All things bright and beautiful

August 7, 2018 a good book the birds and the trees

In the same week, Krista Tippett and Maria Popova both discussed Michael McCarthy’s memoir cum manifesto, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. Or perhaps I just happened on these two conversations in the same week? I’m not sure — and it doesn’t matter, of course, except that the dual mention felt like a ping from the universe: I needed to read this book.

The Moth Snowstorm is by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking. McCarthy juxtaposes descriptions of his own joy in encountering nature with discussions of the crushing impact people are having on the natural world — in Britain and across the globe. It’s grim, and yet there is beauty and love and joy and, ultimately, at least a glimmer of hope. McCarthy posits that our capacity for loving the natural world might offer a means of saving it.

I found this book to be a wonderful read, once I got used to its rhythm. McCarthy’s prose bursts forth in all directions with asides and digressions and bypaths; it’s as fecund as the natural world he remembers from childhood. Trying to pick out a bit of his text to share is like scooping up water from a pond: you’ll likely get algae and water striders and a porriwiggle or two along with the water. Not that this is a bad thing.

Butterflies #1

Michael McCarthy tells us that his first memory of falling in love with the natural world — with wildness — was of discovering a buddleia bush covered with butterflies. In fact, butterflies flit through this entire book — and they inspired me to create these postcard variations as I read.

In my imagination, McCarthy might have seen something like this when he visited that butterfly bush as a child. He writes:

I first stumbled upon this [butterfly-attracting] property of the [buddleia] plant when on a bright morning, soon after we arrived, I ran out of the house into Sunny Bank to play and encountered the tall bush covered in jewels, jewels as big as my seven-year-old hand, jewels flashing dazzling colour combinations: scarlet and black, maroon and yelow, pink and white, orange and turquoise. The buddleia was crawling with butterflies. (p. 5)

butterflies in bright colors

In fact, it was not just butterflies that were so abundant in the days of McCarthy’s childhood:

There were a lot of many things, then. Suburban gardens were thronged with thrushes. Hares galumphed across every pasture. Mayflies hatched on springtime rivers in dazzling swarms. And larks filled the air and poppies filled the fields, and if the butterflies filled the summer days, the moths filled the summer nights, and sometimes the moths were in such numbers that they would pack a car’s headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard, there would be a veritable snowstorm of moths, and at the end of your journey you would have to wash your windscreen, you would have to sponge away the astounding richness of life. (p. 13)

Butterflies #2

In bleak contrast to these recollections of natural abundance, McCarthy describes various cases where humans have devastated wild populations. Especially painful to him are the ravages to his island nation’s flora and fauna that have occurred in his lifetime — what he calls “the great thinning.”

All across the land, they tumbled in numbers, the birds, the wild flowers, the butterflies, and it is clear that more than half of all Britain’s wildlife, as it existed at the end of the Second World War, has now gone. (p. 99)

This second image, dark but with iridescent glimmers, suggests this dimming, this thinning. Butterflies speak of ephemeral beauty and grace. We just didn’t know how ephemeral.

butterflies in dark colors

Butterflies #3

In the final chapter, McCarthy describes visiting his mother’s grave with his children and there finding inspiration for a fitting tribute to her.

It was a Sunday at the beginning of April; a cold morning of pale sunshine filtering through high clouds with a wintry north wind, though even in the chill air the cemetery was a pleasing place, lines of dark green cypresses and mature hollies giving it an Italian feel. We found the grave and the children read what was written on the headstone, and we stood in silence thinking about it, and as we did so a dead leaf came tumbling through the air towards us on the wind and fell at our feet, right at the grave’s very edge. And then, in the thin sunlight, it opened its wings: it was a peacock.
I was taken aback…
The butterfly at my mother’s grave.
It was ragged and rough after its overwintering, but the splendour of its colours was discernible still, the maroon wings and the four eyespots with their amethyst cores… and at once it set something alight in me, as butterflies have always been able to do… (p. 231)

This experience led McCarthy to his quest to see all 58 species of British butterflies in a single summer, to dedicate each butterfly he found to his mother — and to enlist the British public in “The Great British Butterfly Hunt.”

This final image expresses some of the grief and rage I feel at the catastrophic damage we humans have thoughtlessly and greedily wreaked upon the natural world — and my fears about where things might be going. Here the butterflies are reminiscent of dead leaves, crushed underfoot on a forest floor. And yet there is a peacock flash of color, of hope.

A great deal of my own childhood was spent outdoors, playing in the as-yet-undeveloped fields adjacent to our house. My sister Kristi and I found tadpoles and newts in the creek (actually, we called it “the ditch”) that ran through our backyard, turned over rocks to find Jerusalem crickets (fascinating and repellent at the same time), chased butterflies, and followed blue-bellied lizards into the brush. Living on the fringes of suburbia, I don’t remember quite the exuberant abundance that McCarthy describes, but my childhood was immeasurably enriched by these encounters with the surrounding wildness.

A blessing on Michael McCarthy for this fierce, sorrowful, and poetic book:
those who have ears, let them hear!

Connections

Butterfly reference images sourced from…

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