More Butterflies......

"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

I currently live in a trailer court, although almost all of my time is spent at my mother's house as her caretaker. I'm not often at my "house on wheels", and scarcely know any of my neighbors, so I was surprised to see a bag hanging from the door a few days ago. 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 still don't know who thought to leave this "butterfly food" for me, but considering my run of butterfly stories and synchronicities lately, I've thought a bit more about the phenomenon, the metaphor, and hopefully, the guidance. I love that "nourishment" was provided for this butterfly. Just plant and water. To be honest, I've never felt more uninspired, confused, useless, and stuck in my life. I look at my two rolls of "butterfly food", and find a living metaphor that gives me heart. I have also been thinking a bit more about butterflies. 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 also 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.

"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 famous Pueblo ceremony (I believe at one of the Hopi pueblos, but can't remember). 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 at last 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."

Because in the agricultural ritual these dances symbolize and invoke for these people, 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.

"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. I'd like to write about this in a later post; it's a very important concept. Perhaps, following this insight that came to me today, and remembering the huge inspiration of this great storyteller, I find an answer of some kind to my own quest for meaning in this difficult time; and I pass this on to any who may be listening or reading. I am a storyteller, a maker of special masks. But we are all, in fact, storytellers. I believe the world desperately needs, especially now, "wise pollinators", women and men who can help the future to generate, flower, seed.

"We're Incubating the Future with the Stories we tell. So What Are They?"

*** To read in full this marvelous excerpt by Dr. Estes, here is a link I was fortunate to find: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=20411005516&topic=4033 

"Rio Abajo Rio"

"Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. "

Norman MacLean, "A River Runs Through It"

The quote above has always been so beautiful to me that I wanted to meditate on it for a moment, take a look into the depths of these waters. Perhaps he speaks of what storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes * called "Rio Abajo Rio, the river beneath the river of the world". Perhaps "El Rio" is also what Jung called the Collective Unconscious, I don't know. But Estes' speaks of the great River of Story, the universal waters flowing beneath the surfaces of all things.

In her wonderful book Women Who Run With the Wolves *** she writes,

"Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayer making, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them."*

Having just finished my workshop sponsored by the Southern Arizona Friends of Jung, I'm always amazed at what happens when people enter the magic circle, the liminal zone outside of the mundane world, where it is possible to speak to the Goddesses and Gods, where the masks can tell their hidden stories. Whether tapping, if only briefly, the wellsprings of El Rio in grief, creativity, meditation, or through the sudden psychic upwelling that can happen when the so-called ego cracks and splinters, it is always a blessing when the waters are revealed, for they remind us of the greater life.

If the river of story has a voice, it's a voice that contains all voices, human and planetary, and the song it sings may be Om, may be "Nameste", I am Thou. Thus, Estes, who is a Jungian psychologist, believes that to simply experience this great river of being is not enough; one must also instinctively participate in some way, find some way to open a pathway, a well spring, for others.

"...[W]hat Jung called 'the moral obligation' to live out and to express what one has learned in the descent or ascent to the wild Self. This moral obligation he speaks of means to live what we perceive, be it found in the psychic Elysian fields, the isles of the dead, the bone deserts of the psyche, the face of the mountain, the rock of the sea, the lush underworld - anyplace where La Que Sabe breathes upon us, changing us. Our work is to show we have been breathed upon - to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts."

I respectfully submit that this is so for any creative person, this is the work of the SEER, residing within each of us. The River beneath the River of the World.

* (p.30, below)

** (p.96, below)

*** Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Hardcover, 560 pages, Random House Publishing Group, 1992

**** I find I've been pulling out these drawings that I did  in the 70's.  Maybe, my desire to renew this acquaintance with my younger self is also an effort to see the River that runs through it.........sometimes, in looking at old work, one can be amazed to see the same storyline...........