A New Voice on a Spring-Forward Morning

Suddenly it’s light.  It happens so quickly. First it’s mid-February and it’s been dark for so long I can hardly conceive of summer, not to mention spring, and then a few weeks later the light yawns into the early evening and I am making supper in daylight and hearing, next morning, the trill of the Eastern Bluebird.  It’s coming!  Violets, apple blossoms, tomato seedlings at the farmer’s market! Robbins nodding their heads above the newly-greened lawn, warblers twittering in the bushes.

In honor of new songs and new energy, I have another voice to offer you this spring-forward morning.  On this rambunctious new path of climate activism I’ve been trodding these last few years, I have encountered much that is heartbreaking, not only about this moment but about our country’s violent, rapacious past.  But it hasn’t all been bleak and tortuous for I have been sustained by the courage and inspiration of many of the people I’ve met along the way. 

One of those people is a young woman (when you are my age 40 is young!) from Mt Desert Island who is the Executive Director of A Climate to Thrive, ACTT.  ACTT is what FreeportCAN wants to be when it grows up.  Johannah Blackman and her friends started this organization much like we started FreeportCAN, around conversations with friends at potluck suppers and cups of tea on the porch.  Since then, ACTT has grown tall and strong and has three full time staff members and many ongoing projects aimed at transitioning MDI off fossil fuels.

The truth is I’ve never actually met Johannah, shaken her hand, hugged her.  We have only met along the newly constructed Zoom Highway.  Last year, she started Local Leads the Way, a digital space for climate action organizers throughout the state to come together once a month to share knowledge and woes.  She leads those groups with grace and wisdom and generosity.

A few weeks ago, I sent her a link to my Substack essay about urgency and asked if she was seeing the same trend in normalizing this crisis.  It was her first introduction to the blog.  In return she sent me her Substack!  It was like discovering a robin’s nest filled with blue eggs over the door or a bluebird nesting in the bluebird box!  She’s a writer too! 

Then I read her blogs!  Not only is she a writer, she’s a beautiful writer! Johannah, a mother of two little girls, writes about an experience I, as an old woman, never had: what it is like to mother in the time of climate breakdown and carry so much anxiety about your child’s future. I haven’t encountered this voice in any of the essays I’ve read, maybe it’s there and I just haven’t found it or maybe it’s because it’s such a new experience that it is hard to put into language or maybe it’s because it’s just too painful to write about. 

Johannah’s taken some time off from writing in the last two years, so this essay, pasted below, which she has kindly agreed to let me send you, was written over two years ago.  It is called “Transform” and in describing the birth of the monarch she summons for our inspiration nature’s powers of transformation which we are about to witness this spring in all their fecund magnificence. 

Johannah uses for her title not the more passive noun transformation, but the active verb transform. To transform. That word resonates deeply for me, for that is the daily work of climate activism — to get up every day and make some effort at transforming what is into something that is not yet, to nudge some program, some idea, some person or people towards a vision of how we need to live on this planet to survive. What makes that work possible, what guides and nourishes that work for her, as it does for me, is love, “deep muscular love.”

*Thanks to Colin Sullivan-Stevens for this morning’s bluebird.

Transform

Johannah Blackman

Jan 26, 2021

A shift of light. A cloud slides away from the sun and, quite suddenly, the air fills with motion. Wings of gold flutter as at least fifteen Monarch butterflies alight from the garden bed in front of which we stand. Flutter. There is no more apt word for the movement. It is delicate and delightful.

My one year-old daughter begins to shout, “Bubba! Bubba!” I scoop her up and we chase after the objects of her enchantment. We find them all around us as they glide and then settle on new blossoms, sipping, fueling, recharging their bright existence.

A month later, the air cooling as summer slips towards autumn, we return to the local butterfly garden. The change is immediately palpable. Blossoms close and drop as the plants go to seed. My eyes scan the air. Will we see any “bubbas”?

Determination and time our friends, we watch and wait. And finally, we glimpse golden movement. We scamper over and there it is: a Monarch feeding. But something is not right. The wings that open and close are badly damaged with chunks missing. 

As I watch the butterfly shift to a nearby flower, thoughts pour through me. I marvel at the creature’s ability to fly, given the state of its wings. I wonder how far it can fly. Far enough for the journey ahead? And I consider what to say to my daughter, who is avidly watching the Monarch’s every move. She understands and notices so much, often more than I appreciate. 

The butterfly extends its damaged wings and I see my daughter’s eyes widen, taking in something new. A “bubba,” yes, but with distinct differences. 

How to explain hurt, loss, and potential hardship? These questions have assuredly stumped parents for centuries. Why is the world unjust? Why do beings die too young? Why do many people not have enough to eat? Why isn’t every butterfly perfect and whole? How about every human? 

And then there is the more recent addition: how to look into the eyes of beautiful young people freshly in love with the equally beautiful world and explain that the world and our future as part of it are threatened. The threat didn’t come from a predatory bird or some other unavoidable fact of life. It came from human choices. Including our own. 

As I felt my daughter turn, kick and grow within me, I pondered these questions. I walked the woods during the nine months of her gestation and I talked to her and to the birds and trees and squirrels. Over and over again, I came back to: “I’m so sorry.” And, importantly, “I’m here to learn with you. I am ready to try a different way of being. Together, we begin anew.”

Back to the butterfly garden and one of the first explanatory tests of my young parenthood. As I contemplate what to say, my mind travels with those tattered vibrant films on the journey ahead, one filled with mystery, one that has stunned scientists and filled spectators with wonder. 

Riding powerful currents of air with wings the thickness of just one cell, this creature of vibrant orange traverses state after state, headed south over the U.S. With stops along the way, the butterfly eventually soars above the open water of the Gulf of Mexico. Below, waves roll and dolphins breach. 

The epic journey culminates in southwestern Mexico, thousands of miles from the starting place in rural Maine. Amidst the branches of oyamel fir trees, also known as “sacred trees,” this single butterfly from Maine huddles together with millions of fellow fliers. The miniscule hearts slow and the butterflies sleep through the cooler winter months. 

This butterfly has never made the journey ahead. She hatched here in Maine, probably shedding her chrysalis only weeks prior. And yet, she knows exactly where to go. Her flight will be guided by a sense of purpose and direction as of yet unexplained by scientists, and not for a lack of trying. 

But the journey is really the second miracle of this butterfly’s young life. Already, she transformed in a process with details that must touch the heart and ignite the imagination of even the most cynical among us. 

Hatching from an egg as a caterpillar during late-summer, this creature then ate her way through leaf after leaf on the many milkweed plants that line the little butterfly garden. As she grew, she shed her skin again and again. 

After about two weeks of gluttony, something alchemical within the caterpillar’s body caused an intricate chain of reactions. First, she began to slow. Meals were less frequents, movement less ambitious. Then, she selected a particular location and created a silk-like mat to which she attached herself, hanging in a J-shape for nearly a full day. Finally, the caterpillar shed her skin for the fifth and final time, revealing the light green of the forming chrysalis beneath. 

Within the chrysalis, and in just about two weeks time, the caterpillar essentially disintegrated into goo. From that goo, the butterfly was constructed. The caterpillar’s mouthparts were no longer needed. A proboscis, long legs and reproductive organs formed. And, of course, the beautiful golden and black wings.

For the first hour after the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, it is unable to fly. In the first stage of its new existence, it is at its most vulnerable, completely at the mercy of any predators. 

I watch my daughter watch the butterfly and I am overwhelmed with admiration. Transformation is not easy. And yet, when I consider the future we share, I think: we all must transform. 

Transformation is exciting. It’s also scary. To fully dive into the creative goo from which we can collaboratively rise anew, we must be willing to shed that former self, prior understandings of who we are and our place in this world. We must allow ourselves to be transformed, this time by love for the earth and our fierce need for one another. 

Perhaps it is that love, a deep, muscular love rooted in respect, that will guide our way, serving as the internal compass that somehow leads us exactly where we need to go on a journey never before taken. 

All great transformation begins in the minds of those who would envision a different way and the hearts that courageously lean into change. And so as I watch my daughter watch the butterfly, I realize I do not need to provide answers. Instead, it is my responsibility to create the fertile ground and the space­–the chrysalis, if you will–for her to weave her own vision. And, like any true vision, it will be one complete with frailty, vulnerability and the many imperfections in this world and the possibility and hope of radical transformation. 

The butterflies shouldn’t be able to make that journey, whether tattered or perfectly whole. But they do. 

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You can read more of Johannah’s essays here:

considereddays@substack.com