We have been blessed with another of day clear skies and warming winds, at least for these hours of the morning. As the mercury rises over the course of the day, we can expect the ambient air temperature to drop thanks to those same winds gaining the speed and force of a dry gale. But even that fact is a bit of normalcy returned to spring here this year.
When I say “normalcy,” I refer not to the upheaval in the world outside our boundary now, but rather, to the deepened drought and other vagaries of climate change that have dogged weather and season in this place in recent years. This is high desert by classification, and of course drought is an ever-present risk, but we have been caught in the throes of an extended now for more than two decades, and the last few years have seen the fields burn up in the sun for an utter lack of rain. This year’s more average levels of precipitation have been a blessing and a gift, but we recognize that they are not enough to rehabilitate, only to ameliorate.
Which is why the early return of the butterflies now is a gift of such power and significance.
They first arrived the day before yesterday, a loose spiral of painted ladies fluttering across the land on their migration for points west and south. No monarchs like those above yet — here at Red Willow, they are more properly spirits of the latter half of summer — but they share the same bright sunny shades and the same gently glowing spirit of hope.
And hope is needed now.
It is, perhaps, natural to seek god in the skies, to cast our eyes upward when hope is scarce. It is, after all, the one place we cannot reach on our own, the one space denied us without the aid of sophisticated technology (and the money that goes with it). Gravity binds our feet to earth, and so flying feels like freedom.
Which, in turn, makes anything that can fly under its own immanent power feel like a symbol, an avatar, a harbinger of hope.
Wings captured the image of the monarchs, above, in late summer, 2014. It’s a photo entitled, simply, Hope, and a tribute to its transformative power. He caught the pair in full and perfect mating display just moments after taking the shot featured here yesterday. It was a year when the harbingers of the subsequent drought were already upon us, even though we didn’t realize it: aspen eaten by unseasonal and invasive predators, burned at the edges by the heat, dry and curling or fallen entirely thanks to too-low levels of precipitation. The damage, ironically, produced an ethereal photo, one in which the bare green seemed to floating against a cornflower sky, and the perfectly melded butterflies floating with it. It also provides a perfect introduction to the first of today’s featured works, all three consisting of pairs of earrings wrought in the shapes of their fluttering wings, this first pair set with (and named for) the floating azure of that same sky. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Floating Azure Earrings
Our world soars on warm silver winds and floating azure skies. Wings gives form and life to wind and sky and the small spirits that inhabit them with these butterfly earrings, all graceful silver wings holding at their heart perfect blues of summer skies. Each dangling drop flares elegantly at top and bottom, winglines articulated, repoussé-fashion, with shimmering depth. At the center of each earring, a tiny round cabochon of bright blue lapis lazuli rests in the embrace of a plain, low-profile bezel. Earrings hang 1-3/8″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; lapis cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; lapis lazuli
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
We do not yet have any of our azure-tinged butterflies floating on the winds, but they are not far off now. What makes this year so unusual is that the orange and black and white painted ladies appeared first. More usually, our first small summer spirit in residence is the mourning cloak, wings of deepest wine edged in ivory and cobalt. They customarily appear another week or so into April, followed in the ensuing weeks by another colorful cousin: the swallowtail.
The western tiger swallowtail is common here in the summer months, albeit usually in low numbers — one, perhaps a pair, occasionally a very few more. Among their favorites are the blue-violet blossoms of the Guatemalan sage, and they can frequently be found among their lush-leafed and -petaled stalks. Those with the beautiful blue markings at the base of their wings are the females, and we tend to get more of them than of their male counterparts.
On one rare and memorable occasion, a black swallowtail visited us here for a two-day detour off its migratory path. This was three or four years ago, if memory serves, and I was not able to find the photos we took of it, but if memory serves, it was a female, as well. As striking as the tigers are, the blacks possess an absolutely otherworldly beauty, wings of black velvet seemingly beaded with gems of pure light, edges in gold as pale as the light of the moon with tiny carnelian flames and opalescent blues at their base.
The pale luminous dots that edge their wings call to mind the second of today’s featured works, a pair in the same shape as the first but set instead with the full round light of moondrift that will fill tonight’s own sky. From their description:
Moondrift Earrings
Warm nights are lit by moondrift, a soft cool glow floating gently overhead on wings of silvered stardust. With these butterfly earrings, Wings invokes the illuminating light of a translucent moon, set across the sky on the crystalline arc of night. Each earring dances in place, three-dimensional wings flared and defined to refract the silvery light. At the center of each sits a small round rainbow moonstone, surface domed and center infused with faint shades of blue and gray, resting serenely in the embrace of a plain low-profile bezel. Earrings hang 1-3/8″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; moonstone cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; rainbow moonstone
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These remind me that our natural world is active, as much process as thing. We catch only the smallest glimpses of at any given moment, and always from a slightly different vantage point that shifts our own perspective. Tonight, we will be granted sight of the moon’s face in full, one that will bear the new and much-vaunted label of “supermoon.” In the way of my own people, this will be the Broken Snowshoe Moon, for those last dilatory weeks of winter when the snow steadfastly refuses to depart entirely, but by which time our ability to navigate it, either literally or figuratively, has at last given out.
But for others among my people, it’s known as the Sugarbushing Moon, the season when the maple sap flows naturally from the trees for tapping and gathering. Names, words, referents: They all change with the differing contexts of our natural world, and it’s a reminder that what holds true in one place is vastly different in another, and the choices we make to give form and shape to, articulation and description of those worlds are not incorrect for being different.
It’s also a reminder that what we think is important may not be the salient or distinguishing characteristic, whether of people, places, or things. Our next butterfly spirit, one whose image Wings captured some three years ago, is a perfect example.
This is a white admiral, the second word of its name probably a result of confusion stemming from a certain laziness of specificity in two different ways. It is a species of butterfly indigenous to this land now known as North America, as well as to other parts of the world, one that manifests various subspecies, from the form shown above to one cloaked in mimetic garb, meaning that it “mimics” the appearance of other species of butterfly.
There is a species known as the red admiral, indigenous to parts of Europe and Asia, that belongs to a different subfamily, and was apparently given its “official” (i.e., latin, colonial) name first. It’s quite different from the white admiral shown above in terms of shape and markings, so why the similarity of name? Apparently the word “admiral” was not in fact any reference to seafaring officers, but instead was a contraction of “admirable,” that species first being known in English as the “red admirable” for its singular flame-like banded beauty. The white admiral probably came by its name as a result of linguistic family resemblance, early categorizers classifying it by aesthetic perception rather than true relational characteristics.
But even so, the name remains a bit misleading.
Looking at the photo above, it’s clear enough that there is plenty of white on the underside of the butterfly’s wings . . . but that is not how most people will initially perceive it. Why? Because the top side of the white admiral’s wings are a deep velvety black, banded near the edges in blocks of white.
And yet, those who named it thought to focus on the smaller white bands rather than the black background as its “distinguishing” characteristic . . . probably because they mistakenly thought it was a newly-“discovered” member of a different subfamily altogether.
It’s one of the reasons I am so taken with, and impressed by the accuracy of, our traditional languages: They account for such differences, including sexual dimorphism, by focusing not on an appearance that is often neither consistent nor descriptive, but by naming those within specific categories based on their actions and behavior — in a word, on what they do. It’s how, in my people’s language, a species of birds whose population is at most only half black (the other half being a variegated brown) becomes not “blackbirds,” which excludes the female of their number, but instead, “those who gather,” which describes the actions of their whole population.
Fortunately for humanity, birds and butterflies alike are strong, independent, and resilient enough not to depend overmuch on what we may call or miscall them.
Of course, it’s not just this resilience, nor simply their free and comfortable navigation of air and wind and sky, that makes butterflies so attractive to us as spirits of great symbolic meaning and power. In many of our peoples’ ways, they are messengers of the spirits, but also symbols of love, of life itself, renewed.
And that is owed to their inherent, essential transformative qualities, an ability to become that is similarly denied us in the wholly natural way that, for caterpillar and butterfly, it is both what they do and who they are.
Which brings me to the third and final of today’s featured works: last in number, but in its own way, perhaps the most powerful of the three in symbolism and spirit. From their description:
Chrysalis Sun Earrings
Dawn takes flight on silver wings, bearing the orb of a chrysalis sun. Wings summons the sun and the transformative spirit of the day with these butterfly earrings, newly emerged from the cocoon of night. Each drop drifts gently from side to side, its flared top and bottom adance in sharp relief. At the center of the wings sits a tiny amber orb, each cabochon as timeless as the light and glowing with its own cosmic fire, each set in the cool, secure embrace of a plain, low-profile bezel. Earrings hang 1-3/8″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; amber cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; amber
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This pair combines transformation with transcendence: the ability, midwifed from the new womb of the chrysalis, to become, and thence to carry that essentially transformative spirit to new heights. It’s an identity that fits the dawn of a new day, and the birth of a new spring season, every bit as well as it does the caterpillar that has transformed itself into a butterfly and so transcended the bonds of earth to fly in the realm of the spirits.
It’s also the pair among today’s featured works that best embodies the beautiful wingéd beings who have become the first to visit us here this year: the fiery amber sun that lights the painted ladies’ wings.
They are much smaller spirits than their monarch counterparts, smaller, too, than the admirals of swallowtails, but they possess a particular fluttering grace that does not accompany those with larger wings. When you read, in metaphorical terms, of a butterfly dancing upon the winds, these are the ones that are the source of such imagery: They do dance, and spiral, and float and flutter seemingly not only upon the winds, but on the light.
Their small size and velvety bodies and wings make them seem exceptionally delicate, even fragile, and that, too, holds important lessons for us now. These are creatures whose wintering habitats have been razed by wildfire, are currently under assault by bulldozers and heavy machinery that blade-edged atrocity of an invasive wall . . . and yet, they are here, early, in numbers, and seemingly ecstatic about it.
These are true Indigeous spirits: of resilience, transformation, transcendence, survival. They remind us that extinction-level events become so only if we allow them, that we have the means, the strength and courage and hope and will, to fight back.
And they remind us that not only is survival possible, but a better world with it.
These small spirits of hope came early this year for a reason.
We can do this.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
