Beauty above me,
Beauty below me,
Beauty before me,
Beauty behind me,
I walk in Beauty.
Navajo (Dine`) Prayer
I am approaching my 76th birthday next week. Wow. I've had a long life. And for some reason, perhaps the threads of synchronicity Spider Woman has been throwing me lately, I've been thinking about Butterflies.
I love the painting above (which I did not create). I don't know how I found it, and I have not bee successful in finding out who the artist is, even when I did an image search. I loved it enough that I even made my own version of the painting - and if I ever find the artist, I would hope she or he would not see this as plagerism, but rather deep appreciation.
An old woman is walking, just a silouette in the distance, her name and identity unknown. Or perhaps, with the passage of time and her long life walk, names just aren't important to her anymore. The road, I imagine, is dusty. Her back is a bit bent..... she is tired, it's been a long walk. But........she keeps on walking. Maybe it's a pilgrimage to her, or maybe a mission. Maybe getting somewhere isn't important any longer - its the walk itself that matters.
But as she walks butterflies emanate from her out into the world. To do their work of bringing Beauty. And to do their work of Pollinating the future.
As an artist, I think this is the legacy many of us would like to leave behind us as we progress on our own, often dusty, often long, roads. We want to think our work has flown forth, to bloom as it will, in other's imaginations, in another time perhaps. Looking again at the painting, I think maybe that old woman doesn't think about such things. She just keeps on walking. But in the end, no one could ask for more.
Pollen: agent of new life, new hope, transformation.
My prayer: May we have butterfly minds, pollinator hearts.
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The ancient Greek word for "butterfly" is ψυχή (psȳchē), which means "soul" or "mind". And I have often found them mysteriously "soulful", as they seem to flit in and out of mystery and of synchronicity. The picture above, for example - it was from the San Francisco Chronicle at the time of the great peace march against the incipient Iraq war, and shows three friends with their "soul icons". Me in the mask of Sophia, Alan Moore, founder of the Butterfly Gardeners Association with his sign, and Nicole, an artist who created "Cosmic Cash". Note that her icon, also, occurred in this synchronistic photo behind her.
Transformers, pollinators .......... they begin their lives as caterpillars, build a crysalis and generate imaginal cells. Imaginal cells (what a fantastic name) are cells in the evolution of a butterfly from caterpillar to winged butterfly that activate within the Crysalis, and the butterfly literally becomes mush as it is deconstructed and changed. As the visionary psychologist Anodea Judith explains it:
"When a caterpillar nears its transformation time, it begins to eat ravenously, consuming everything in sight. The caterpillar body then becomes heavy, outgrowing its own skin many times, until it is too bloated to move. Attaching to a branch (upside down, we might add, where everything is turned on its head) it forms a chrysalis—an enclosing shell that limits the caterpillar’s freedom for the duration of the transformation.....Tiny cells, that biologists actually call “imaginal cells,” begin to appear. These cells are wholly different from caterpillar cells, carrying different information, vibrating to a different frequency–the frequency of the emerging butterfly. At first, the caterpillar’s immune system perceives these new cells as enemies, and attacks them, much as new ideas in science, medicine, politics, and social behavior are viciously denounced by the powers now considered mainstream. But the imaginal cells are not deterred. They continue to appear, in even greater numbers, recognizing each other, bonding together, until the new cells are numerous enough to organize into clumps. When enough cells have formed to make structures along the new organizational lines, the caterpillar’s immune system is overwhelmed. The caterpillar body then become a nutritious soup for the growth of the butterfly."
If we can see that our thoughts participate in pollinating the future, we can perhaps find ways of living with simplicity and honor, even in a time so very out of balance. Regardless of where one is, there is a profound need to "walk in Beauty". To be "on the Pollen Path".
Without the grace of the pollinators, the butterflies and hummingbirds and bees, there will be no future. This idea is fundamental to spiritual traditions of native peoples of the Southwest, including the Pueblo peoples, the Navajo and the Apache. As shown above, when this young Apache woman came of age and entered into her fertile years, she was blessed by the tribe with symbolic pollen. Imagine what it would be like if young women in our world were so honored.
"The Pollen Path" is a healing and initiatory ceremony/concept among the Dine` that variously enacts a mythic journey, and demonstrates a cosmology of non-duality. "Pollen Path" art and sand paintings often show the union of opposites, such as red sun and blue moon, as well as the directions and associated stories, representing the cycles that form a whole.
As I imagine the metaphor of a "pollen path" for our time, as I consider the "emanations of beauty" in the painting at the top of this essay, I reflect as well that some butterflies, like the Monarch or the Painted Lady, are migratory. Monarch butterflies will migrate over very long distances, as amazingly frail as they seem. Some travel from Mexico to the norther parts of the United States and into Canada, a distance of over 2,500 miles. Tragically, because of climate change and loss of habitat, they are among the endangered species.
Lastly, I always seem to return to one of my favorite storytellers, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, on the work of the Butterfly Dancer. May we all, women and men, young and old, become Butterfly Dancers this May Day.
"The (Hopi) butterfly dancer must be old because she represents the soul that is old. She is wide of thigh and broad of rump because she carries so much. Her grey hair certifies that she need no longer observe taboos about touching others. She is allowed to touch everyone: boys, babies, men, women, girl children, the old, the ill, and the dead. The Butterfly Woman can touch everyone. It is her privilege to touch all, at last. This is her power. Hers is the body of La Mariposa, the butterfly.""La Mariposa" from Women Who Run with The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells the story of waiting to see the "Butterfly Dancer" at a ceremony. Tourists, unused to Indian Time, wait throughout a long, hot, dusty day to see the dancer emerge, expecting, no doubt a slender, ephemeral Indian maiden, and they are no oubt they were shocked out of their patronizing cultural fantasy to see at last the grey haired Dancer/Pollinator emerge, slow, not young, with her traditional tokens of empowerment.
"Her heavy body and her very skinny legs made her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale. She hops on one foot and then on the other. She waves her feather fan to and fro. She is The Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak. She is that which most think of as not strong: age, the butterfly, the feminine."
Because in the agricultural ritual these dances symbolize and invoke, call in, the forces that initiate the vital work of pollination, this is no job for for an inexperienced girl, no trivial token flight for a pretty child. It's a job for one who has lived through many cycles, and can seed and generate the future from a solid base. Again, I take here the liberty of quoting Dr. Estes again:
"Butterfly Woman mends the erroneous idea that transformation is only for the tortured, the saintly, or only for the fabulously strong. The Self need not carry mountains to transform. A little is enough. A little goes a long way. A little changes much. The fertilizing force replaces the moving of mountains.
Butterfly Maiden pollinates the souls of the earth: It is easier that you think, she says. She is shaking her feather fan, and she’s hopping, for she is spilling spiritual pollen all over the people who are there, Native Americans, little children, visitors, everyone. This is the translator of the instinctual, the fertilizing force, the mender, the rememberer of old ideas. She is La voz mitológica."
"La voz mitológica". The mythic voice. The voice that shows us the place where the Butterflies go, the voice that sings the threads of synchronicity as they weave into our lives and become visible. The Mythic Voice re-enchants the world around us, lending luminosity to each footstep, and pollinates, energizes, en-chants those who hear.
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Some of my own butterflies
