Elegy For A Dying Butterfly

My experience of life is lived in constant awareness of my body aging and dying in pain.  It is deeply troubling, like a dying butterfly or shooting star.  I had never marveled at the intricate beauty of a fully realized, living body until mine began its current decline.  Its dying is painfully rejected by all its dying parts, and its mind and spirit rage at the injustice.  I remember it so well, showroom condition. There is no smell like the smell of a new body.  My new memories are often of the many times I recklessly abused this beautiful thing, using it carelessly, flinging it at life as if it would last forever.  Living now is an exquisite dance of compromise, an adjusted newness of being, and rejoicing as it overcomes.  Nothing is so satisfying as creating new uses for an old antique; new ways of being, who I used to be.