On the Persistence of Butterflies, and the Emanation of Beauty

                   

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.

Peace March against the war in Iraq, San Francisco, 2003

  

Peace March against the war in Iraq, San Francisco, 2003

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."

from Imaginal Cells and the Body Politic by Anodea Judith Ph.D.

Photo from: http://www.fishersville-umc.org/classes/nac/Pics/week0401.htm

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.   

   

Some of my own butterflies

Hands of the Spider Woman

I was hiking in the Superstitions, looking for petroglyphs I’d heard were to be found in the back country, in the folds and recesses of the mountain. It was a strenuous climb for me, and they weren’t easy to find, obscured by the terrain, and often well off the trail. It took a while to decide where to look.

The particular site I was seeking had been a special place to prehistoric Anasazi people, who had left layers of pictographs scattered throughout the entire area. I was thinking, as I searched for the traces and touchstones of these people, about what I knew of native mythology, and wondering what these artists from so long ago might have been communicating with their mysterious imagery. There was so much I wanted to learn about the traditions, histories, and stories of native Americans in the Southwest - among them the Hopi and the Pueblo peoples. And of course the Navajo, whose rugs and pottery fascinated me. In Arizona, where I live, a great deal of art, aesthetics, and architecture is inspired by indigenous cultures, but very few people actually take the time to learn very much about these diverse and ancient peoples. I was among them.

I was thinking about the mysterious figure of Spider Woman, also called “Thought Woman” by the Hopi. Spiderwoman is poised at the very center of the Web of life in many native American creation stories. Arriving from underground realms, she creates the world, and then passes the creative process on, forever offering her wisdom, and the sacred craft of weaving, to her grandchildren.

I’m not entirely sure I like to call Spiderwoman (who over the years has become my guide and muse and inspiration) a “metaphor”, or an “archetype”. Although I was thinking along those lines while I huffed up the mountain. The most profound meaning of Spiderwoman’s Web is as the universal symbol of planetary and spiritual ecology. Spiderwoman speaks in the wind, reminds us of who we are beneath the surface with her synchronicities and threads.

The web that Thought Woman sings or names into existence represents, to me , what quantum physicists call “Entanglement Theory” - the probability that everything, down to the most intangible dancing particles and waves - is “entangled“, is woven together, is one. All conscious in some fundamental essence, within a universe of unimaginable creativity.

Masaru Emoto, the scientist who has devoted his career to studying the ways water is affected by the psychic environment, has shown that our thoughts may actually have the power to influence the way water crystallizes with his process of high speed photography. “Water”, he writes, “exposed to the words “thank you” form beautiful crystals when frozen. But water exposed to abuse often results in broken or deformed crystals.”1

And as she named them, they appeared.
She is sitting and thinking about this story now
And that’s why I'm telling it to you.1

What’s a word, if not a thought that has been crystallized? Spiderwoman was “on my mind“ as I walked. Or, perhaps, Spider Woman judged me ripe enough to turn her attention my way.

The famous lost Dutchman took his secret gold to his grave, but the Superstitions hide other kinds of secrets. Eventually, out of breath and already sunburned, I found what I was looking for. Near a welcome and rare spring, with layers of petroglyphs on adjacent rocks. Combined with natural beauty and a sense of potent geomantic energy, it was a place that seemed infused with numinous power. And scattered throughout like a motif or underlying texture there were hands, painted or incised on the rocks.

(the weft)

Hands among hunters and big horned mountain sheep, near metate holes that once ground blue corn or mesquite, protecting solarized shamans in their ecstasy, touched odd shapes and circles, or seemed to hold snakes and spirals that wound and curled like water or wind from fingertips. Shadow hands scratched into the rocks, weaving the stories as they were being told. There was a presence in those ubiquitous hands that absorbed my imagination. As if, for that quiet, illuminated moment, I saw them become fully fleshed, emerging from beneath the transparent, dreaming surface of the canyon. Numinous.

(the warp)

It occurred to me I was looking at Spider Woman’s many hands, appearing on the canvas of another time. From the wise storytellers of the desert, to the great webs of planetary ecology, quantum physics, and even the internet - Grandmother Spiderwoman was reaching out to teach her grandchildren how to weave .

Beauty is above me
Beauty is below me
Beauty is beside me
Beauty is before me

Navajo Blessing Way Chant

The origin of the word “religion” comes from a word that meant “to link back“ (religios), which bears (again) the metaphor of weaving. In Eastern traditions, each verse of a tantra (meaning a spiritual practice) is called a sutra, which means “a thread”. So perhaps the real meaning of a religious experience concerns “linking back”, re-membering a greater tapestry of being beyond the narrow viewpoint of individualism.

At that thought, being an artist and amateur mythologist, I had to pull out my sketchbook and attempt to turn my revelation into something I could take back with me, something I might be able to share. An icon that could be enshrined as a symbol of planetary ecology. I imagined a shrine that would frame an elegant Web of concentric circles of relationship and co-creation.

It occurred to me then that a spider web represented the quintessential symbol of interconnectedness - but perhaps a loom was an even better iconic image for Spider Woman/Thought Woman.

A loom: an engine of interwoven and interdependent fibers, coming together in continually creative patterns of relationship. A loom meant the active art of weaving. The pattern was always changing. There was a vertical and a horizontal, a warp and weft, light and dark, yin and yang - the dynamic exchange of polarities to create something new. The weaver’s thoughts and hands manifesting, undoing, creating, unraveling. My imagination took off.

Navajo story tellers say that Spiderwoman is best heard in the lonely wind, and that with practice, you can hear her whispering in your ear. As I drew a lovely spider web, and then a complex woven pattern …………..something like that happened. It sounded like a kind-hearted chuckle.

So I went a step farther with my logic. Even the Web (or Loom) of Life is still a pretty abstract idea. I think our task, as artists and mythmakers, may be to move increasingly away from abstractions, because abstractions move us increasingly away from being truly within the world. We need to find practical ways to experientially know that we are embedded and embodied within the immanent sanctity of our Earth. Myths that speak, in our hour of evolutionary crisis, not about how to manage, use, abstract or renounce the world - but how to join it.

Hands. Spiderwoman’s hands. Collaboratively weaving. My hands. Your hands. Our hands.

And that’s what I drew in my sketchbook, and then I had to leave, because I was afraid I might not make it back to the trailhead before it got dark. But I realized something important as I managed my way down the trail and into a magnificent Arizona sunset.

I had been given a Blessing. And blessings, like all things that have to do with Spiderwoman, are circular. You don't get to keep them.

Sooner or later, you have to pass them on.

1 The Navajo also symbolize her with a cross, representing wholeness within the 4 directions.
2 Carol Patterson-Rudolph, “On the Trail of Spiderwoman”, Ancient City Press, 1997