Without Change

Perhaps without change, one could argue, there would be no butterflies. Their lives are so brief, what can it matter? They are like leaves that painlessly drop from trees. Plenty of nets to go around, with scarcely any turf left; as it is, they have hung on many decades longer than expected.

Or maybe the butterfly, as if in flight from itself, zigzags through the air as it senses, everywhere it flies, the ultimate difference.  Yet change remains, and our tender attention to it need not be narrowed by the broader world contained within the innocent, unguarded space of the one great sadness obstructing our view of it.

The Eighth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke