or a Yang to their Yin. It causes them to search for beings that radiate in the same frequencies their counterpart in heaven radiates. Essentially, when we search for a partner we are basically just looking for ourselves.”
I sighed, looking at the stream flowing by, the water clear, the beauty irreplacable. The beavers were almost finished now, so they nodded, adding one stick and then wandering off upon two legs, chattering about something, chewing on what seemed to be berries.
“Elderberries. The beavers are eating elderberries. They are angelic. Protective.”
“You remember,” my angel said, happily. “Heavenly berries.”
I suddenly remembered my favorite berries at my grandma’s breakfast table. I had spent my summers there and she had decorated my raisin bran with ...
“Elderberries,” she repeated.
“Is that all you eat here?”
My angel smiled. “What we do is imagine we eat it. We create what we eat. We can create anything.”
I winced, sort of like Clint Eastwood had in “For A Fistful of Dollars”. My angel now did the same thing. At once, I saw her turn into Clint, complete with pocho and cigar. “Holy Cow, don’t do that.”
My angel, giggling, turning into herself again.
“You see,” she said, laughing, “you can manifest anything you want. Mostly, though, you guys only manifest the bad stuff.”
I sighed again, this time a bit depressed. “Really?”
My angel nodded.
“Why do we do that?”
“You still think you can find the answers outside of yourselves.”
“They’re not?”
She shook her head. “Every religion has told you so in their strivings to point you toward your inner faith. Every love affair you have had has told you to follow your heart. But you always lose faith, believing in everything but yourself, following people who tell you lies just to get rich and richer and it all makes you grow poorer. And so you get back here and remember, swearing that when you incarnate again you will promise yourself to remember what reality really is about. You tell your angel that you will remember, but most of you don’t in the end. You believe the priests, the doctors, the teachers, the bosses, the newspapers, the politicians and the policemen, confusing God and religion, forgotting that God was there first before the interpretation of him. So you join the clubs, blaming other clubs for calling him by another name, but you are all his children. Somewhere, though, is that little voice inside you, telling you,” my angel now whispered pointing at my chest, “I am not of this world, so the answers to my problems cannot be found in this world.”
“Love is the answer,” I whispered, looking at the two beavers disappearing into the forest. Now I realized that beavers were turning into me and my angel walking away toward this creek. “Hey?”
“Hey?” my angel answered.
“Those beavers turned into us.”
She smiled. “You’re getting the hang of this, boy.”
I looked over at my angel, who now had metamorphed into the white haired guy I thought God looked like. “You like me as a girl better?”
I laughed, shrugging. “I guess.”
My angel nodded, smiling. “I’ll stay like this for a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“If I want to kiss you, God, then maybe you should turn into a girl again.”
“You afraid of gay people?” my angel asked me, polishing the newly created whiskers.
I paused, wondering what to say.
“You don’t think I created gay people?”
I shook my head. “I said nothing of the sort.”
“Love is love, you know,” my angel, that had now turned into God, said. “You people choose your own ways to express your love anyway. Some souls feel better when they embrace people of their own gender. That is fine with me. As long as they are capable of loving and respecting one another, as long as they don’t kill or hurt anyone, I am fine with that.”
I think I took the longest look at anyone I ever had.
“Sex is not a sin?”
God raised one eyebrow, looking like a colleague I had known back when had been a fresh pro in my first company.
“You serious, kiddo? Would I require you to make children, wanting you to procreate, telling you to love each other and forbid you to like it? Forbid you to actually do it? What do think I am? A liar? God does not lie. Are the animals ashamed of being naked? Have you ever seen a tiger with a T-shirt? And don’t come with that old wives tale about animals not having souls. Ask any dog owner. They are more spiritually aware than you have turned out to be. They never ever left Eden. You left. Don’t blame me for that one.”
“Adam and Eve was an allegory.”
“A good one you misinterpreted.”
“What about the snake?”
God sighed. “That’s what I always tell you guys, but you never read the bible. You just believe the thousand people in power who have misunderstood me. The snake made you believe you were naked, making you cover yourself, giving you shame. The forbidden tree was shame. The forbidden fruit was not sex. You need to like it. In fact, the Hindus got it very early. They turned the sexual power into spiritual power through what they call the Prana. You can even feel me when you make love to your partners. But you would rather praise the killers in your society, hoping they kill the ones who want to make children. And so, because you claim sex is dirty you commit real sins like using sex as dirt and claim that the real sex is the sin. But it never was. The sin is the lack of love. Love. Love. Love. Love. For God’s sake, grow up.”
I now realized we had actually and seriously misunderstood God. “I never knew you could get so angry, God.”
I literally saw God transform back into my personal angel, who smiled very sweetly. She shook her head. “I just told you what you needed to hear. I read your emotions as you read mine. I am you.”
“But these are the truths of eternity, aren’t they?”
She nodded. “Pretty much.”
“So what I do now?”
The angel now stood up, taking my hand and inspiring me to stand up, as well. I did and upon doing it, my angel kissed me. It was the kind of kiss that filled me up in a way nothing has ever filled me up before. Soul, body, spirit, mind, organs, all of it simply felt as if it was filled to the brim with divine light. This was more that sexual. This was eternity in the making, timeless and gorgeously green like the heart chakra. The kiss lasted for eons, it seemed. I could died have and gone to heaven and incarnated again and still be kissing her.
When my angel retracted from my lips, she smiled the sweetest smile I had ever seen, again tilting her head in that sweet way I loved so much. “Two things, my dear. When you love someone else, remember you are just loving a part of yourself, just like your hate only flows back to you, your greed to yourself, your envy to yourself.”
“And second of all?”
My angel raised her hand and caressed my cheek with such a tender loving beauty that I cried. My soul actually produced sweet pearly teardrops that hung in the air as diamonds for a while. There was love there and it all belonged to me. The best thing of all was that this love was eternal. I had learned about quantum physics for a good reason. Matter was only vibration, so matter was indeed an illusion. Auras could be photographed, so ethereal bodies were a reality. Particles connected, so shared energy was the only reality.
“Stop categorizing things. There are no categories. We are all one. All of us. So don’t fear anything. God is real. God is love. So be God. God and Good are just one “O” apart and the “O” is the complete circle of love. The reality you live in is an illusion. Even Edgar Allan Poe knew as much when he wrote that life was but a dream within a dream.”
“Will I wake up from my other dream?”
My angel giggled, her hands moving swiftly in what seemed to be circular motions similar to horizontal eights, to send us back to where we had been in the first place: back on the hill where the butterflies belonged.
She nodded, her eyes shining and tingling, that spark in her eyes mirroring the look that all of my lovers had given me when I had made love to them, a look that most of the people I had helped or healed or assisted or laughed with, had given me. I realized now that this sparkle was my own, the people I loved to love mirrors of myself. If I could love myself, then maybe I could love others.
I saw my angel play with the butterflies, speaking to them in the Enochian tongue. “I am always with you, my dear.”
As I turned away to walk back the path away from my own dream, I thought of something. I had forgotten to ask her the most important question of all.
“What’s your name, my angel?”
She paused, raising her eyebrows in slight surprise. “I am you, so why should I be anything you are not? My name is yours, my soul is yours, my love is yours.”
I smiled, crying happy tears that turned into diamonds, hovering in the air for a moment or two that lasted for what seemed to be an eon. I walked back to the dream that I called my reality, knowing that my soul was truly at home here. Here, where the butterflies belonged.

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