It’s been such a week, and it’s only Wednesday.
The cold in recent days has been hellish, even when the mercury rises to fifty; that’s what happens when spring’s gale-force winds return in fall.
Of course, the fifty-degree high is, if less inconvenient, a far more dangerous issue: We’re past the midpoint of November, racing headlong to official winter, and today, as I waited in the truck while Wings ducked into the hardware store, a wasp flitted past my face.
A wasp. At a time of year when there should be a few inches of snow consistently on the ground already.
I know some folks will be focusing on my juxtaposition, above, of the words “wasp” and “face,” but the truth is that wasps, bees, all of their kind are not merely relatives but friends. I speak to them in the old language, broken though my grasp of it may be, and they respond by sitting with me, visiting, whether on the windowsill or on my hand or arm. I have no fear of being stung, because they have no cause to fear me, and they clearly know that.
It’s sometimes true of other small wingéd spirits, dragonflies and butterflies and moths and hummingbirds among them. It’s possible to convey that you are not a threat, and occasionally, life hands you an opportunity to demonstrate it. I have saved countless bees and wasps who have gotten trapped indoors, allowing them to travel outside upon my hands; I’ve done the same for the butterflies and moths when required, for more than one hummingbird that has been stunned in an impact and needed my palm for a safe space to regain their bearings. The dragonflies are more skittish, but in summer, at least in those years now when we are granted the gift of their presence, they frequently buzz past me, and when we had a full and healthy pond, they would sit nearby on rocks and stalks and blades of marsh grass and allow me to photograph them at length.
And in fact, while we had no pond again this year [impossible in a twelve-hundred-year drought], we did have a few scattered dragonfly visitations, a couple as recently as around Halloween. If you were wondering, that’s two months past their typical departure date.
The moths are mostly gone now, even at night; it’s no surprise, given that last night’s actual low temperature here was twelve, with wind chills undoubtedly in the single digits. but over the last week, I would have sworn that what spiraled past me on two or three separate occasions was a butterfly — or, probably more accurately, two or three different ones — and to have them still fluttering around in mid-November is unheard-of here.
Or was unheard-of.
No longer, apparently.
These were not the monarchs, although one of those returned at October’s end, along with a young mourning cloak entirely out of season, too. No, these are the small field butterflies, the less showy ones who we perhaps don’t notice perched on the last large blossoms of the year, but who are doing the busy work of pollination where it counts all the same.
With our current conditions of chaotic and still deadly weather, the folks who are unhoused [and their animals] are much on our minds these days, and we’re doing what we can to help.
It seems like far too little, and yet, absent the for-all-practical-purposes unlimited resources of both the government and the billionaire class, it’s all we can do. It would be so very easy to lose hope, and thence motivation to continue the work.
But perhaps these late-appearing butterflies are here precisely to counsel against that.
If such tiny fragile beings can do their work out of season, so can we. It’s a matter of adjusting both expectations and actions to meet the current crisis . . . and refusing to be persuaded that such small efforts do not make a difference. Some traditions teach that every life is a whole world, and from that perspective, even if we only save one life, that is worth it.
But I suspect that the work we do [and by “we” I mean not just Wings and I, but all of us engaged in such work now] saves many more lives, and thus many more worlds, than we will ever know.
After all, Butterfly does exactly that: Who knows how many lives, human, animal, bird, insect, plant, are saved by her pollinating of just one small area? We could learn from her example in that context alone, but she has so much more to teach us: about humble beginnings, about transformation, about adaptation, about the beauty and power of transcendence.
And now, in a world in collapse on every level, we need those lessons more than ever. We need to understand, to internalize, and then to act upon the essential truth that now? Adaptation becomes transcendence.
The peoples who belong to the lands of this broader region share commonalities in their traditions, including the spirit beings who animate their origin stories and teachings. One of those beings is known as Butterfly Maiden, associated with summer but bearing lessons that serve us well all year round, especially now that seasonal boundaries have become so badly blurred. And her spirit animates today’s featured work, one of the same name, and one that, for reasons that will become clear below [and for the person whose name it bears, if in a slightly different form] is particularly close to my heart. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Butterfly Maiden Necklace
The Butterfly Maiden holds the light in her wings. In these ever-shorter days and lengthening dark, Wings summons her shape and gifts into being with this powerfully inspirited necklace. The pendant is cut freehand of solid sterling silver, forming the outline of her body wrought in stones arrayed to the Four Sacred Directions. Her body is an oval of glossy, liquid onyx; her wings, a pair of matched and angled cabochons of richly banded simbircite, glowing with the orange fire of the sun; her face is hawk’s eye, bold midnight blue banded with brilliantly chatoyant gold. Each cabochon is set into a scalloped bezel trimmed with twisted silver; a tiny stamped butterfly flutters over her own heart. Atop the Maiden is a broad, bold bail of sterling silver hand-stamped in a repeating pattern of thunderhead symbols laid base to base to point to the Sacred Directions. The pendant hangs from a cascade of highly polished sardonyx barrel beads, speckled and banded in shades of black and white, amber and copper, interspersed with pairs of small round sterling silver beads, all strung over sturdy and shimmering sterling silver chain. The center bead is flanked by a pair of larger, hand-made and hand-stamped silver beads, and four small round beads lead toward the findings at either end of the strand. The pendant is 3-7/8″ long, including the bail, by 2-1/16″ across at the widest point; the bail itself is 11/16″ long by 5/8″ across; onyx cabochon is 1-1/2″ long by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point; simbircite cabochons are 1-1/4″ across by 1-1/16″ high at the ends; hawk’s eye cabochon is 1-1/16″ across; bead strand is 20″ long (dimensions approximate). Close-up of pendant shown below. Designed by Aji; created by Wings.
Sterling silver; onyx; simbircite; hawk’s eye; sardonyx
$3,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Here, she’s robed in the deep midnight blues of early winter and the black of early night, all banded with the golden glow and amber fire of a sun that keeps the world alive. It’s monarch shades like the royalty of her kind, big and bold and yet fragile still, those same colors present on the smaller, hardier, more persistent spirits that have spiraled past me on these cold and windy recent days.
I noted last month that much of October is heavy on memory for me, and not always in a good way. The date chosen for Indigenous Peoples’ Day [the actual date, not whichever one is a give year’s governmental holiday] is the date of my sister’s murder, thirty-one years ago last month. And this year, the memories were exceptionally hard.
There’s no particular reason for that, at least none that I can identify; some years are relatively easy, most I might describe as difficult, and occasionally, as was the case this year, that anniversary becomes excruciatingly hard. When that date rolls around, the fact of her loss is unavoidable, as is the grief that attends such memories, but I make a conscious effort to turn. my attention not to how she left us, but to who she was.
And one of her names was, is, Butterfly Woman.
It fit her perfectly: gentle, shy, radiating the beauty of genuine love without even realizing it. She was not afforded a chance at adaptation, instead being sent straight to transcendence, but all these years later, I still find myself contemplating how she would have responded to specific circumstances, what she would make of the world as it has become, what she would encourage me, us, to do with the resources and privileges and blessings granted to us, however modest they may be.
She was not, as she would have been the first to tell you, particularly brave in the accepted sense of the word; she was much too shy for that. But when she was struck by a wrong done to someone, she would make her feelings known. She was not what the outside world might call adventurous, but her entire existence was, in its way, perforce one of adaptation on a deeply personal level, and I think she would have found value in applying those lessons to the work the world faces now.
Her life, like that of her namesake, became a physical embodiment of the truth that adaptation becomes transcendence, and the wisdom she left behind continues, I have to believe, to add beauty to this world, and medicine, too.
Every life is a whole world; every life has value. I think she would be the first to join us in the work.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
