Living in the suburb, we get all kinds of bugs and insects in the garden and inside the house — fireflies, butterflies and moths, grasshoppers… But what’s really interesting is that every year on All Souls’ Day, we’d always have a moth that stays inside the house the entire day, sometimes even longer. This year, it was a large, beautiful, yellow moth.
The moth was in my study, it got too near Alex and, in trying to avoid it, she bumped her knee on my table and got a nasty bruise. She wanted me to get rid of it but it was so beautiful I decided to take photos first. But it proved shy, flew to another part of the room and kept moving.
So, I asked Sam to get her butterfly net (an old accessory from high school).
But this moth didn’t intend to get caught. It eluded the net and settled on the wall near a window from where I managed to take photos. Since it didn’t seem interested in flying out of the window, I left it alone. We went to Greenhills, shopped, went to the supermarket, then to a Chinese deli and came home several hours later.
After dinner, we were lounging in the Family Room and found it there. Speedy didn’t want to shut the windows to turn on the aircon with the moth still inside the house. He asked Sam for the butterfly net, caught it and let it out through the window.
Whether in jest or wishful thinking, every time we find a moth inside the house at this time of the year, we always say it’s either my father, my grandmother or Speedy’s father, all of whom have been dead for years, paying a visit. I suppose it was this mood (plus the fact that she had just seen a horror movie called Reincarnation) that prompted Sam to ask me if I believed in reincarnation. She asked me in the car on the way to Greenhills. I told her it was an attractive thought, the ability to come back over and over, but the rational side of me says it just isn’t true.
But, if it were true, Sam persisted, would I want to be reincarnated? Yes, I told her. I would. In fact, I want more. I want to be reincarnated and retain all memories from previous lives. Imagine… All that knowledge. The ability to solve problems of the present because you know exactly where and how everything went wrong in the past.
There are a lot of cultures where reincarnation figures prominently. Part of the law of karma, some say, and what you don’t pay for or what reward you are not able to collect in this lifetime, you can pay for or collect in the next. For others, it is simply an integral part of the belief in the afterlife where the death of the body is not the end but merely the transition to another kind of life.
It’s an attractive thought, like I said. And goodness knows how I’ve pored over historical romances that deal with reincarnation. Anya Seton’s Green Darkness is one of my favorite novels of all time and that’s what it is all about — ill-fated lovers meeting again some five hundred years later — in another life — and the passion is still burning. Great stuff for fiction, really. Even in Filipino pop literature and entertainment, reincarnation combined with romance has always been a surefire formula for commercial success and even critical acclaim. Mars Ravelo’s Maruja was a hit in komiks form and the first film adaptation with Susan Roces and Romeo Vasquez was memorable too. Even when seen through the eyes of a child, I must say, because I was very young when I saw the film and I still have wonderful memories of it lasting and lingering enough for me to dismiss the two remakes as poor copies.
But. As wonderfully attractive as the notion may be, I still say that reincarnation is best left to romantic fiction. It might serve as a symbol of continuity and immortality in some cultures and belief systems but, for me, it’s just a beautifully conceptualized fiction.
There have been people we all feel that we have met before, or events that we are sure we have done before although we know we haven’t. It is hard to explain why….perhaps the soul has experienced it before. Who knows really. But the idea is better than just living this short existence and the nothing.
deja vu, right?
I actually WANT to believe in reincarnation, I’m not sure yet- but it seems like a wonderful thought. Don’t get me wrong, the heaven and hell concept is nice too, but what do you think is happening there now? probably overcrowded from all of the billions of humans that died over the centuries.
What I do wanna point out is, if there really is a thing as reincarnation, don’t get too excited. You might as well be living again as a moth or a rat. I don’t think everyone will be lucky enough to become human again..hehe
really beautiful moth btw.. ^ ^,
Like you said, it is just a “beautifully conceptualized fiction.” Amen.
Moths remind me of flying ipis.
I don’t believe in the religious notion of reincarnation. But the notions in physics that nothing is really created nor destroyed, that energy can be converted to matter (and vise versa) seem to make more sense.
Or maybe reincarnation is the romanticized idea of a do-over and second chances and plain human avarice. (Like Erap.)
When my father passed away, we gathered around his coffin the first time when he arrived from the funeral parlor. A butterfly fluttered by, rounded us up and even landed on my brother. That was the first and the last time I saw a butterfly inside the house. We figured, it could have been my dad blessing us.
It could not have been reincarnation , though. From what I’ve read about the subject, you come back in a higher form or as is as life on earth is our way of perfecting ourselves towards Nirvana or heaven. So, we cannot be reincarnated as an animal or an insect.
You can be reincarnated as a lower form if you did wrong in this life — according to Hindu tradition anyway.
I’ve read a lot of items about reincarnation and I’m still skeptic.
I haven’t killed any four legged animals or fowls for food. I really don’t have the stomach to do it. My late mother, who could always do it swiftly, was always telling me not to bother my conscience about it. These animals are God given and once slaughtered for food, they would always reincarnate.
I’ve heard a lot of variations of reincarnation — personally, I don’t like the idea of being reborn as a cockroach. LOL
I don’t want to be reincarnated. Imagine: lifetime after infinite lifetime of birth, aging, sickness, and confronting death! Repeating the suffering over and over and over again. Blech.
I know life can be beautiful, but unless it becomes ABSOLUTELY 100% suffering-free (impossible!), I’d still NOT want to go through the cycles for infinity.
So if anyone owes me anything: no, I don’t want to come back for another life para singilin kayo. Sa inyo na lang kung anomang inutang nyo sakin! (Then again, if it were money… hahahaha! Kidding :-p)
Reincarnation probably is not a good idea for a playboy who took advantage of women and need to pay his dues in the afterlife.
Jack Nicholson’s character in the film “The Bucket List” had this clever thing to ask about reincarnation:
“What does a snail have to do to reincarnate? Leave the perfect trail of slime?”
It leads to a ton of questions more than answers doesn’t it?
I would love to be reincarnated as a beautiful yellow (my favorite color) moth myself.
I’ve often wondered the same thoughts over the past 10 years, not necessarily about reincarnation but about the coincidental appearance of a strikingly beautiful moth shortly after the passing of someone or some animal I had a close relationship to. Though moths are mostly nocturnal, these have appeared at the most coincidental and unlikely times and in very unusual manners. The moths tend to be larger than the average household nuissance moth. My first reaction is to dismiss them as pests and try to remove them from my vicinity but I find them to be stubborn, unafraid, almost purposefully fixed. As I study them for a few seconds more, I find them to be attractively colored and marked which catches my attention and makes me explore further. Then upon later reflection, the color and markings of the moth remind me of the recently deceased.
I have resisted telling anyone this in the past but it happened to me again for the third time last week after the passing of my brother-in-law. My family and I traveled out of state to pay our respects and as we boarded the staircase of the puddle-jumper plane from the runway, I noticed a moth fixed to what looked like the center stair. As I passed it I nudged it with my foot to make it fly away but it simply moved to the side of the step and held steady. It wasn’t the typical grey household nuissance moth either- it had unusual markings and was brown pigmented. This occurred on a windy day as the propellers of other surrounding aircraft were still idling on the runway and making a lot of noise. I thought this was a highly unusual place to find a moth but later I began wondering if it was somehow my brother-in-law greeting and saying his final goodbye to me, his sister, and our children as we boarded the plane and passed the step. This was 3 days after his unexpected death, and I had not seen any other such remarkable moth for any length of time either before or after his passing.
The 2 other moth experiences were after the passing of my grandmother and the passing of a family cat. Maybe 1-2 weeks after my grandmother’s passing, an attractive moth with dark brown pigment similar to my grandmother’s fixed itself to my pant leg while I was commuting home on a crowded subway car. I was some distance from the exit door and so I found it unusual that a moth would seek me out. The woman next to me noticed the moth first and encouraged me to chase it off my pants but I held off until I exited at my stop, preferring to let the moth go free than injure it or kill it. I exited the car with a crowd of people and intended to free the moth but it was gone by the next time I checked my pant leg. Later that day I reflected and felt strongly that it was a sign of my grandmother saying her final goodbye.
The first moth experience happened about 3-4 days after our family cat was put down. I returned home from one of my routine road trips, unloaded my duffel bag from the rear seat of my car, and by carrying it over my shoulder went into my room in my parents’ house. Only then did I notice the most beautiful grey moth I had ever seen with geometric markings had attached itself to the top of my duffel bag. This was fitting because we named our cat Geo because of similar markings he had on his coat. At that point, I retraced my steps and left the house with my bag, but by then the coincidence was striking to me and so outside I carefully tried to remove and free the moth thinking it was a sign and goodbye from the cat. I recall I had to forcibly remove the moth before it reluctantly flew away into some bush.
It’s hard for me to grasp that these were all coincidences.