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I could write about butterflies, but I do not know them, though I have a flittering kind of love. They know, themselves, no other. I approach, rarely get a screen shot so to speak of them through the camera on my phone, but butterflies do not dally. It is easy to either romanticize or mechanize their work, as if they were a phenomenon of spontaneous generation. And of course, that is the feeling, especially as the appearance of butterflies becomes rarer. I do little humble works on their behalf, making sure that there are flowers for them in our garden spring, summer, and fall. Winter gives me recess, because once we hit 30 degrees at night, not only are there no butterflies, but no flying insects of any sort. On the first few days of this, I feel lonely. But it passes into knowing austerity is a grand companion also, just much bigger, and more demanding of attention. I am so glad I got to live in Alaska, a place so large there are 5 climates. I lived in two, and saw another up close. But each of them individually told this story: we are so small that we must respond to climate, for climate being so large, cannot respond to us, because it cannot even see us individually.
But like everything real, butterflies are not some surprisingly large and eminently shakable box of presents under a Christmas tree from Santa Claus. Have we done ourselves favor or misfavor by such myths, which no doubt, go deeper into our psyche that we will ever be able to admit.
The closer we get to the ground, the closer we get to the truth. But that means moving away from the chopped or plastic trees and all the wonderful sentiments they evoke and getting our fingernails dirty.
Because that’s where the butterflies come from, perhaps below the soil, at its surface, or more likely, in the leaf litter my neighbors, to my great grief, whisk away with giant vacuums and burn. The Holocaust is everywhere. It seems to be some element of human nature to believe that tidying up the entire surroundings around us somehow ensures our safety, that then also we an consider ourselves.
The great red oak that was just chopped down next door, it’s species can harbor over 400 kinds of caterpillars. It’s doesn’t, all at once, anyway, but it is a sort of natural history that to know over time this once at least was true.
The leaf blowers, the tree choppers, the burn pile pyromaniacs, the entire ethos of pesticide laden suburbia, we know not what we do. And I am not perfect, I have to put up with some rudimentary elements of house maintenance, executing mice, and seducing ants to their boric acid deaths.
But still, I know to leave the leaves exactly where they want to be in the yard for the most part. And especially, when I see the caterpillars and aphids eating up my Brussel sprouts, I know so very well that this is cause for rejoice, not distress. Who, after all, honestly, needs those vegetables more? Me, or the wild world that is drawn like a magnet, which gives inference that there is nothing better for them here, as I provide oasis in this lawn laden desert.
It’s odd that I keep writing about this topic, I have done it so many times. You’d think I’d be done by now. But I look at it as an invitation to grief. I have my own personal griefs, which seem to me at times of course, even much bigger than the climate, and I don’t pretend to know better. I am slowly delving into those griefs, and really, the deepest lesson I have learned so far is that I am gradually overcoming my aversion to my physical pain, my grief, letting go of that executive function that retreats into its ivory tower in revulsion, and to say, from somewhere deep, deep like the soil or the leaf litter: “You are welcome here grief and pain, you are my companion, and I know you have so much to say, that I don’t want to hear, and I know at last I am beginning to listen. I hope you can forgive me enough to keep giving me your messages, I know they are as miraculous and important as each individual butterfly, the viceroy, the blue dot, the skipper, the tiger swallowtail, the tiger swallow tail black variant, and yes, even the cabbage moth portends and exercises some kind of muscular wings that breath hope in their air drafts.
It is a wonderful thing that grief and sorrow have not abandoned me, even though I have so often abandoned them. They are helping me, at least showing me, how to dig deeper into the soil, where wonders, if you have the eye for it, are as ephemerally precious and astounding as each individual butterfuly, that like grief and sorrow, arrive without any schedule at all, meaning, it is best to be out where you can feel the climate, best to be knowing where to look even though you don’t yet see anything, best to be ready as you can be, which means, to be open, not grasping, aware and yet thoroughly patient as you can be. All of these qualities and more are gifts of grief and sorrow and pain