windthread

again.  Clarissa Pinkola~Estes   Women Who Run With the Wolves

La Mariposa,  Butterfly Woman 

"To tell you about the power of the body in another way, I have to tell you a story, a true, rather long story.

For years, tourists have thundered across the great American desert, hurrying through the "spiritual circuit":  Monument Valley, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Kayenta, Keams Canyon, Painted Desert, and Canyon de Chelly.  They peer up the pelvis of the Mother Grand Canyon, shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, and hurry home, only to again come charging across the desert the next summer, looking, looking some more, watching, watching some more.

Underneath it all is the same hunger for numinous experience that humans have had since the beginning of time.  But sometimes this hunger is exacerbated, for many people have lost their ancestors.  They often do not know the names of those beyond their grandparents.  They have lost, in particular, family stories.  Spiritually, this situation causes sorrow….and hunger.  So many are trying to recreate something important for soul sake.

For years tourists have come also to Puye, a big dusty mesa in the middle of "nowhere", New Mexico.  Here the Anasazi, the ancient ones, once called to each other across the mesas.  A prehistoric sea, it is said, carved the thousands of grinning, leering, and moaning mouths and eyes into the rock walls there.

The Navajo, Jicarilla Apache,  southern Ute, Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Santa Domingo, Laguna, Picuris, Tesuque, all these desert tribes come together here.  It is here that they dance themselves back into lodgepole pine trees, back into deer,  back into eagles and Katsinas, powerful spirits.

And here too, come visitors, some of whom are very starved of their geno-myths, detached from the spiritual placenta.  They have forgotten their ancient Gods as well.  They come to watch the ones who have  NOT forgotten.

The road up to Puye was built for horse hooves and moccasins, but over time automobiles became more powerful and now locals and visitors come in all manner of cars, trucks, convertibles, and vans.  The vehicles all whine and smoke up the road in a slow,  dusty parade.

Everyone parks trochimochi,  willy nilly, on the lumpy hillocks.  By noon, the edge of the mesa looks like a thousand car pile up.  Some people park next to six foot tall hollyhocks thinking they will just knock over the plants to get out of their cars.  But the hundred year old hollyhocks are like old iron women.  Those who park next to them are trapped in their cars.

The sun turns to a fiery furnace by midday.  Everyone trudges in hot shoes, burdened with an umbrella in case it rains (it will),  an aluminum folding chair in case they tire (they will), and if they are visitors, perhaps a camera (if they're allowed), and pods of film cans hanging around their necks like garlic wreaths.

Visitors come with all manner of expectations, from the sacred, to the profane.  They come to see something that not everyone will be able to see, one of the wildest of the wild, a living  numen,  La Mariposa,  the Butterfly Woman.

The last event is the Butterfly Dance.  Everyone anticipates with great delight this one person dance.  It is danced by a woman, and oh what a woman.  As the sun begins to set, here comes an old man resplendent in forty pounds  of formal dress turquoise.  With the loud speakers, squawking like a chicken espying a hawk, he whispers into the 1930's chrome microphone,  "An our nex dance is gonna be th Butterfly Dance."  He limps away on the cuffs of his jeans.

Unlike a ballet recital, where the act is announced, the curtains part, and the dancers wobble out, here at Puye, as at other tribal dances, the announcement of the dance may precede the dancer's appearance by anywhere from twenty minutes to forever.  Where is the dancer?  Tidying up the camper, perhaps.  Air temperatures over 100 degrees are common, so last minute repairs to sweat streaked body paint are needed.  If a dance belt, which belonged to the dancer's grandfather, breaks on the way to the arena, the dancer would not appear at all, for the spirit of the belt would need to rest.  Dancers delay because a good song is playing on "Tony Lujan's Indian Hour" on radio Taos, KKIT (after Kit Carson).

Sometimes a dancer does not hear the loudspeaker and must be summoned by footrunner.  And then, always, of course, the dancer must speak to all relatives on the way to the arena, and most certainly stop to allow the little nephews and nieces a look.  How awed the little children are to see a towering Katsina sprit who looks suspiciously, a little at least, like Uncle Tomas or a corn dancer who seems to strongly resemble Aunt Yazie.  Lastly, there is the ubiquitous possibility that the dancer is still out on the Tesuque highway, legs dangling out of the maw of a pickup truck while the muffler smudges the air for a mile down wind.

While awaiting the Butterfly Dance in giddy anticipation, everyone chatters about butterfly maidens and the beauty of the Zuni girls who danced in ancient red and black garb with one shoulder barred, bright pink circles painted on their cheeks.  They laud the young male deer dancers who danced with pine boughs bound to their arms and legs.

Time passes                                                                                                                                                                                     and passes                                                                                                                                                                                     and passes.                                                                                                                                                                                    People jingle coins in their pockets.  They suck their teeth.  The visitors are impatient to see this marvelous butterfly dancer.

Unexpectedly then, for everyone is bored to scowls, the drummer's arms begin drumming the sacred butterfly rhythm, and the chanters begin to cry to the Gods for all they are worth.

To the visitors, a butterfly is a delicate thing.  "O fragile beauty," they dream.  So they are necessarily shaken when out hops Maria Lujan.  And she is big, really BIG, like the Venus of Willendorf, like the Mother of Days, like Diego Rivera's heroic size woman who built Mexico City with a single curl of her wrist.

And Maria Lujan, oh, she is old, very very old, like a woman come back from dust, old like old river, old like old pines at timberline.  One of her shoulders is bare.  Her red and black manta, blanket dress, hops up and down with her inside it.  Her heavy body and her very skinny legs made her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale.

She hops on one foot and then the other.   She waves her feather fan to and fro.  She is the Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak.  She is that which most think of as not strong:  age, the butterfly, the feminine.

Butterfly Maiden's hair reaches to the ground.  It is thick as ten maize sheaves and it is stone gray.  And she wears butterfly wings, the kind you see on little children who are being angels in school plays.  Her hips are like two bouncing bushel baskets and the fleshy shelf  at the top of her buttocks is wide enough to ride two children.

She hops, hops, hops, not like a rabbit, but in footsteps that leave echoes.

"I am here, here, here…                                                                                                                                                            "I am here, here, here…                                                                                                                                                          "Awaken you, you, you!"

She sways her feather fan up and down,  spreading the earth and the people of the earth with the pollenating spirit of the butterfly.  Her shell bracelets rattle like snake, her bell garters tinkle like rain.  Her shadow with its big belly and little legs dances from one side of the dance circle to the other.  Her feet leave little puffs of dust behind.

The Tribes are reverent, involved.  But some visitors look at each other and murmur  "This is it?  THIS is the Butterfly Maiden?"  They are puzzled, some even disillusioned.  They no longer seem to remember that the spirit world is a place where wolves are women, bears are husbands and old women of lavish dimensions are butterflies.

Yes, it is fitting that Wild Woman/Butterfly Woman is old and substantial, for she carries the thunderworld in one breast, the underworld in the other.  Her back is the curve of the planet Earth with all its crops and foods and animals.  The back of her neck carries the sunrise and the sunset.  Her left thigh holds all the lodgepoles, her right thigh all the she-wolves of the world.  Her belly holds all the babies that will ever be born.

Butterfly Maiden is the female fertilizing force.  Carrying the pollen from one place to another, she cross-fertilizes, just as the soul fertilizes mind with nightdreams, just as archetypes fertilize the mundane world.  She is center.  She brings the opposites together by taking a little from here and putting it there.  Transformation is no more complicated than that.  This is what she teaches.  This is how the butterfly does it.  This is how the soul does it. "