Prompted, response to "butterfly"

"I do not know whether I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." -Chuang Tse

Every spring the cliff swallows come to nest under the eaves of the houses in the neighborhood. Every spring the neighbors are ready with their hoses, their swimming pool brushes, their long handled brooms, to knock the nests down before the birds are even finished building them. When considering the history of events that led to such a tragic exchange between bird and human, one realizes the houses came first, and the cliff swallows followed after. Cliff swallows' bodies are built for the life they lead: their wings are long and tapered, their flight is spontaneous and zigzag, and their tiny fluttering hearts are meant to rest, one on top of the other, in a nest built on a cliff or a building. Cliff swallows won't nest anywhere else. And so, in this region of quiet shrubbery covering gently rolling hills, the birds have taken up residence with the newest and most unusual neighbor, because they are new and unusual here, themselves.
The neighbors don't understand this.
The neighbors built buildings for other reasons than to provide nesting sites for cliff swallows, but the birds don't understand that.
And, now the people don't care.
And so, the birds and the neighbors are the same kind of desire, but the neighbors, being so overwrought, with so many convolutions outward from their innermost animal nature that they are just too tired to make the long journey back, only know this desire, and only know themselves, in dreams when they are birds. The neighbors will wake in a sweat from a dream in which they are thinking:
Oh, you little feathered crystallization of hope, your bewildered head turning this way and that, your eyes blinking in the bright light of life. Why are you here, on the concrete in front of the air-conditioning unit? Where do you really belong? And how can I help you get there? I cry a lot these days. It does take a lot out of you. But how paralyzing is desire? Please, can't you just open your wings and fly? Your bones are blue, like you have a body-wide brain freeze. Boy, do I know how that feels. Like lightning, without the thunder, and meant only for you. Ligaments with exclamation points. I! Am! A! Wrist! Birds have wrists, too. I can see yours, right there were a feather is missing. We have both fallen prey to something way too zealous. Now we are hyperboles of ourselves. I want, very badly, for you to get off the ground, and take me with you.

But the birds don't have to dream: their hearts are their long wings which are the zigzag flight which is the path that becomes the insect as soon as time-space shifts so that the insect can enter it, can enter the birds' desire to eat, and grow, and to keep on living.