A Myth is a Female Moth

Lion's Gate & The Thinning Veil, Simplicity, and Why I'm Sick of Metaphorical Butterflies.

Vasilina Sirotina at Unsplash

When I was a little girl my Mom was studying French and Film. It was so exotic and intriguing to my little mind.

I was also terrified of moths. Their big fuzzy bodies would batter the windows of my Grandparents’ country cottage in the night, and I looked upon them with equal measures of wonder and terror.

‘You know what a moth is in French?’ my Mama asked me. ‘Papillon de nuit, that means “night time butterfly”. You love butterflies, don’t you?’ I nodded.

As far as I can remember, this was the earliest instance of poetic thought my mind could process.

Now, moths are of much further significance in my story, but it’s a wee bit of a ramble to get there. Bear with me.

The Squeeze of Synchrony

I’ve been sitting on a couple of drafts here on Substack, but I haven’t been able to muster up the gumption to finish either of them. It all seems like distractions from writing my book, but I can’t bear to abandon these babes just yet. One is a poem inspired by the four elements, the other is a therapeutic art exercise for grief.

Getting anything done is currently quite the squeeze.

Every time I sit down to tend to my creative babies, my eight month old wakes from his nap or something else needs tending.

In Ireland, we have what everyone is calling a “housing crisis” - I call it government ineptitude, if not outright weaponised incompetence, coupled with the devaluing of labour vs inflated property prices, because of proximity to our declining capital Dublin (the Eircodes here start with an even number - meaning you’re “posh”).

We have friends living with us until they find their feet in the Dublin rental market. I love living with these friends, they are genuinely the sweetest, most thoughtful, caring people we know. But between the house being busy and a teething baby, it can feel like I’m never going reach creative fulfillment.

We’re planning on putting a shed in the garden, specifically so I can have some creative space - but this is really just a placeholder for our home in the countryside someday, as far away from the city as I could possibly place myself.

I feel like we’re behind in life. I feel like I wasted my best years. I feel guilty we had babies before moving to the countryside, but if we waited, then we would potentially have had zero babies.

Often when I’m stuck in these unhelpful mind spirals, events conspire to remind me that time is progressing exactly as planned.

Head of a moth, magnified 90 times, Marinus Pieter Filbri

One of the friends living with us is a woman I’ve known as long as I can remember. She used to babysit me and, despite having drifted away from her over the years, she remained a slient but steady source of support in my life - waiting in the wings for whenever I needed her. Needless to say, I’m happy to finally return the favour.

She’s a bit tapped into the other side. She has premonitionary insights. She can sense when her loved ones have passed by the presence in her room. She predicted with freakish accuracy the surprise present her family had recently shipped in from abroad for her.

Recently we had three very strangely synchronous occurrences involving dreams that are simply beyond coincidence:

1. I was dreaming about swimming in the ocean, and greeted her the next morning with my dream story. She had been dreaming about buying me a swim suit.

2. I was on the other side of the country (Ireland is small to be fair), walking through a field and loosely gathering lines of poetry about my Grandad in my mind. Once home, I opened my phone to jot the lines in my notes app. She had text me - ‘Had a dream about your Grandad last night’

3. I had a lovely grief dream about my Nana, and wrote a note about it here. Later that evening, she text me to say she had been sorting through stuff in her parent’s house and found an old newspaper photo of me and my Grandparents - she was actually compelled to climb into the attic to rummage in a random bag, and lo, this photo was in the bag.

The next day was a normal, boring day - except for one occurance. As I pottered about the kitchen, suddenly I was auditarily assaulted by loud flappy buzzing in my ear. Thinking it was one of the usual pesky bluebottles this time of year, I batted it away without a second thought.

A large, fat, fuzzy, dark moth revealed itself, flapping about my head and then settling on our (too grimey to share picture here) window frame. Again, I didn’t think much about it at the time. Until I went to the upstairs bathroom, and a second, smaller, grey and black speckled moth sat there on the sill.

For some reason, the smaller moth triggered a memory of me in the depths of my grief after Nana had passed. I have no idea why I assigned her the moth as her means of revisitation in those days, I just did. My Uncle is bumble bee, and our friend’s husband is a wasp. My Mom associates robins with Nana, but moths always sat right with me instead.

But I had forgotten about it until now.

Moths in Summer isn’t particularly poignant in and of itself - it is peak moth season afterall, as they emerge from their cocoons and seek mates.

What is poignant is the timing - the veil between worlds is thin around this time of year.

As of time of writing, 17th July) have Mercury, the psychopomp that brings messages between the living and the dead, stationing retrograde at 15 Leo - the Leo power portal.

This time of year social media usually buzzing about the Lion’s Gate Portal on the 8th August. This is an annual occurance (the eighth day of the eighth month), where the energies are ripe for manifestations practices, rituals, meditations etc. As far as I can tell, the primary basis for the date tends to be centred on this numerological alignments of 8s.

You’d think, given my Leo stellium, I’d be all about the Lion’s Gate and tapping into my personal powers, but honestly I think of this Lion’s Gate Portal malarky as just another pop buzz word.

I do, however, have great respect for the Power Degrees of the Fixed Signs, which occur at 15 degrees Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. The fixed signs are associated with the fullness of the seasons: Leo - High Summer, Aquarius - Deep Winter, Taurus -- Bright & Lush Spring, Scorpio - Darkening Autumn.

The qualities of the fixed signs are enduring - they have the determination and persistence to see things through. They will have an unshakeable faith in their ability to bring forth fruits in time, and will offer their unwavering dedication to those who need it.

Although numbers have archetypal power, I do not believe the Lion’s Gate occurs on the 8th August due to the double 8 phenomenon, but rather due to the passing of the Sun over the 15th degree of Leo - the degree of power - which is actually the 7th August this year.

All of this explanation is really just to say - these synchronicities hold a LOT more weight than usual.

Simplify, Slow Down, and Be Kind.

Later on that evening of moths, I was reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to my eight month old before bed. The illustrations in this book are so simple, but so, so, SO GORGEOUS.

I imbibed the illustrations of apples and leaves with my eyes, noticing the subtleties of texture and form. I began to sort of see Eric Carle’s artistic process in my mind, and how ingeniously elementary this process was.

Carle used a mixed media technique of painting tissues, harnessing the vibrant colours produced due to the tissue’s transparency, and then, once dried, cutting out basic shapes to form collages.

While researching Carle’s process, I came across his advice:

“Simplify, slow down, and be kind. And don’t forget to have art in your life - music, paintings, theatre, dance, and sunsets.” Eric Carle

I’ve been scuffling with a book idea for as long as my little man has been alive - nearly eight months now. We are currently going through the dreaded eight-month sleep regression phase…

I feel so stuck - stuck endlessly researching and never trusting my own innate expertise, garnished from a life of many difficult experiences.

Stuck figuring out the exercises and how to make a perfectly cohesive whole out of the end products, and stuck scrambling to find 20 minutes here and there to work out the most complicated, and closest to my heart (aside from my baby of course), project of my life thus far.

Carle’s advice initiated the paradigm shift I needed to finalise my plans for the exercises within this book: Simplify.

Every mentor I’ve ever had has told me I need to simplify my ideas - I need to distill them down to their basic essence and, to borrow from alchemy, extract this essence from the dross. My own Mother has in the past described my writings as too dense, impenetrable, or inaccessible.

I used to take these as criticisms. Over time I stopped caring. I was writing for myself, and if it resonated with others, great.

But writing for others - especially grieving others - and hoping that they might be willing to compensate your efforts, does require a paradigm shift. It does need to be accessible, comforting, and if I’m doing my job well, hopeful.

The grieving mind is riddled with the complexities of the tasks of mourning, as Worden described them: accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain of grief, adjusting to a new identity with new responsibilities, and finding meaning in a painful life.

This is no small feat. Asking a griever to summon the energy to begin a new project is a big ask, and asking them to trust you to lead this process in an uncertain world is another leap indeed.

So taking my time with the preparations is paramount, but I’m prone to over extending myself. I wanted to pack in a little of every arts & crafts style going because the “go big or go home!” mentality of the Big Pharma work ethic is evidently rather well rooted in my well-meaning mind - I’ve always strived to be a high performer.

But let’s face it, a zentangles doodle design project, followed by a sculpture of your signficant keystone, with some smashed momentos mosaic and a bit of support structure weaving, followed by grounding stone painting etc etc etc. is a tad too much.

Now, my kindred spirits, I hear you - “That does sound like something I would love. I love trying new things, why not include such variety?!”

You see, every exercise in the book eventually forms part of a larger whole - a sort of artistically rendered home for your grief - and these wholes will hopefully form a village; a co-collaborative, creative self-care movement.

The beauty of big projects is that they are an assembly of small, simple, but meaningful acts.

So, the exercises in the book will honour exactly that: the simple process of mixed media collage, utilised by Eric Carle in The Very Hungry Catrepillar.

Muddy Moments

I lay in bed that night thinking about the significance of it all: the dreams, the synchronicities, and what appeared to be inklings of messages whispering from somewhere beyond the veil - through moths.

I remembered that even the simplicity of mixed media collage has so much space for play and conection with nature.

I remembered preparing for my Nana’s funeral; how her beautiful corpse lay in the sittingroom, heavily scented of rose geranium. My boyfriend and I snuck away from the chaos, a little tipsy on wine, and walked up to the top of the lane. After the last house, where the road ended, was a stand of trees with a very muddy path.

We took off our shoes and rambled through that small stand, up to our ankles in squelchy mud, and for a few brief moments, I forgot I was grieving and remembered I was living.

When we returned bare footed with mud booties, everyone in the house laughed it off as us being simply drunk, but I’ve been drunk many, many times. Most of those moments are forgotten, discarded to the wastelands of my wasted mind.

That moment, however, has always remained with me - a juxtaposition of the joy and grief that can simulatenously co-exist in any and every moment.

I lay in bed imagining where mixed media art can take us - beyond the studio space, through muddy fields or upon sandy shores, and how the textures of living can be enfolded within the process of art making.

These are the moments I wish to bring alive with my book.

An obvious symbolism that I have neglected to address so far is that of transformation: both the moth and the butterfly begin life as caterpillars, eventually entering an intermediate chrysalis phase where their entire body liquifies into a biochemical soup that is somehow miraculously reformed into a beautiful winged creature.

The thing is, if you spend any time at all in the online grief world these images of butterflies become pretty twee, a tad contrived, and, for me, they just lose their symbolic potency entirely.

I have a future draft Substack title saved in my notes: “I Don’t Need Any More Butterflies”. When you lose a child, everything becomes butterflies - the cards people send, the embillishments on gifts, the notebook from the charity, the decorative additins on his candle and his ceramic prints… Every overly saccharine comfort-quote doing the rounds on grief media features a feckin’ butterfly.

Everytime I see a butterfly I’m told “Oh it’s Lucas coming back to visit” - just because culturally, here in Ireland, butterflies are the spirits of babies that have passed, but I’m hardly ever asked about my own personal symbolisms (I see more of that baby in a aubergine or a lemon than I do in a butterfly, if anyone would care to ask).

I sound bitter - I’m not. I’ve just entirely bored with the butterfly metaphors. I need TOOLS and TECHNIQUES, not frills and trimming.

Grief is transformative, and I can appreciate that my identity has been liquified and resolidified many times over by this mysterious process.

But butterflies, beautiful as they are, are incredibly delicate. They have a life expectancy of several weeks, maybe months in some species. Moths aren’t much tougher either.

Butterflies fail fucking miserably at capturing the essence of transformation through grief.

You unwittingly spend your life building a scaffolding of assumptions around you - that the world is benevolent, just, controllable and predicatable, that you are worthy of these things and that bad things happen to other people - for the tectonic forces of grief to suddendly shatter those protective walls.

That earthquake erodes your very foundations, your sense of safety, churning up the core of uncertainty; the rubble of your self-confidence.

You pick up the pieces to rebuild, to pretend you have come out the other side of the process, but your crumbling edifice gives way again and again.

This is why I’m writing my book - for others like me, who need a more meaningful metaphor for their personal rebuild project.

Grief is not something passive that biologically just happens - like breathing or sleeping - it’s an active act of endurance and rehabilitation.

Rebuilding from the rubble has a resonance with grief like no other, and although I want to provide a blueprint - not THE blueprint, but MY blueprint for rebuilding.

Moth mouth parts, Martin Frobenius Ledermüller

My lovely friend - the one described above, the one “tapped into the other side” - sent me a list of actual 6th grade history test answers, and the results are, of course, hilarious.

Among the long list are some crackers, such as “Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics” or “Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines”.

But the one that has laughing tears streaming down my face as I currently write goes to:

“The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.”

In writing about dreams, my grandparents, messages from the other side, and how I extracted some meaning from these synchronous occurances into instructions for moving my book forward, something struck me.

These reflections on meaning and messages from my Nana will become the myths of my living son’s future - and she was, indeed, a female moth.

To my Bluequentials & our Creative Grief Club,

Your presence here means so much to me on our walk with creativity and grief. Every time you read, comment, or share these words, you validate that creative grieving is a possibility for us all. Your support allows me to continue researching, writing, and creating resources that honour our losses while nurturing our resilience.

If it resonates, consider a small donation to the Coffee Donations using the button below - it keeps the words flowing while I’m nap-trapped with my little one, and my emotional support dog (Blue!) walked on the daily!

Thank you for believing in this work.

Sarah-Liz & Blue