musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Flutterbys


Perhaps we live our lives in parts, segments that seem distinct only in retrospect. But now that I consist of gnarled limbs and painted, fragile leaves already heavy with the luxury of years, I am allowed think of butterflies as ephemeral markers, unlikely bookmarks in my life.

I’m not really sure when this idea took hold, but there is a hallowed story that my mother would inevitably drag out at family gatherings of a butterfly landing on my nose when I was lying on the grass as a baby. Far from annoyance or fear, the curious insect apparently stayed there while I chuckled with joy and wriggled my arms, unable to capture or dislodge it with as yet unlearned precision. Of course my memory of it was my mother’s only, but the underlying reverence that accompanied its telling, the wonder in her voice, and the unlikely grace of its occurrence, seemed to flutter in and out of my life like a pencilled, fading marginal note in an often-quoted book.

It’s not as if that meant I regarded butterflies with any reverence, but I can remember being as fascinated as any child would when they fluttered by on their way to somewhere and then suddenly changed their minds. At the time, I remember wondering whether they really knew what they were doing; whether, they were completely at the mercy of any passing breeze; or whether, quite the opposite, they were actually playing in the invisible currents of air like the leaves seemed to do in autumn.

In fact, as a child I used to play a game of trying to catch them with my hands in the late summer heat of our Winnipeg backyard. It whiled away the time I suppose because it was a nearly impossible task. In fact, I only managed a capture once, and delighted with my unexpected success, I carefully opened my hand and grasped it by its wings to examine it like a well-earned trophy, then liberated it from my palm. I must have injured the wings, though, because it fluttered helplessly to the ground, unable to fly.

Upset and crying, I picked it up again and ran into the house with tears dripping down my face, hoping my mother would know what to do. She looked at the helpless thing squirming in my hand and tousled my hair with a sad smile. It seemed to be suffering, she realized, so she said we should put it out of its misery and bury it in the garden -in her bed of flowers, actually. I remember her saying that it would probably like that, and in my overwhelming guilt I agreed that the flowers were probably where it was heading when I caught it. There was no pride in my skill of capture, no sense of ascending yet another rung on the way to adulthood, but rather a still developing understanding of ephemerality and the unexpected consequences of ill-considered actions. Life hung on a thread, not a rope…

But of course that was of a time; I grew up, and thought little more of butterflies as biology and economics demanded essentially flowerless choices and stable directions. And yet, as Fate would have it, a chance remark by a friend in university, made that hot summer afternoon in Winnipeg with all its guilt and tears come flooding back. It was embarrassing, but one day in early autumn, as we sat having coffee in a little student café overlooking a garden, a butterfly landed on our table for a moment, and then curiosity sated, fluttered off again in random directions. I remember thinking of a quote from Stephen Leacock in his Nonsense Novels: ‘Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.’

Dierdre, however, had a different take on butterflies: “I’ve always called them ‘flutterbys’, G,” she said, as she watched the pretty wings flapping at the air as if uncertain of its continuing support. “Don’t you think that’s a better name for them?”

I had to admit that it probably was as I nodded and then turned my head to wipe away an unexpected tear. Some memories are powerful; some things are fragile.

Now, years later and perhaps only marginally wiser, I have, unsurprisingly, come to regard butterflies as emblematic of our eggshell climate. The past sits uncomfortably on my conscience, I suppose, but nevertheless, I needed something on which to pin my thoughts. It was therefore serendipitous to discover an essay from the writer, lecturer, and teacher Matthew Wilson entitled ‘Butterflies: the ultimate icon of our fragility’.[i]

As he writes, ‘If the climate crisis is searching for a symbol, one option is the butterfly, an insect that is not only hypersensitive to the ecosystem, but steeped with meaning in the history of art… Since the 4th Century BC, visual artists have been fascinated by the ephemerality of butterflies – their brief summertime appearances, their dainty structures and skittish, lackadaisical flight paths. Their most entrancing capability is to metamorphose from caterpillars. It is an act that has long [been] seen as a symbol of beauty breaking free from baseness…

‘But butterflies have also been symbols of ourselves: more precisely, our inner, spiritual selves.’ And yet, ‘in art history, butterflies have also been warning symbols… they continued to represent the human soul for centuries.’

Wilson goes on to describe the butterfly and its meaning in various historical stages of Art, but perhaps my favorite was in Thomas Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly painted in 1756. It’s an exquisite painting of two sweet young children wandering hand in hand in what may be a garden somewhere. One of them is reaching for a butterfly that is sitting on a plant beside her but ‘the butterfly just within grasp is settled perilously on a thistle that will spike the tender young hand that reaches towards it… Gainsborough’s painting, made on the cusp of the industrial revolution in Great Britain, reflects an ongoing delight in the soon-to-be-threatened natural world. But the butterfly remains a vanitas symbol. That is, they remind us of the transience of life and the ephemerality of the luxuries we mistakenly think important.’ And yet there is an innocence there, a naïve hope that we can touch it without either of us being injured. I suppose it’s a lesson that we still have to learn.

But it’s not so much about the danger to the butterfly, of course; it’s more that the world in which we both evolved to thrive is changing, losing its bloom. There is danger in thinking we can tame a flower or trim a forest; we cannot imprison Nature without ourselves being trapped behind the bars.

I think I sensed that many, many years ago, when I buried it, along with my nascent guilt, in a September flower garden…

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[i] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210915-butterflies-the-ultimate-icon-of-our-fragility

gozzter

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