Butterflies
For a dear friend on a big birthday.
A gift of words; brush strokes on a blank canvas depicting a very different picture than the one I sat down to create.
Yesterday’s story, through today’s eyes.
Dedicated to you and our circle of woman, small and large. To the years you walked the path alone and the ones we’LL CONTINUE TO walk together. To knowing we’re connected in our hearts through time. May this new decade shine bright.
with love,
AG
The days tick on, faster and faster. Our digital calendars barely keeping up with the rush of our eager fingertips. When we speak, it’s usually at one another, conversations of superficial stories from the not-so-far past followed by hopeful, yet comfortable plans for the not-so-distant future. Today is a placeholder in between, a bridge for what wasn’t quite and what still might be. It’s more than a crisis of the now. It’s a graveyard of missed opportunities adorned with 140-character captions and glittery filters. Some of us visit often in hopes of resurrecting what has been long dead. Others have already boarded the next train to hope’s future.
To be clear, I’m not speaking of the need for mindfulness carved out in between meetings, finding daily presence in attempts to still our minds until the digital timer runs out, pre-scheduled not-doing sandwiched between a robot’s agenda. I’m writing about what gets missed in the evolution of humanhood; the beauty of traditions, the difficulty of passageways, the inevitability of transitions, the tornado of felt experience, the wisdom inside the eye of a storm.
I’m writing about growing up as woman in our growing gender-less-focused world. What dissolves as a result, what yearns to remain on the surface of truth? Where are our cultural fairy godmothers? Who holds our hands and our hearts as we reach thresholds of pain and pleasure? How do we even know they are there when countless acres of pavement cover sacred spots once used to mark the necessary pause of time?
I write with hope and resolve, a mixed bag of an old ache that won’t let up – to be held within a circle of womanhood whose grouping of bones know more than my body alone ever can. Whose hands are worn with experience, not just from doing the dirty-work but from letting it cleanse their hardened hearts and calcified minds. Women who have done anything and will continue to do anything for the purity of love, excavated their own delusions in the darkened faces of others’, who have come as close to their own demons as their own knives would let them…laughing together in the silent celebration of our proverbial kitchen, the one where water both washes away the remnants of change, while feeding the ground below with its blood-laden wisdom.
We come into the world eyes and heart open, gulping for air and experience. Newness is our north star and our destiny, a homecoming from which we never left. Innocence in its purist form, never leaving its place of origin, because no place exists but innocence itself. To watch young babies with unveiled awareness grow into young girls with wild abandon, dresses twirling, youth effervescent exuding from the freedom of her arms and legs. Tender, tough, sensitive, strong, mysterious and magical. She is all things. How do we celebrate what is both innate and extraordinary? What can’t be contained into yellow school buses and classrooms with locked doors? What is the line between playing princess and actually being one? In the great chicken-and-egg debate, did the wonder of little girls come before Barbie, or did Barbie create what we think we know about little girls?
I sometimes have trouble feeling the essence of the years lived between a baby’s innocence and a young girl’s wonder. Culture dictates so much of the story; girlhood, shrouded in shades of pink and petulance. How much of our daughters who stand before us are copies of who we used to be, or who we thought we should’ve been? How can we support something we, ourselves, have been taught to dampen and disappear?
I grew up watching Alice in Wonderland, which to me, is the ultimate adventure of girlhood. The wonder of make believe come to life; ridiculousness turned reality; reason left above ground outside of the dream that awakens below it. There’s color and character and chaos, a perfectly imperfect mix of awe that surprises and inspires. Anything can happen, an inevitable miracle she makes so. Fear reduced to healthy trepidation for the unknown, not the obstacle we grow to make it out to be; instead, a gentle impulse towards the next wondrous circumstance. Life in these days of girl is heart-racing glee and down-regulated relaxation. Worry live not long beyond a moment’s concern for a curled-up caterpillar she prays will find his many feet. Imagination rules, a brief period of time before the weight of the cultural rulebook robs her of the curiosity she is designed to express best.
For some auspicious little girls, this time is carved out of preciousness. Special moments between mommy and daughter celebrating our earliest firsts. Daddy/daughter dances and devotions, the honoring of her virtue when little is awoken within her for others to dishonor yet. Disney teaches us that princess-land is safe and supportive. Our innocence encouraged to the point of flattery, we know not that we’re both being adored and acquired.
Sadly, not many of us grow up in fairy-tale childhoods. We’re products of cultural conditions, familial norms, government oppression and religious restriction. If we have any remnants of our innocent youth unscathed, we are the lucky ones. The rest of us let them decay, or we go back in time to dig up bones we forgot we had, in hopes of unearthing parts of ourselves which never had their heyday, let alone the proper burial their over-looked deaths deserved. The innocence of childhood can’t last forever, but it can be transitioned with grace. A fair maiden’s pipedream we ought to resurrect, before the wisdom of her wonder sleeps beyond its ability to wake.
Eventually, hunger comes to pass. Wonder grown too exponential for its own britches; it needs others to sustain its feverish need for even more adventure. This is the plight of girls as we mature. Life becomes bigger than our make-believe dolls and naïve games. We look for their bridge to certainty, using our growing desire as fuel for the tumultuous journey ahead.
It is a pivotal time often diminished to hormones, training bras and boys. Crushes come with jest, periods come with warnings, breasts come with confinement. Directly or not, we’re told to batten down our hatches before we ever learn of the beauty that their milestones possess. Our curves, the pathways to our unknown. Our scent, the blossoming of our unique nature. Our desire, a guide map toward the wayward and the well-behaved; our inner whores and virgins, fighting to never know one another’s name.
Wanting gets met with the cold reality of not getting, our yearnings censured and sanitized to fit the comfort level of the world around us. Forget the dull, unfamiliar aches of our bodies, the awakening of our cells to life in relation to others. Love starts to move through our matter in spades, but we’re taught to bury it just the same. We either comply with resolution or revolt with rage. Our hunger falling to learn the shape of its own belly; our natural pace of exploration and satiation, stalled or silently suppressed. Desire shrinks with malnutrition, a failed promise of sustenance where no nourishment can be found.
The heat of a young woman is her birthright and her calling card. It links her to women throughout time, long before we walk this earth and long after we’re but ashes of fires once ablaze. It is our desire to be seen and known and felt. It is where differentiation of spirit and sameness of heart share in communal midnight mass. It is when longing moves internal from our limbs and finds respite in our wombs. It is why we take on life and the challenges that come along with it – love and pain; an invitation to attend our very first marriage within, before we ever go looking for it without.
Devoid of our own hunger, we know not who we are, so we seek to find out in all the wrong places. Dressing room mirrors, the back seats of foggy-windowed cars, inside thousand-page school-books, in the faces of other tender women we ripped apart with anger we don’t know where else to place. Our perfection, our avoidance, and our fight, short-lived attempts to understand and claim what is already ours to know and own; a temporary reprieve from an arduous task no one told us we’d have to take alone.
Our grandmothers, mothers, and aunts can only help so much recover what they themselves gave up long ago. Severed from their own infernos, our pleas for guidance are met with their own quiet disappointments for letting their fires dull. How can a baton be passed that can’t be found in the hands of those who come before us? How do we learn to ignite wrath in the dark without a match?
Hunger unsettled turns to hunger unchecked. What can’t be expressed properly in or out becomes a direct magnet for hunger’s violent grasp. Jobs, men, fancy cars, sculpted bodies, young faces; hunger seeps from our bones, if not our mouths. Demure need not mean sated, how often it covers the fangs of a lioness on the hunt for her prey.
The beginnings of adulthood bring with it so many gifts. An autonomy just outside the shadowed gaze of our familial umbrella. Attempts to stand on our own two feet, high-enough heels to see over our friends, confident struts our hips have yet to authentically move. Our fire merging frantically with our minds, taking names and making plans. We’re more than flesh and bone and longing, we’re women on a mission with a fresh manicure. Desire has a target and a wallet worthy of pulling it off. We’re our own worst enemy and the greatest wing woman we’ll ever cross paths.
How easy it is to lead passion right off the cliff from which its often perched. High on life and lust, we’re on-track eagles, fixated with fixation, obsessed with obsession, preoccupied with preoccupation. We feel sexy and seductive and spontaneous; dynamism runs through our veins like blood warmed with bourbon. Drama is our only way to display what has long been repressed or misunderstood. We’re here to settle the score, despite you never signing up to play the game.
I write with my own recollection of righteousness, remembering my years of supposed reclamation, cloaked as self-possessed repossession but actually devoid of the contents that make up mature passion. I almost had enough chutzpah to f*&@ who I wanted when I wanted, but not nearly enough emotional awareness to meet the remnants of my little girl with whom I woke up next to the following morning. Actions with perceived consequences didn’t recognize themselves until after the fact. Lessons learned over half eaten breakfasts in the days and months following each mediocre decision. Going backwards, perhaps not; guided by the knowledge of those who know better, a wish discovered a decade too late.
Emotions run amok – everything that we’re not taught to feel runneth over. Fear of abandonment, of failure, and of inadequacy; unwanted substitutes for their fuller feelings of longing, confidence and charisma. Life teetering on the reply of one text message or the acceptance of one job application. No two moments alike and yet the hell of emotional overload on repeat until sleep or spirits takes their place.
My circle of women were my peers in their own similar boats of turmoil. We held each other hand’s as we each moved through waves of impermanence, begging for a lifeboat in the shape of an uninterested crush to call boyfriend. Our mothers promised us promising futures of love and order, concealing their own worries that our escapades, or lack thereof, would result in what every woman is taught to fear the most, aloneness not of her own choosing. Support for our pleas came with fears about our own misshapen place within our cookie-cutter world.
These are intended to be the years dedicated and devoted to our bodies, minds, and spirits – a trinity now covered in bubblegum, monetized by white girl wellness, outfitted in athletic wear, candles and meditation cushions, absent of the essence from which they hope to sell. It is the sensitivity of the maturing woman that is her guiding light. When she can feel deeply and regulate regularly, her body becomes a vessel for life lived through her. She can hold and release big swathes of personal and collective experience. Her mind is engaged yet clear, her body is supple yet strong, and her heart is full yet open. We aren’t flailing in confusion, consumed with craziness, or lost in selfish ambition. We’re channeling our passion towards good, while learning to embody our unique version of woman.
Some women are lucky enough to find freedom in the fire, letting it burn them into statues of themselves with entirely new silhouettes. Liberated and luminous, they shed whatever covering remains of young womanhood for the naked exposure of the intensity that burns within. What does culture critique of such women in the glory of their grandeur? How much can we see them as the patriots of passion from which revolutions are built? Instead, how reflexively afraid we are to get burned by their blaze.
Something stills within her. Even with the pace of her life running at high speed, its once chaotic vortex finds relationship with a solid center within. Her internal clock, a gift from the steadying vibration beneath her feet; a stabilizing beat that patiently waits for the calm of its coming calibration. Passion burns bright and balanced; like a reverent fire manned by the holiness of her heart. Only then is she moved to her next right action. Feeding others with generosity her sole purpose, her hearth the place from which she both rests and receives. It’s a time for the reciprocal dance of a more mature love, cultivated and settled in the recesses of her own heart, shared with reverence to those further beyond her humble home.
I’ve only considered that I might have discovered there is ground underneath my own feet several years ago. Treading water for too long in the depth of my emotions blinded me to the shallow waters of maturing womanhood that have been gathering subtly under me. Do we even notice when swimming for survival is no longer our sole responsibility? Can we trust to walk upon the solid ground of our own making below or is it merely a mirage of quicksand waiting to suck us back into more chaotic times?
I feel my own resonance with my words and the arduous journey it’s taken to feel even a fraction of what ground feels like. Words only do it justice after its solidified into a foundation I can replicate when the very same floor has been pulled out from under me. How do we find ground while earth’s revolution shakes below us? What is ground if not the serenity of earth just as it is?
I’ve fought hard to experience what is still ephemeral much of the time. I’ve killed belief systems of my own narrow-mind for the possibility of spaciousness that comes with wider mental pastures. I’ve forced myself to start the work of confronting darkness: what I’m truly capable of, what others are capable of, what I’ve done already and what I’ll likely still need to do to retain my place in this world. The willingness to see us for the simple animals that we always will be, for the complicated humans we’re forced to embody, for the lost souls we’re desperately trying to find, for the breaking hearts we sometimes disregard having.
It's a time of getting as real as each moment will grant. Patience wrapped in fortitude, gently lifting veils of delusion while meeting our scared histories that have worked so hard to keep them in place. Everything becomes workable when workable is the only-remaining frontier. Black and white left for old movies, color and curiosity take the place of stories of the past.
If we’re not careful, it’s easy to get lost in the dark or avoid it completely. Love and light attempts to find ground in the illusion of a connected heart too afraid to see where it severs in cruel punishment of others. Humanity’s heart is filled with blood and blame, and none of us are exempt from our contribution to its collective wail. How do we learn to take responsibility for our part in the whole? Who teaches us to cup our hands to receive our share of humanity’s tears?
Mother Earth herself willing and able to collect and metabolize whatever is placed upon her. She weeps along with us, not exempt from her piece of her own pie. She holds us in our shared sob, reminding us that even though we cry, all is well in the comfort of her embrace. This is woman, supportive. This is woman, present. This is woman, grounded. This is woman, maturing into her womanhood.
The sacredness of love, marriage, motherhood, creation and all of their many iterations occur as we discover life’s pathways between our passion and our purpose; a pouring into life-making itself, into the depths of the heart, into the holiness of a union, into the conception of a new being, into bringing the heavens to life beneath our feet.
Who we give up inside of ourselves is as significant as the woman we replace her with. Where is our reverence for each changing of the guards, for each new head of house, for old sets of clothes that no longer fit, for the deep respect for those who get left behind?
So much of this goes dishonored and unnoticed. We substitute union with grand proposals and over-the-top weddings that overshadow the blessing and burden of binding two souls. Pregnancy is often diminished to numerology – baby statistics in utero and post-partum weight loss once delivered. Motherhood, a dizzying game of comparison on which mothers are designed to fail; too much or too little of everything, up for daily debate and regular ridicule. Missing, a dedication to thresholds impregnated with their own messages and meanings. When creation is our legacy, why do we favor its wrapping and pass over the jewel inside?
I don’t pretend to know what is beyond where I am but I do long for it to exist as I’d like to imagine; a coven of silvering-haired women, human in body and ethereal in spirit, outstretched arms towards the direction of those of us longing to feel the closeness of their touch. The feeling of being pulled towards wisdom and grace, hope in a beggar’s cloak. The anxious need to know coupled with growing patience for unfolding.
I’ve managed fairly well with breadcrumbs of wisdom sprinkled like stepping stones along my particular path of life. I pieced them together on the chessboard of my making, knocking over pawns who have gotten in my way, grateful for the bravery of internal and external knights who have saved me. Wisdom stacked like books on overflowing shelves of an old historian’s treasured collection. If we had access to every book in the library, would we even choose to let knowing ruin unknown’s greatest form of fun?
We can’t skip experience, or read up enough on its arrival before it arrives. The train meets us at the station we are at, even when we miss it. But, having access to a web of women need not mean getting ahead of ourselves. It means preparing ourselves, cultivating feeling early, learning to slow down into life before it gets too fast for the natural pace of our feet, even if we still enjoy riding at full speed. A whisper in our ears to let the thrill of wind move through us, a tender moment inside the anguish of grief accompanied by the comfort of a wise friend, the sharing of joy’s bliss exuding from life’s most sacred and mundane moments.
Mature wisdom infuses life with meaning and truth, and it knows the difference. It knows we’re at the helm of what we make things and it deeply honors what has lived within the feminine spirit since the beginning of our time. It takes seriously what it means to be woman in our individual lives and in our collective world, and it never fails to see the beauty and the heartbreak of it all. The cosmic, holy, human joke -- to be so integral to life, touched by it wholly only to have to leave it. Bittersweetness on the tongue of existence. Belly laughs for the absurdity of our earnestness. How little we know until we learn how little we know.
I’d like to believe that even wisdom goes back to the place from which it all began. When learning is so prudent it dissolves back into knowing all together. I imagine death in its purist form has this beautiful circular quality to it, innocence and wisdom meeting in unison all over again.
What I yearn for now I will be held responsible for soon enough. A lifetime of questions metabolized for the sake of those who need it’s answers most. What is my contribution to this web that has long existed and needs more support than ever to be created? Where are our human re-connecting stations, where are our reminders of truth, where are our initiations of remembrance, where are our links to the womanhood of which we are an essential part?
Life, a series of supposed destinations flanked by the breaths we take in between. Little deaths and rebirths sometimes so subtle we miss them, yet no way less profound than their more obvious occurrences. Patient and eager we follow along our inevitable paths of change, awaiting the deliberate demands of metamorphosis before us. Her butterfly knows not who she becomes until in reflection of another’s awe.