Right before dinner Tuesday evening, my husband and I were unwinding on our deck after a long and busy day when a monarch butterfly landed on my shoulder. It lingered so long that my husband was able to walk by it, go into the house, get his phone (and mine as I was expecting a call) and take several photographs of it. At 6:00 pm, I received a scheduled phone call from my friend, Sara. My delicate little companion remained perched on my shoulder the entire time Sara and I chatted on the phone. When I hung up, it was time for dinner and so I gently encouraged it to fly away. It didn’t. Instead, it climbed onto my finger. I sat for some time talking with it and eventually began petting its tiny legs and then its delicate wings. It didn’t flinch.
After several minutes, I tried to coax it onto the leaves of a plant so that I could go prepare dinner. I managed to settle it onto a leaf, but once I stepped away, it immediately flew around me, landed on my leg, and marched directly upwards. Amazed, I reached out my finger and without hesitation; it climbed onto it again. I lifted it back up to eye level and talked to it for another ten minutes or so. I walked around with it. I stopped and studied it again while it seemed to calmly study me.
I have no idea what this little butterfly was capable of comprehending, what it might have wanted, why it seemed to have no fear of me. It behaved as though it trusted me completely and its dark eyes seemed to look directly into my own. I was enchanted. I was touched. I was captivated. I didn’t want to anthropomorphize this fragile little creature and yet it became increasingly more difficult to resist asking it what it wanted. Was it okay? Did it have something it needed me to know? Was it asking something of me? It had been with me for close to an hour. I had things to do, another trip to Lewiston to make, and dinner to make. I periodically flicked my wrist, encouraging it to fly away. It didn’t budge. While it perched on my right hand, I awkwardly lifted my phone with my left hand, placed it between myself and my persistent little companion and attempted to take close-up shots of its wee little face. Then we walked around some more, the monarch and I. Next, we sat, facing the lake, a gentle breeze periodically rustling my hair and its wings. I petted it. I talked to it some more. I flicked my wrist, coaxing it to take flight, and then repeated the process. Walk. Sit. Pet. Flick, coax. Finally, it ambled down to the end of my finger, paused for a moment, and lifted off. I ran into the house before it could settle on me again.
I was relieved to be free of the butterfly and, at the same time, I felt a sense of loss. The kind of loss I often feel when my friend Stephanie’s car leaves the dooryard, beginning her long journey homeward, away from me.
A Newsweek article published in January of 2019 reported that Monarch butterflies are going extinct, declaring that a staggering 90% of them have already disappeared since the 1980s and that they may vanish completely from the planet within the next twenty years.
I’ve been doing a significant amount of grieving these days, lamenting the diminishing wilderness, clean water, air, food, species, civility, hope. There are a great number of us who are grieving. Who have grown increasingly heartsick from incomprehensible news, distorted facts, outright lies, unchecked corruption, greed, and a tidal wave of hatred. A CBS News headline declares that “There Have Been More Mass Shootings Than Days in 2019.” We are reeling in response to three mass shootings within the past week, too many dead and wounded to grasp, too much rage to express, too much pain to absorb.
My country feels both more endangered and more dangerous to me than at any point in my lifetime, and a part of me wants so much to turn away from it all, take refuge in shopping, food, numbness, a hundred small and petty distractions. Today, I keep bringing myself back to those moments with the butterfly. How beautiful, and fearless and trusting it seemed. In many cultures, the butterfly has been perceived as a symbol of profound change and transformation. Before it becomes a creature of beauty and flight, it suffers a very messy and dark period of dissolution. While trapped within its cocoon, its caterpillar body begins breaking down and liquifying, dissolving so completely that its caterpillar self ceases to exist. And yet, while the cocoon has been a dark and dismal tomb, it has at the very same time served as a womb. Because even as the caterpillar was coming apart, the imaginal cells of the butterfly were coming together. It was Richard Bach who observed that “what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.”
A few moments ago, I went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and learned that Nobel Laureate and literary light, Toni Morrison, died yesterday. She was such a courageous and wise woman who touched and taught me so much. The news of her death is still too startling and new for me to fully process yet, but one line keeps running through my mind. She wrote, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the thing that weighs you down.” Words that resonate so deeply as I sit here in my sunlit room contemplating heartbreak, death, transformation, Toni Morrison, and butterflies.
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