River of souls

Day 3: Monarchs nectaring at El Rosario Sanctuary

I went on pilgrimage to a sacred site. In search of the winter home of my beloved Monarch butterflies.

Monarchs fill me with wonder and delight. They carry happiness on their wings. In summer, whenever I glimpse the flash of orange wings through a window, I rush out into the garden, like a child, to greet them. 

Entranced, I watch them circle and float on radiant wings. I pay close attention to which plants they prefer, how long they stay to sip nectar, whether or not they visit the milkweeds. When they leave, if they return.

Like everything we open our hearts to, the Monarchs speak to us, and teach us. 

Monarchs and their epic journey south speak to the wild, abundant, mysterious presence of life on this being we call Earth. 

Some see Monarchs as a symbol of transformation, and of the soul. Mexican peoples have believed for centuries that Monarch butterflies represent the souls of their ancestors who are returning to visit them, when they arrive around November 2, on Dia de Muertos. Children of the sun, they call them. 

A caterpillar miraculously dissolving, then reassembling itself inside the chrysalis to emerge as a butterfly: this is one mystery.

The billion Monarchs who fly for two months to arrive in the fir forests of Michoacán have never been there before. Yet, somehow, each migrating generation knows where to fly — how to find this precise place in this wide Earth — where the guardian fir trees protect them from intense heat of the sun, rare snow storms, and cold winds that would otherwise kill them, and end their ancestral migration. 

Another mystery. Monarch upon Monarch, mystery upon mystery. 

Day 1: El Rosario Sanctuary

When the sun came out, then we witnessed the most spectacular sight: thousands upon thousands of Monarchs left their trees and took to the air. I no longer had to look at them through binoculars. They were here, zooming just above our heads as we walked down the mountain.

I walked silently, in a dream, amid the surreal magic of tens of thousands of Monarch butterflies winging around me, pouring down the mountain like a river of joy. 

A river of souls, speaking truths to us.

Whispering that our souls are alight. 

That our souls co-exist among millions of souls — all striving, all invisibly connected past present and future by a great web of life that flows from and around this planet into the universe. 

That our souls understand mysteries that our minds do not. 

That our lives are ephemeral, yet beautiful beyond words. 

Day 2: Sierra Chincua Monarch Sanctuary 

See now through my eyes...

Here, resting inside these many mysteries, millions and millions of Monarchs crowd thickly over the fir needles. 

Large clusters of butterflies cling to branches, literally bending them downward with their collective weight. They roost on trunks among the lichens and mosses like dense ruffles of stiff taffeta. Like rust-colored leaves that never fall to the ground.

I saw this. This, I saw with my own eyes. 

The sight was so vast, so strange, and beautiful, and astounding, and overwhelming, that it was difficult to encompass the reality, even as I stood looking at it. 

I looked, and looked, and looked, at the millions of Monarchs roosting in the silent, enchanted trees, or flying very high, black against the bright sky, and it still did not seem completely real. 

On the third day, when the temperature rose, and the sun came out, that was the day the Monarchs came to greet us, their relatives. Then they began to fly in great numbers, accompanying us along the path, flying just above and alongside us as we walked down the mountain. 

Are you my soul guide? I whispered as they flew past. Are you the psychopomp on my journey through the Underworld? 

Then, at last we came to a place where there was an opening, a corridor among the fir trees. And that is where I experienced the wonder, of a river of monarchs, a river of souls: the loveliest sight I have ever seen. 

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The journey: I flew across North America, rode on a bus for three hours, up and up into the Sierra Madre Mountains, to the small town of Angangueo. The next day, we took a 20-minute drive in pick-up trucks to the sanctuary entrance, then half-an-hour on horseback up the mountain, followed by a 15-minute hike to the viewing area.

What I remember

On the eve of Imbolc, I feel like my candle is unlit.  

 

At this time of year, I long for a sense of kindling. A feeling that the world is inviting me. But all is quiet.

 

The Northern winter is long; a test, really. It tests our patience as we wait for the world to unfold in its own time. It tests our belief that from the grayness we, too, can rise green and new, like the eternal springtime.

 

When we see only the cloud-thick skies of winter, we cannot notice how the light is growing. 

From our rooms, we cannot notice how the Bald Eagle and Great Horned Owl already nest in the tallest white pines and cottonwoods. 

 

But, seen or unseen, we know that Earth manifests all in its right time. Including our Selves.

 

A sacred sun burns deep inside each of us. So I believe. Some call it spirit, or divinity, or life force.

Sometimes we feel the flames leaping. Other times, it may burn so quietly. And in the depths of a winter of the soul, we may worry that the fire has flickered out. 

 

We may not know that slow, quiet transformations are happening within us, which cannot be measured. Or understand how to unravel the messages we send ourselves in dreams, or synchronicities, or patterns. 

We may hear a voice saying that perhaps we are too old, or too worn out, to be renewed; that our story has somehow ended, without our even being aware of it.

 

But then we are reminded. Are we not made of this constantly renewing Earth? Yes. Of the same essence as the clouds, the crow, the ice, the snow. 

 

We know then that our lives are not small, but enormous … shapeshifting, unfolding, flaming, throwing light all around us. Ever-renewing.

 

This is what Imbolc helps me to remember. 

Thousand year forest

In the thousand year forest, Brigid's serpent ripples forth from earth's womb, and tastes the wild air with her tongue.

This wind, it tastes of mid-winter: the matings of eagles and owls, frost flowers blossoming over iced river edges.

Goddess of Fire and Creation, let me say that somewhere not here, yet living deep inside me, is a sacred grove; a wild and holy presence.

Somewhere inside that grove lives a wild woman, in wordless conversation with the eternal forest.

Her mystery is mine, have I forgotten?

The forest is inside always; its ways strange, though we think we know them. We think we know ourselves also, and that is the quickest way to lose the deepest mystery of our beings, which is unknowable.

Unknowable.

Are we not, somewhere, carrying inside still the mystery of the humans we once were—the mystery shared by every wild creature, embodied fully through fur, scales, feathers and skin?

Wordless; but speaking through the magic of grace, power, movement and gesture.

Eternal; yet beautiful in our earthiness and mortality.

Nationless; belonging only to the earth.

Entranced by and afraid of the flame.

Called by dreams, moved by unfathomable intuitions.

Conversing with creation through hand, eye, nose, ear and feet that caress the ground as we dance.

Sea changing, blood coursing to tides of joy, sadness and desire, and to the moon in the wide sky.

.

At times when I must hold in my thoughts, my objections, my anger, my grief and even my truth, even then I am still a wild dancer through this life.

Remember.

How this dance embodies that eternal mystery...which is what art is for.

Thus we banish winter

On this, the first fire festival of the year, some alignment of time and energy helixed together, manifesting in my reading a book in which a character described Imbolg as "the kindling in the forest of winter."

Ahhh. Lovely.

Yet, a little strange. Since coincidentally, I was reading the book with the Kindle app, and on the festival of Imbolg.

As I read, a wistful feeling crept over me. I was wishing that I had felt up to attending the St. Brigid's/Candlemas ritual last week at the college where I once worked, instead of being down with a cold. The college was founded by the Catholic order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a community of women who are perfectly okay with acknowledging and even celebrating the pagan roots of Christian holidays and who conduct lovely if slightly earnest ceremonies with a touch of mystery.

~ ~ ~

In one ritual, I read elsewhere, she representing the Maiden sweeps deosil around the circle, symbolically brushing away the old and outworn.

Earlier today, again by coincidence, I performed a similar action. On hands and knees, I used a wet cloth to wipe up the accumulation of sand, salt and snowmelt just inside the back door. Juniper, my familiar, sat near me and watched the motion of my hand, circling around and around--every revolution sunwise, or deosil.

~ ~ ~

After the sweeping comes the chanting.

Thus we banish winter,

thus we welcome spring,

say farewell to what is dead

and greet each living thing.

Thus we banish winter,

thus we welcome spring.

I say the words aloud,  to myself. Just as I write this, I say them, for any who are listening to hear.

I am not burning incense, or anything else, yet I smell incense burning.

Strange and strange.

It is a hint of woodsmoke creeping in round the edges of my old window frames from outside on this fine, frosty night.

Or is it?

I need more magic in my life. I choose to think of this phantom whiff of sacred smoke as one more part of this Imbolg ritual I seem to have been participating in all day without even realizing it.

Until just now, as I wrote this.

Welcome, spring. Let the fire in the forest of winter be kindled.

Cold

The calligraphy of cold writes on my old windows...

...I see a parrot tulip stenciled in ice...

...a child's drawing of feline ears rising from a scarf woven of crystal floss...

...and a warm-blooded little cat who pushes her face against my hand and purrs, unused to being anything but the center of attention.

Stazi Lu and I might wish we lived someplace where Imbolg actually does signify the softness of springtime—a warmer place, where the midpoint between winter solstice and the spring equinox is celebrated with towering fires on the high hills, and fiddled melodies, and a fine, pagan revelry....

The rhythms and seasons of the Upper Midwest are a world away from those of the old Celts, though. Early spring is still a good six weeks away. It is one degree Fahrenheit, the sun has descended and the wave of frigid air emanating from each double-hung window reaches far into the house's interior. I hear the high-pitched spinning of car tires on the ice as my neighbors try to negotiate the frozen ruts of the alleyway behind our house. It is hard to make oneself go outside; but it is hard in a different way to stay in. And though I am to winter born, this quote otherwise sums up the last day of January:

“I, however, a tropical bird, was cold—cold one way outdoors and another way indoors, ceaselessly and more or less thoroughly cold.” 

—Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness