Lessons from the Insects

The animal world has been speaking to me for a while now. Probably my whole life, but I've only really been paying attention in the last decade. Before that, I would absolutely, 100% be the fool (The Fool) talking to the mammals, insects, arachnids, birds, and so on, regardless of their location on land, sky, or sea. If they approached me, or meowed, mooed, or chirped, I was likely to meow, moo, or chirp right back to them. I heard them, but I didn't yet know how to listen.

Then the buck stopped here: A young, male deer stood in the middle of the gravel road next to the house I was meant to buy in West Virginia, and he wouldn't move. I was forced to idle on the gravel road at the corner of the oversized lot with a cute two-story 1908 farmhouse, and take a closer look. Mid-summer 2015. It was then that I started listening more closely to what the animals were trying to tell me. Not just humoring them and myself by mimicking their sounds, but listening and watching them to take in what they were telling me through their presence and song, and I would less-often speak back to them in my human language and thank them for the message. Including and especially the spiders, who made it a habit of regularly visiting me at my West Virginia home.

It didn't take long to hone my intuition to figure out what the animals were trying to tell me. And when I couldn't figure it out immediately, I still knew its import, and I would look it up later in one of my animal guidance resources, usually Ted Andrews' Animal Speak or, more recently, his Pocket Guide, which is small enough for me to travel with.

This weekend, it has been the insects who are talking to me: first, the butterfly, then the ants, and then the caterpillar.

Oh, Butterfly...

The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail—who is kind and forgiving despite my constant butchering of its name, calling it a Yellowtail—showed up on Saturday morning. It's been hawt in Asheville, peaking at 90º most days by noon, bad humidity, and then thankfully an afternoon thunderstorm to give us a small break. The sun blazed on Saturday and as I began to dry out, walking towards my water bottle, I spotted one of the many Swallowtails on campus, trekking the same path. We moved together down the length of the deck that sits next to the carport (under which we build the tiny houses). I noted its path with curiosity, and it beat me to our goal: my cerulean blue water bottle, sitting at the end of the deck railing.

I watched the butterfly probe my bottle for nearly 10 minutes, resting and no doubt pondering why this water-looking thing wasn't providing any water. I even tried to give it some water, dripped from a nail head, that I'd dipped into a different water bottle and placed nearby, but it wasn't having any of my shenanigans. It kept me company for such a lengthy time, I realized it had a message.

Butterfly (new birth): New love and joy are coming. Transformation is inevitable but will be easier than expected. Embrace the new beginnings. —Ted Andrews

(I'm debating, for the sake of my audience's reading attention span, to not delve deeply into each of the three insects and their specific meanings for me this past weekend. I think I want to stay at a higher level with this post. But if you're really curious, maybe you can message me and I'll write some more about it. I'm not trying to be coy, just attempting to get some quick thoughts down before the week moves on.)

Ants on the Hill

Today is September 1, 2024, and I finally got to an errand I've been meaning to do in Asheville since I arrived in March of this year. I went to my maternal grandfather's grave in Lewis Memorial Park. (Maybe I should also pay attention that this cemetery is on Beaverdam Road??) This grandfather—my mother's father—died of lung cancer in 1955 while living in Asheville. My mother was seven (her younger sister, five), and Robert Manning Moore has been an ethereal figure for most of my life. I've written about him in the past, often in relation to my knowledge of him through my grandmother and mom, including designing an entire new media project (back when we still called them that), titled Dear Robert Darling.

Some highlights about Robert's life that I remember: He was in the US Navy, stationed (with my grandmother in tow) at Pearl Harbor in early 1941, was out on the USS Enterprise at Midway when the bombing occurred, has otherwise been around the world on a naval ship (with pictures to prove it), was a clerk, and wrote (mostly typed) delightful letters to Ruby, my grandmother. She, in turn, wrote letters back to him, longhand. That forms the basis of Dear Robert Darling. In addition, I know that he and his brother Wilson ran a renown bakery at 321 Merrimon Avenue in Asheville for several years; Robert was the bookkeeper. They sold the business when Robert got sick, and the new owners ruined the recipes they promised to uphold.

The last time I visited Robert's grave was in July or August 1999, the first time I did my very own cross-country road trip. Asheville was my first stop (after a short-lived weekend romping it up in Chapel Hill at Sleazefest, a then-annual three-day rockabilly concert at the 504). All I did was drive through the still small-ish town, find the building where the old bakery was (now an out-of-business music store), and drive up to pay my respects at the cemetery. Then, as now, I took the required grave marker photo—though, then, I had to wait months to get the film developed and had WAY too many, unnecessary grave marker shots to warrant what I paid for the developing.

When I found Robert's grave—thanks to my mother's quick text responses and good memory—it was slightly overgrown. As I picked the ground cover to reveal the marker's corners, I saw it was covered in tiny, scurrying ants. I'd no doubt unsettled their nest. It didn't occur to me at first that they were there for me, but I looked around and notice that none of the other grave markers had ants on them. Just Robert's. And it was covered. Then it hit me... ahhhh, ants. Industriousness.

Ants (industriousness): Pursue your work for the common good. If your efforts are true, the rewards will follow. Build from the ground up—no short cuts.
— Ted Andrews

This one I remembered the key word by heart. I brushed them aside, called in Robert's energy as an ancestor whose spirit feels like joy, happiness, industriousness, adventurous, and calm to me. I brought Ruby's rabbit foot to the grave site with me. The rabbit's foot lives in my car, inside an Altoids tin decorated with an old family photo of her that I made for her for Christmas 1998. The tin and the foot has been in my car since she passed in January 1999. I laid the tin with the rabbit's foot on Robert's grave for a few moments while saying some prayers. Though she was married at least three times, Ruby always said Robert, her second husband, was the love of her life (thus, the salutation Dear Robert Darling on all of her letters).

Robert never struck me as a handy kind of guy—he wore glasses from what I remember in photos (clerk, bookkeeper)—but he did love books. Another story I remember from growing up was that he and Ruby had all these books in the bookcases. Old, smelly books. I loved them, of course. And the connection between Ruby's notekeeping her whole life, Robert's letter-writing, my dad's Post-It note poetry, and my three degrees in writing... well...writing comes from all sides of my family. I didn't know until much later that Robert had purchased many of those books at a garage sale so as not to make the bookshelves on top of the secretary desk look so empty. lol.

His travel spirit comes with me on all my trips. My hope is that his joyous spirit wanted to remind me, through the ants, that industriousness can be found in many aspects of life: my writing and my building, the latter of which is definitely being called out in the reminder to "build from the ground up—no short cuts!"

(Beaver, btw, means build. "Build towards your dreams. Do not neglect what is most important to you. Now is the time for action not daydreaming."—Ted Andrews)

The Caterpillar That Would

When I got back from the cemetery, I sat on the covered porch in the rain, checking a few things on my phone and having an afternoon snack. I leaned forward and thankfully caught this little fella in the corner of my eye before I squashed him. (Which is good because I would have ended up with a nasty, itchy rash.) This little caterpillar—well, he was a good inch-and-a-half long—came out of nowhere. He was just there, very certainly crawling up my leg, onto my shirt, and would have kept going had I not been startled enough to say, "Oh, hello!" when I first spotted him. That stopped him cold. And he was not budging for a hummus lid, a phone case, nothing unless it was organic material. Thankfully a friend is visiting this weekend and had left her yoga strap in arm's reach, so I grabbed that and relocated this mister to the far edge of the concrete pad, so he could go about his day in the grass.

Without hesitating, he bee-lined back towards me, making his way quite quickly. Meanwhile, I was trying my best google-fu to figure out what he was, how badly he might sting if I tried to touch him, and what his spiritual meaning was. He was quickly gaining on me, so I retreated to the tiny house and pulled out my Ted Andrews book:

Caterpillar (good luck): Good luck and new birth are at hand. Take a gentle and quiet approach to endeavors. Be realistic and shed the old.

My friend came back by then and, again I show my gratefulness to the universe, because she studied insects and caterpillars in particular as an undergraduate student and had an app that she spent a good deal of time looking through to determine what kind of caterpillar it was. We are still searching.

In sum: new birth, transformation, build from the ground up, and take it gently. Can do, Universe. Can do!