"The 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" …excerpt from Women Who Run with The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Years ago (about 15, to be exact) I was living in a trailer court, but spending most of my time caring for my mother, who had a house not too far away. It was no easy time, as my mother was in her 90's, my brother Glenn had had a brain stem stroke and was on life support in a facility, and my other brother, David (who thankfully lived part of the time in his house in California) was, and still is, aggressively hostile and paranoid toward me. That's why my trailer was my personal sanctuary.
I didn't know any of the (mostly elderly) people in the trailer court, so I was very surprised to see that someone had left a bag hanging from the door to my old motorhome one afternoon. It contained two greenish rolls of what the label called "Butterfly Carpet" - you spread them out on soil, water, and up comes a garden of flowers guaranteed to attract butterflies. I never found out who thought to leave this "butterfly food" for me, but considering my fascination with butterfly stories, it was a synchronicity I took note of. A "butterfly carpet" to help me remember that things will change, transformation and new possibility will come eventually.
Years later, I still remember the symbolic "nourishment" that provided for "this butterfly". Just plant and water. I remember looking at those rolls of "butterfly food" some unknown person had left, and found a living metaphor that gave me heart, then and now.
Butterflies are not only lovely creatures that embody the perfect metaphor for transformation. They are also the final life stage of the caterpillar, responsible for laying the eggs that will ensure future generations. They are generators of the future. And, they also have another job to do. A very important job. They are Pollinators. They must see to it that not only caterpillars, but many other kinds of life are able to have a future. Just as diminishing populations of honey bees threaten the food crops, so too are these creatures potent, and vitally important to the Web of life on our planet.
"And here too come visitors, some of whom are very starved of their geno-myths, detached from the spiritual placenta. They have forgotten their ancient Gods. They come to watch the ones who have not forgotten."
In Clarissa Pinkola Estes famous book Women Who Run With the Wolves she tells the wonderful story of waiting to see the "Butterfly Dancer" at a Native American Pueblo ceremony (I believe at one of the Hopi pueblos). Perhaps tourists, waiting a long, hot, dusty day to see her, expected a slender, ephemeral Indian maiden; no doubt they were shocked out of their paradigm to see, finally, the grey haired Butterfly Dancer emerge, slow, sure, heavy, with her traditional tokens of empowerment. An old woman.
"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."
In the context of the cyclical ritual these dances symbolize and invoke for the Hopi, the vital work of pollination is no job for for an inexperienced girl, no trivial job for a pretty child. It's a job for one who has lived, and lived, and can thus seed and generate the future from that solid base of experience and understanding. As Estes goes on to say,
"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.
A very important concept that touches the Archetypes, the Ancestors, and the lively, evolving, yet ancient country of Mythos. As Estes points out, among the audience who come to watch, rather than participate with, the rituals of the Hopi, are many who, unknowingly, are "visitors, very starved of their geno-myths, detached from the spiritual placenta.". The Mythic Voice has great power to animate, enliven,sanctify, and en-chant, our world, which Modernism and Capitalism has turned into a lifeless commodity, a thing. The "Mythic Voice" has the authority to re-call (or should I say re-sing) our longing for the re-enchantment of the World back from the places it has been buried, dismissed, left to dry up like a discarded leaf. And yet the longing and the seeds of that longing remain, ever ready, like the "butterfly food blanket" (gifted by a stranger to me) to rise up as sprouts, then leafy plants, then flowers that provide food for the beautiful winged Pollinators of the imagination. I find that I wrote numerous times in this Blog:
"We're Incubating the Future with the Stories we tell. So What Are They?"
I think on this a lot. Because we need, especially now, "wise pollinators", women and men who can help to imagine and thus generate what Ursula Leguin called "Realists of a larger Reality". We need them now, very much.
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