Throughout a dismal summer, people asked where all the butterflies had gone. Occasionally a white flash fluttered out of the corner of my eye — one appeared at my window as I wrote that, would you believe — paper wings sifted through pink thrift and oxeye daisies which, apparently, are also referred to as moon daisies because they’re so bright they appear to glow at night. I meant to check this and forgot. But it was true — this year recorded the lowest ever number in the Big Butterfly Count and the reported decline in moths and butterflies is becoming all the more visible even to those not particularly looking for it. Did you know that butterflies, on average, only live for a week or two? One day this summer a sizeable orange-winged thing came knocking on my window and my first thought was, I wonder if that’s you, remembering a butterfly who flew out of that very window a few years ago. It was then, Googling ‘how long do butterflies live’, that I realised it would be impossible. Other recent searches include ‘rock butter’, ‘paper wasp nest’ and ‘97 hit from The Verve, ‘bittersweet synonym’. I wonder how many butterflies were lucky enough to emerge at just the right time this year to experience a lifetime of stillness and sunshine.
With butterflies on my mind, at my window and, in two dimensional form, falling through the library’s letterbox and glowing from my screen, here are few updates on the library followed by more about that butterfly who came to visit.
Latest news from the library
New books and objects
If you’re visiting the library, please ask to see the ten bird nests or fragments of a wasp’s nest which were recently donated by local artist Hugh Loney. The once ornamental Singer sewing machine has been skilfully restored by a thoughtful visitor (who remarked, on returning a borrowed book by Terry Tempest Williams, that ‘she writes how I knit and sew’). The shelves have had a seasonal refresh to reflect the change in the seasons. The door remains open (via a buzzer) from 10-4 Friday-Sunday, with any changes to hours being posted on Instagram.
Equinox Supper
“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals.” The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
The Nature Library hosted its first supper, celebrating the autumn equinox with words (and plants!) from The Nether Project and food from Narture in Ayr and Glasgow’s two.eight.seven as well as the library’s neighbours, Gloria and Pilar of Made by Flour who decorated their sublime meringue clouds with flowers from the garden and filled the water with chocolate mint and parting gifts of sunflower seeds. There’ll be more suppers to come.
Weeds, Wild Oats and Other Stories
There’s still time to visit The Nature Library at Grinneabhat in Bragar, Isle of Lewis as part of Weeds, Wild Oats and Other Stories, a joint literary and visual reflection on nature between The Nature Library and artist Magdalena Choluj. Oats, language, landscape, I don’t really want this one to end, but sadly it does on October 12.
Scotland’s Climate Week and Green Libraries Week
“It is critical for governments to put creative incentives in place so that communities around the world have tools to say yes to renewable energy. But … all progress will be put at risk unless policymakers are willing simultaneously to say no to the ever rapacious fossil fuel industry.” — This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Naomi Klein
Last week was Scotland’s Climate Week, a Scottish Government initiative aiming to “raise awareness of climate change and to encourage us all to consider the actions required from all of society in order to achieve net zero”. The theme was Stories for Change. Stories that change things — the way we think, see, feel, the questions we ask, the choices we make — are the reason this library exists and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate was a big one personally. For reasons which aren’t that important I have a number of hardback copies of it. Visitors to the library have been able to take a copy away away with them for free — to keep, obviously you can take any of the books away for free — until they’re gone.
The Nature Library will also be celebrating Green Libraries Week from October 7-13 with free workshops throughout the weekend along with some other good, green things.
The Nature Library is open 10-4 from Friday - Sunday at 122B Montgomery Street, Irvine, Ayrshire, KA12 8PW
One day with a butterfly
Turn to the page about flowers. You know, he says that a butterfly is a flower with wings. Don’t you think that is a fine idea?
Georgia O’Keeffe
In January, my friend Anna shared something about that strange, suspended month. It wants to be a beginning but rarely offers such promise. “It’s goo”, she said. Our bodies and minds are mush. We’re caterpillars curled up in cocoons, components and whatever we became in the past year dissolving into a gloop before taking shape for the one ahead. Winter passes and the light returns. Summer comes, in its own way. By autumn the air has regained its sharpness and it feels a good time to check in with the analogy. What transformations have taken place? What journeys, across the world or of more modest distances? Am I reminded of Annie Dillard’s childhood, caught by her well-intentioned teacher, all wishes to bestow the marvels of the natural world as crumpled as great wings in a too small jar?
A smaller moth could have spread its wings to their utmost in that mason jar, but the Polyphemus moth was big. Its gold furred body was almost as big as a mouse. Its brown, yellow, pink, and blue wings would have extended six inches from tip to tip, if there had been no mason jar. It would have been big as a wren.
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
None of the above, really. In January the library was somewhere in-between finding a permanent space and moving into it, but it’s by no means existing with wings outstretched yet, and while I can think like a butterfly a little more effectively than I can think like a mountain, the fact remains that, as Jonathon Porritt wrote in The Green Fuse, “I can never never be other than human”. My phone reminded me that a few years ago I, no more than human, spent twenty four hours with one no more than butterfly, so I wanted to reminisce before I forget our time together completely. It also has a little bit to do with Barbara Kingsolver, and a little bit to do with hope.
As soon as the first person walked into The Nature Library at Civic House back in October 2019 it began being shaped, in earnest, by its visitors. Sometimes this was in the form of time spent browsing, reading; someone choosing this space as a place to spend time would make me consider anew what exactly the library is or could be. Conversations would open up new connections, as they do. One visitor spent over an hour perusing the shelves, sitting down with considered choices one by one, browsing with the grace of someone walking through a meadow, hands clasped softly behind their back, occasionally dipping their head to smell a flower. Ah, yes. Lovely. A collection of books became a library.
But to speak of others shaping it in a more literal sense, it has to be through the tender and tangible book donation. The shelves become brighter, richer, radiating with stories I might never have found on my own. Whether or not they realise (or want) it, by donating a book, visitors hand over a part of themselves. The generosity throws me every time. I thank them too profusely, swear I see their eyes widen, weight transferring to their heels as they consider asking for it back. Such a moment occurred at the opening of library’s second location, Glasgow’s Project Cafe in November 2019, when someone who kindly donated a book at Civic House (thank you) donated two more (thank you thank you). Both books were by an author I was unfamiliar with at the time — Barbara Kingsolver. Thank you thank you thank you.
It’s impossible, now, for me to think of butterflies without thinking of Barbara Kingsolver. Flight Behaviour, one of the two books donated, tells the story of the monarch butterfly. In fact it tells the story of thousands of them filling a forest at the foot of the Appalachian mountains, engulfing the thick columns of ancient trees and weighing down their limbs, steeping the air with an orange glow; a symbol of environmental crisis or heavenly miracle depending on which character of the book is speaking. Every turn of the page sounds like a wing shuffling for space.
“The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes.”
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour
Kingsolver never saw herself as a writer when she was growing up in rural Kentucky, convinced that they were, by and large, “old, from England, and uniformly dead”. She accepted that by being American, alive and a woman, becoming a writer simply wasn’t an option and still, of course, her notebooks began to fill with poems and stories. When biology class enticed her with a career in science she ended up with a job as scientific writer for the University of Arizona and demonstrated that roads don’t tend to be signposted with ‘Become an Author, This Way →’. Even when pursuing science, writing was inescapably her way being and communicating in this world. Her background in biology, and later in human rights and social issues, came to form the core of her novels, arguably Flight Behaviour most of all (of the ones I’ve read, gleefully still outnumbered by those I haven’t).
I read it in the almost-autumn of 2021. I’d been swimming outside my house near enough every day that year, but spells of high winds had kept us on dry land for weeks — I have no interest in entering a sea that doesn’t seem to want me in it. On this day it was by no means calm, but safe enough to be met with open arms. The sun clawed at water and stone and we threw ourselves into the washing machine waves, filling our bodies back up like soaked fruit. Shouts of ‘Oh, hello!’ got caught in the breeze as bodies were lifted by the swell, each crest a garden fence over which a friendly face would appear.
All summer, my eyes were honing in on a particular shape and colour. Alarming abnormalities in the surface of the sea to avoid, avoid, avoid. Lion’s mane jellyfish. It’s easy to spot a solid thing in liquid, even when that solid thing is itself made almost entirely of water. They blister the surface, smoothing out the ripples in a way that’s not-quite-right enough to make you look twice. My eyes constantly scanned for these smoothings and for the colour orange — not of the fruit, or of the near-neon fizzy juice that used to fill the blue capped bottles strewn on the strand line. No. Rusty orange like a wreckage.
By September we’d collectively waved off the last of the jellyfish, and on a day so wavy it’d have been pointless looking out for them anyway, but my eyes clocked a flash of orange just as I’d taught them to. This was a bright orange, though. Like the fruit. Or the fizz.
Tunnel vision is the term for it. That fleck orange was everything. It was probably a Toffee Crisp wrapper, but I needed to know for sure. The orange lay on the surface like a slip of of silk and as soon as it was an arm’s length away, I lurched forward and scooped it up with my big foam neoprene hand.
It was a butterfly.
I kicked furiously back to shore with my left hand, cradling it, held above my head, and my right worked tirelessly to push through waves which seemed to surge twice as high. Sometimes I’d spin onto my back for a rest and to make sure the butterfly was still there. With wings snapped shut they stood poised on my finger, statuesque against the whirling wind and water.
Fellow swimmers looked at me, puzzled. “A butterfly!” I yelped chaotically, followed by “I’m reading a book about butterflies!”, which seemed important. It was important. The book was coming to life. Sort of.
Onshore, the butterfly perched on my hand still clad in a neoprene glove which needed to come off, and I prayed that the release of my suckered fingers wouldn’t ping the small creature to the heavens. Swimmers chatted, flasks squeaked open, clothes were deftly flung off and on. Meanwhile I stared, stunned. Eventually, with the glove safely removed and them still atop it, I carried them both home like an offering.
Now what, I wondered. Sitting in the window seat I continued looking and as my body warmed, other senses began to thaw. The butterfly’s feet were sticky. Strong. Disproportionately, I thought, for their size, and considering that the tip of each leg looked like black thread frayed and splayed after too many failed attempts through the needle. The wings’ underside were the greyish brown of wet cement and remained closed as small staccato steps were taken up my robe, the tiny rumble of them enough to roll beads of saltwater off the edges of paper wings. Then, in the blink of an eye that I was luckily taking a lot less of, those wings popped open and my world was struck by a shock of orange.
I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.
Flight Behaviour, Barbara Kingsolver
One of the wings was torn from body to tip. Unable, or simply unwilling, to fly, once its wings opened up it began beelining up my arm with newly tapped vigour. (A moment, if I may, to remark on the way a butterfly walks. There’s something comical, almost penguin-like, to it. A sort of seesawing with every step. A toddling.) As they reached my shoulder I’d place my hand there, onto which they would embark and be carried back down to my wrist. Then off it went again. We did this hop on hop off dance for a while, round and round as I kept them away from where I didn’t want them to go. The sensitive parts — collarbones, neck, face — seemed to encroach on my personal space, but eventually it seemed futile, cruel, even, putting so much effort into keeping them from wherever they were so determined to go. The butterfly stomp stomp stomped (I couldn’t hear the impact of its wayward feet, but maybe they could) a worn path up my arm and, let loose, kept on going. Up onto my collar which it used as a bridge from one side of my neck to the other, then climbing onto my hair until they reached the very top of my head, where they stopped. Okay then. I could get back to my day. (With continued interruptions, since it’s impossible not to document minute by minute a butterfly living in your hair. A real, breathing butterfly, not from Claire’s Accessories but from the raging sea.)
Dinner was cooked with them perched on my crown. Vegetables chopped, grains scooped, water boiled, stirred, drained. After a little while I took out my phone and flipped the camera around to face me to check on them, and gasped. The butterfly was gone.
Oh god. Oh god they fell in. The clumsy human thought they could be a butterfly’s saviour and inevitably made things worse.
A valid theory, usually, but in this instance the butterfly had simply closed their wings and stood camouflaged against my hair. Apparently they do this when resting, and I felt a sense of pride having given them such a valuable sense of safety. (They also do it to cool down which, standing over the hob, was more likely.)
It’s hard to eat dinner with a butterfly crawling all over you so I popped them in what I hoped was a suitably large jar, big enough to walk around in but enough of a challenge to crawl out of that maybe they wouldn’t bother trying. I ate dinner in peace, glancing between bites, and released them back into the wide-ish world when finished. Immediately a flutter filled my ear and the butterfly flew — flew! — to the ceiling. Unimpeded by its half-wing, and away from me for the first time. Possibly, I considered, in a bit of a huff about the jar.
They stayed put, the night drew on, and eventually I had to go to bed. An evening of butterfly research informed me of their love for lemons, oranges, watermelon and apples, and I hoped the one sad lemon from the fridge would do. Shockingly, no. In the morning they remained in exactly the same spot I left them in, so I dashed outside for richer fare. Clover and daisies, wild cabbage, dandelion, arranged in a small cardboard box with some grass. Though not expecting a round of applause, I was a little perturbed when they climbed instantly out of the box. Back onto my hand. Up my arm. Into my hair.
Yesterday’s flurry of excitement began to morph into worry that I was doing something wrong. Should I have taken the butterfly home at all? Was I doing more harm than good? Removing them from whatever natural cycle it was supposed to experience? Was I doing them any favours or just entertaining myself? Still, convinced that surely they needed to eat something, I encouraged them back into the munchie box. And they found the dandelion. Gosh, did they find the dandelion. With no hesitation and effortless elegance, the proboscis unfurled deep into that bright weed, that tiny sun, and between its slim petals slipped straight and strong as a needle (a snap bracelet comes to mind). The butterfly glugged and glugged and glugged, front legs splayed sturdily to either side lest it fall over in delirium from the gorging of all this sweetness.
The effect was akin to my nephew’s first sip of Irn Bru. The butterfly suddenly effervesced as though reminded of their life’s purpose and sure as hell that they weren’t going to find it here. They scrambled to the window and looked longingly to the horizon. The wind howled. Stay, I thought. It’s not safe out there. But their body quivered against the glass, frantic. Okay. I cracked the window and nudged them towards the wider, open end. They bounced off the inside pane and onto my thigh, where there was nothing between them and the open sky. And then they flew.
I don’t particularly want to make a mystery out of this because the whole point is that there’s no mystery to it. I believe that to relate to the earth in this way is natural, ordinary and accessible to everybody. The spiritual can and often should be utterly mundane.
Jonathon Porritt, Green Fuse
It’s difficult talking about a butterfly. I’m no scientist. I’m no butterfly. It’s impossible understand how it might have felt when my hand scooped it out of the waves, but I’m not sure how much harm there is in trying. “Yes I am anthropomorphizing goddammit”. I don’t understand how the butterfly feels but neither is it offered an inkling to how I feel. Our existences matter to each other nonetheless. Quite directly on this occasion, but also indirectly, anytime one emerges into a world transformed by human actions, anytime one emerges on day one of a two week spell of high winds and rain. We exist in the same place and in equal measures. It’s sort of absurd, that one route of evolution created a butterfly and another created humans, and here we are, living in the same town. I’m not sure where jellyfish fit in.
“The spiritual can and often should be utterly mundane” said Jonathon Porritt. We experience it when the light spills in great beams over distant hills, or a snowdrop pushes through the hard winter soil, or a tiny worm makes tiny ringlets of wet sand by passing that sand through its entire body. Like it’s nothing. Leaves once green are suddenly ablaze red and orange. Butterfly orange. Somehow, at some point, one definition of mundane, that which is relating to or characteristic of the world, became synonymous with another, that which is lacking interest or excitement, dull, ordinary. Somewhere, sometime, the everyday world came to be considered less miraculous than a heavenly one. A caterpillar dissolves into mush inside its cocoon. A butterfly is born. It lands on a flower which eats the sun and exists in colours we’ll never see. Everything that is relating to or characteristic of the world is extraordinary.
“I’m not unhopeful”, said Barbara Kingsolver at Portobello Bookshop’s launch of her latest book Demon Copperhead. “That’s not an option.” The reason this library started was because these books were making me more concerned about the environment and more hopeful for its future at the same time. Flight Behaviour explores the paradox of science in human culture. Science has always offered new understandings of the world yet can be met with scepticism, particularly with the increased access citizens have to information, factual or less so. We have, more than ever, agency to question what we’re told. This is a good thing. But when the findings of scientists are not the quest for space flight or our understanding of gravity or the curing of diseases, when instead of ‘We’ve done it’ we’re more likely to hear ‘We have a problem’, there’s less to cheer for. But the problem solving, the making-of, the not-quite-there-yet moments of looking and checking and trying only add to the magic of discovery. They show how unexpectedly an answer can be found, the value of working on a problem, the beauty of the drudge. Flight Behaviour is a reminder of how ludicrous it is to expect any kind of ‘We did it, it’s done’. Crucially, it also highlights the importance of scientists, researchers, reporters, media and the general public all being given access to an understanding of what’s happening from trusted, reliable sources. (The public recently put libraries in the top five trusted professional groups — 46% of adults said that libraries would provide trustworthy information. Though it should also be noted that 49% said the same about police officers.) The in-progress, the unfolding, the searching — the caterpillar mush — is as true and as vital as whatever emerges. Which itself is rarely, if ever, final. Science is never finished. A story is never finished. All of this has something to do with hope. All of this has something to do with not much more than a butterfly.
Troon Public Library back in May. Tulips by Richard who’s been looking after the library’s garden for fifteen years. While I was there at least one person for each of those years stopped to comment on how beautiful they were, and thanked him for them.
song/book
Another self indulgent serving of a book paired with a song, this time it’s The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Years by John Anderson, but which I heard via a cover by Sierra Ferrell.
Don't look back in sorrow
The children have tomorrow
Those years, everybody knows you gotta let 'em go
And they kinda roll by like tears
Just a measure of time, playin' with your mind
And passin' you by, those years
Years, Sierra Ferrell
Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory. … Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple of wellbeing, repeats the same curve of rhythm; covers fresh sand with a chill or ebbs a little slackly without. So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose–so it seems.
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Final bits
Currently reading: In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Read: Readers on the importance of libraries, and their fragile future
Read: An alarmingly bad day searching for butterflies
Sign: Butterfly Conservation calls for government action on nature emergency
Watch: Guardian of the Monarchs
View: ELEMENTAL Exhibition by Charleigh Ferguson at the Harbour Arts Centre