caterpillars

Little Salt and I are sitting together under an ancient angel oak tree.

We call the tree St. Gabriel, because it has two gigantic limbs that look like arms reaching up into the sky and a glow that looks like a halo shining around it.

There are caterpillars (aurviqs in Iñupiaq and orugas in Spanish) everywhere, inching their way over and around St. Gabriel and us.

It might look like there is no end to them, but they have to be very careful.

See that bird sitting on St. Gabriel’s shoulder? 

It’s ready to swoop down on one of these little ones and eat it for supper.

Hear those paper wasps buzzing around the nest on St. Gabriel’s arm? 

They would love to have one of these little ones for supper, too. 

Little Salt’s abuelo and mamí might accidentally step on one of these little ones with the soles of their huaraches and crush the life out of it.

So there are many things these caterpillars should be afraid of.

But there are some ways they can protect themselves. 

Nature has given them some amazingly wonderful, wonderfully amazing ways to help them live. 

Look at this one. 

It’s got bright colors all around it.

It will become a Monarch butterfly. 

Those bright colors tell that bird and those paper wasps that the caterpillar has been eating poisonous plants and so is poisonous itself.

Nature helps them be tough on the inside so they can be safe on the outside.

Here.

This is caterpillar larva. 

At first, I thought it was bird droppings.

These eggs will become Tiger Swallowtail butterflies.

Nature helps them camouflage themselves so they can stay safe.

There.

That one will have big circles on it’s wings that look like eyes.

Those big circles are called eyespots and will make the butterfly that comes out of this caterpillar look bigger and scarier than it really is. 

Nature helped it look like a snake so that birds and paper wasp will leave it alone.

Caterpillars have a lot to be afraid of.

 

But they have a lot to be brave about, too.

Like us.

little light

The Iñupiaq word for caterpillar is aurviq.

The word for butterfly is taqalakisaq.

When I was a little girl, my aapaaluk, my grandpa, held my hand and toddled with me around the spring land of Point Hope.

The land wakes in the Arctic spring, when the sun moves higher and longer across the sky, after the Arctic winter, when it sleeps the cold, cold months, sometimes in twenty-four hours a day of darkness, under a heavy blanket of snow and ice.

“Ataguna,” said my aapaaluk.

Look.

It is a taqalakisaq.

A butterfly.”

Then he was silent.

He is always silent after he tells me to look at something.

“It’s because I want you to taaqsiulgu, Little Light,” he tells me time and time again, “I want you to see in the darkness.

And you cannot do that with too much talking.”

I was learning to look AND to see.

I am learning, still.

I saw the butterfly.

It was beautiful.

So very beautiful.

“It is an Arctic Fritillary,” he said.

“The yellow in it’s wings reminds us of the sunlight off of the Chukchi Sea, Little Light, the sunlight that brings us warmth, the sunlight that brings us hope.

Hope.

The taqalakisaq is born out of the aurviq, the caterpillar.

It becomes the taqalakisaq through ilimmaq, through metamorphosis.

The shaman metamorphoses to fly through the air or the sea to learn the old ways to bring back to the people.

To help the people.

The aurviq, like the shaman, metamorphoses.

Three living things, Little Light - the caterpillar, the shaman, and the bowhead whale - hold the world.

They hold the world.”

I held out my hand.

The taqalakisaq landed on my palm.

My aapaaluk was silent again. 

This time he was silent for a long time.

He looked at the butterfly in my palm.

He saw.

“Little Light,” he said, after the butterfly lifted off of my hand and flittered off into the sunlight. 

Atanya.

Listen.”

You cannot do THAT with too much talking, either.

Sometimes, though, when he really wants me to tusaanigluk, to hear and want to hear more, he uses the word atanya for listen, instead of the common word ‘a’, he will say a few more words.

“Your name is Taklaingiq. 

It is the old language for the agviq, the bowhead whale. 

Your name is similar to the name for the butterfly, taqalakisaq.

The agviq’s name is similar to the name for the caterpillar, aurviq.

The old way teaches that names are important.

The old way teaches that all things are connected.

What does this mean to you, Little Light?

What does this mean for you?

Ataguna.

Atanya.

He held my hand again, the hand that had held the butterfly, and we toddled on.

minimalism

His mamí, on the way to the garden to pick fruits and vegetables from the plants and and trees of the land, would find him beneath the apple tree beside the fence of the garden, writing.

His bony shoulders hunched over his notebook as if he were a human question mark.

His long fingers gripped around his pencil as if he were a human exclamation point.

Writing the things he saw and heard and smelled and tasted and touched.

Writing the things he thought and felt.

His papí, on the way back from the fields, would find him on top of the giant rock in their yard, writing, his eyes to the sky as if he were seeing something others barely missed seeing, his ears to the ground as if he were hearing something others barely missed hearing.

flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk

White and cold. 

Everything was covered in cold white. 

The fields that provided for us. 

The trees that shaded us.

My abuelo’s hunched shoulders as he trudged to the barn to milk the cows. 

All were blanketed in snow. 

It was the coldest stretch of days and the heaviest and deepest of snows that the low country of South Carolina had seen in a hundred years. 

It was the first time I had EVER seen snow.

Mamí had her arm around me.

We snuggled close together.

We watched my abuelo disappear into the blinding whiteness of the pouring snow.

“Eso es nieve, Little Salt,” she whispered. “That is snow. Es tan, tan hermoso, ¿no es asi?

It’s so, so beautiful.

It makes everything look so bright and clean and new. 

But, you know what? 

I’m thinking about what’s underneath that snow.

I’m thinking about that because of something that happened to me when I was a little girl in El Salvador.

Every Sunday afternoon, mi papí and mi mamí would take me and your tias and your tios to San Salvador. 

We all worked so hard on the farms and in the fields from Monday through to Mornings.

We campesinos loved Sunday afternoons because we were allowed to go to Mass and then sit together and enjoy the evening in the city park.

Everything looked white, clean and new in the city center. 

White, clean and new.

We were walking down the sidewalk, papí in front, mamí behind him, and siete hijos in a row from the tallest to the shortest. 

A land owner was walking up the sidewalk toward us.

As was the custom, we stepped off the sidewalk to let the land owner pass. 

I looked down at the ground.

I saw something surprising.

The sidewalk had a small crack in it.

Out of that broken place grew a flower, a tiny flower. 

Even though I was wearing my Sunday dress, I knelt down on the ground close to the flower.

I cupped my hands around it so I could really see it. 

It was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen in my life. 

It's still the most beautiful flower I have ever seen in my life. 

It’s petals were yellow.

It’s stem was green.

And the center holding its seeds was brown. 

The yellow was the color of the early morning sun.

The green was the color of the fields at dawn and dusk.

The brown was the same color as my skin. 

There was that flower, growing through the hard, white concrete that covered the earth!

That's why I’m thinking about things that are covered up, Little Salt. 

About things that are underneath. 

Most of the time, you can’t see them.

But they're there.

They’re beautiful.

And they’re making a crack in the sidewalk so they can be seen, and grow, and make the world un lugar mas hermoso.

A more beautiful place.

Estamos aquí, mi hijo.

We are here.

little salt

At the sound of Little Salt’s whistle in the early morning darkness, the lightning bugs in the old, cracked mason jar beside his cot began flashing their lights. 

A warm glow filled the gutted out school bus his family used as shelter during the summer as migrant workers on a Johns Island peach and tomato farm.

On the day he was born in the crowded favela outside the big city of San Salvador, a surprising thing happened.

He was wrapped in a blanket, snuggled by his mamí’s side.

His big, brown eyes were wide open. 

He was as still as the water in the lakes and ponds in the countryside on that hot, sunny afternoon. 

A lightning bug came into the room and lit gently on his nose. 

He blinked his eyes four short blinks.

The lightning bug blinked four short blinks back. 

He blinked three long blinks.

It blinked three long blinks back. 

Was he communicating with the lightning bug? 

Is such a thing possible? 

Maybe.

Maybe not.

You will have to decide.

The lightning bug took flight and flew out the window from which it had come.

It made it’s way into the bigger, wider world of the workers and campesinos of El Salvador.

When he was two years old, he was lying on his back under the afternoon shade of the old apple tree in the back corner of the Johns Island South Carolina farm.

His abuelo was lying beside him.

They were looking up into the branches that were heavy laden with little green apples.

“That color green there, Little Salt, is a color that can't be made with paints on an artist’s palette,” said the old man.

“Nope.

Only the universe can make colors like that.”

His abuelo was talking quietly to him, circling the pad of his calloused thumb round and round his chubby brown cheek.

A lightning bug lit on his nose and flashed its soft yellow light three times. 

Little Salt’s eyes turned inward toward the lightning bug. 

He blinked three times, as if he was sharing a soft light of his own that was yet unknown to human hearts and minds around him.

I knew then that he was a special kid, the kind of person born into the world once in a long, long while.

Carter and Carver

(looking for beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary, courage in the human)

My little brother stood quietly beside his desk.

He held a magnifying glass in his hand. 

I looked at him from the splintered pine frame of our kitchen door.

He turned around slowly, a person in deep thought, and looked at me through the lens of the glass. 

His magnified eye was astonishingly big and brown.

As big as the world and as brown as the turned soil in the fields around our farm in Clarendon County.

- Carver, why you up? It’s the middle of the night.

- I cain’t sleep.

- What you doin’?

- I’m studyin’ a tomato.

- Why?

- Did you know tomatoes come from the Andes Mountains 'round Peru in South America? 

And they're fruits and not vegetables 'cause they have seeds inside of them and 'cause they come from a flowering plant? 

And they're good for your heart?

I walked to him and knelt beside him. 

I turned his magnifying glass around and looked into his eye. 

I saw clearly the parts of his eye that my teacher taught me at school – the colored part that is the iris and the black part that is the pupil. 

But it was Carver who taught me how these parts work together to  help us see.  

- Carter, you know the five senses?

- Yeah. Let me think…seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

-Did’ya know if we divided our brains into five parts, a little more than three of those parts would be filled up by seeing?

There’s a thin layer on the inside of the eyeball. 

It’s the retina. 

Nobody could see into the retina until microscopes were invented. 

When folks looked inside the retina for the first time, they found millions of these tiny cells called rods and cones. 

Those rods and cones find rays of light and turn them into signals for things called optic nerves. 

The optic nerves send these signals to the brain and it turns them into pictures. 

‘Cause of the way lenses work, the picture is upside down. 

The brain turns it right side up. 

Idn’ that amazing?

-Yeah, it's amazing. 

And, you know what? 

So are you.

He taught me the parts of the eye that helped him see the world as everyone sees it. 

In that moment, though, deep in the dark of night, I tried to see the parts that I didn’t understand, the parts that woke my brother in the middle of the night to study a tomato while our corner of the world slept, the parts that helped him see the world as only Carver could see it. 

I gently put my arm around his shoulders and held him close to me.

the sayings and doings of the little monk

 

Elias and Gabby

“Sure thing,” said Elias.

Have a seat.”

“Gracias,” said Gabby.

“Go ahead. 

Estoy escuchando.

I’m listening.”

“Good, because it’s a story about a boy who needs you to be a careful listener.”

“My abuelo used to say, ‘Gabby, listening to people’s lives is an art, and you are the Frida Kahlo of listening.”

“Hmmm,” he smiled.

“I’ll try to be the Diego Rivera of storytelling, then.”

This made her smile, too.

“Well, they’re name is the Flores family. 

There’s an old man, Gustavo. 

He’s sinewy thin, and his arms and legs look like the far branches on a tall, old tree. 

He has a head full of gray hair, and that makes him look wise in the ways of the old ones in Latin America. 

He has wrinkles on his face that look like ruts in a dirt road. 

He has a rich voice, a storyteller’s voice, and he’s a good storyteller. 

Most of all he has kind eyes that are full of life, even though he’s seen a lot of hard times.

There’s Gabriela, called Gabby, like you.

She’s Gustavo’s daughter. 

Her arms and legs look like the branches of a tree, too, only they’re like the ones closer to the trunk, thick and strong and able to carry heavy things. 

She has a head full of black hair that looks like a night sky on a moonless, starless night. 

Her brown eyes carry that moon and those stars, though. 

You can see a soft light when you look into them. 

She has wrinkles around those eyes, but they aren’t the wrinkles of age and time. 

They’re the wrinkles of worry and weariness that shouldn’t be on the face of someone so young.

She has a soft, quiet voice.

She doesn’t talk much but when she does she says important things. 

You should see her hands and her feet. 

They’re calloused and worn, yet gentle and warm against the life she’s lived so far.

And there’s Salito, Gabby’s son, Gustavo’s grandson. 

Everyone calls him Little Salt.

He’s small in size, even for a ten-year-old, but he has a big heart. 

He has tiny ears, but he’s a good listener, too.

He looks at the person who’s speaking as if he’s drinking their words on a hot, humid day.

He’s very smart, even though he goes from school to school on the migratory trail and misses ‘lots of days during the school year. 

There’s one part of him that worries me. 

He doesn’t talk. 

I don’t think it’s because he can’t talk. 

I think it’s because he doesn’t want to talk.

I’m not sure, though.

I am sure from the stories his abuelo tells that he’s lived some hard times and seen some hard things on the road. 

There’s a doctor, Dr. Maria, the best doctor I’ve ever known, who’s working to help him.

I’d like to find a way to help him myself, help him say what’s inside of him, if I can. 

That’s one of the reasons why I’m here.