Harvest Time and the Butterfly

The “Fancy Shawl Dance” is a representation of The Legend of the Butterfly Dancer.

The story goes like this … Many, many years ago when the Earth was still quite new, there was a beautiful butterfly who lost her mate in battle. To show her grief, she removed her beautiful wings and wrapped herself in a drab cocoon. In her sadness, she could not eat or sleep and her relatives kept coming to her lodge to check on her.

She was lost in heartbroken despair, but she didn’t want to be a burden on her people so she packed up her wings and her medicine bundle and went on a long journey. She wandered about for many months, until finally she had gone all around the world. (To this day, butterflies go on long journeys, but that is another story.)

On her journey she kept her eyes downcast and stepped on each stone she came to as she crossed fields and streams. Finally, one day as she was looking down, she happened to notice the stone beneath her feet. It was so beautiful that it healed her sorrowing heart.

She then cast aside her cocoon of grief, shook the dust from her wings, and donned them once more. She was so happy she began to dance to give thanks for another chance to begin a new life. She went home and told “The People” about her long journey and how she had been healed.

To this day, “The People” dance this dance as an expression of renewal, and to give thanks for new seasons, new life, and new beginnings. The shawl in the Fancy Shawl Dance represents butterfly wings. The lightness of the dance steps and twirls represent the butterfly’s style of flight … joyful fluttering as if from flower to flower.

I have written before about the Hopi Butterfly Dance. Now is when it is danced.

The Hopi Butterfly Dance, a traditional social dance of the Hopi, is held in August or September after the gathering of the harvest and presentation of the Snake Dance. It is a thanksgiving ceremony for the harvest, chiefly for the corn crop. Like most Hopi ceremonies, the Butterfly Dance is a petition for rain, good health and long life for all living things. The dance also recognizes the butterfly for its beauty and its contribution in pollinating plant life.

I am moved to write about these dances today because I’m in Vermont with my sister and brother-in-law who are in the process of harvesting vegetables from their garden.

The bounty from a relatively small number of plants is quite amazing. Peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, basil, squash, zucchini, lettuce, cucumbers… incredible. My sister doesn’t necessarily dance but she does smile and give thanks in her own way. She knows this is a blessing and joyously shares the blessings of The Mother with friends and family. Today we will have Italian sausage on the grille with roasted peppers. Sometimes with home made bread. Sometimes Don has made a maple cake from the syrup he produced so painstakingly in spring.

Does The Mother hear the thanks of my sister? I know She does which is why every year her kitchen is filled with all of this tasty wonder. Rosemary catches rain water from the roof and carries it into the greenhouse. She composts her food waste and uses it for fertilizer. She doesn’t use chemicals. She talks to her plants like Dan Evehema talked to his. A hard simple satisfying life.

What stands out as strikingly different between the Indigenous world and the world of the Vermont Yankee is the celebration and/or ceremony of the harvest. The thanksgiving to Mother Nature, to The Butterfly to the Bee. I believe this is partly why we are in a climate crisis and sixth extinction.

In Indigenous tradition the concept of One Mind and One Heart is vital. In ceremony when EVERYONE focuses on the health and help of the person asking for ceremony … miracles happen. The spirits, the people…everyone and everything dance in unison with the song and the drum …. a common vibration is established and the healing takes place. One Mind and One Heart. When you go now to YouTube and listen to the Hopi Butterfly Dance…and watch the dancers dance in unison … you will FEEL them …not just hear them. They are in relationship with the Butterfly and The Mother … giving thanks and asking that they return next season.

When we forget The Mother … the Butterfly, the Bee, The Moth … the Plants … we are saying to them they don’t matter. It is like when we are forgotten. When no one calls or sends a card or e-mails. When no one touches us or hugs us or tells us they love us. We shrivel up and die. Without relationship we are lost … this is true for ALL things … even my bowling balls Jim.

So today, harvest time, I would say to you … give thanks. Dance and sing. Enjoy the colors and the bounty. This is the way we battle the climate crisis and the sixth extinction. Honor the plants and animals and stones. Stop the abuse. Stop the mutations. Stop the destruction.

Do you create or do you destroy? Every day we must ask ourselves that question.

Hecetu welo. It is so

Mitakuye Oyasin

Rags