María Suárez Toro, Puerto Rico.
January 30, 2008.

That day I thought I could fly. I really believed I could. I had no doubt. I could fly, you know, like the words of the song by .R. Kelly in Space Jam.

I believe I can fly
I believe I can touch the sky
I think about it every night and day
Spread my wings and fly away
I believe I can soar
I see me running through that open door
I believe I can fly
I believe I can fly

See I was on the verge of breaking down
Sometimes silence can seem so loud
There are miracles in life I must achieve
But first I know it starts inside of me.

Hey, if I just spread my wings
I can fly
I can fly
I can fly, hey
If I just spread my wings
I can fly
Fly-eye-eye.

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You see, flying is part of the metamorphosis of the butterfly effect so it must be a part of our lives also. The butterfly is a being that re-creates itself in many different forms during its intense and ever changing short lifetime. That is why for centuries the process of metamorphosis had been a puzzle to ancient cultures and remains a mystery today . Despite the fact that the knowledge is available to explain the process, I it never ceases to amaze us. The butterfly has to pass from being a baby egg, to being an adolescent worm, to a flying adult.

Today science knows that the butterfly’s metamorphosis depends, not only on a division and specialization of cells, but it recognizes that cells have to die so that new structures can emerge. And the old ones disappear.

Its flight even challenges genetics

I keep thinking of the most recent theories about our genetic composition and the eternal debates in science regarding the relationship between nature and nurture. Most scientists have stopped making that a dichotomy. They stress that it is not that a fixed genetic code replicates itself to pass on the same code, fixed and unchanged, but rather they emphasize that what exists is really an “epigenetic system” In lay language, this means that our genome is affected by its interactions with its surroundings to the point of bringing about genetic alteration.

We know that now, after centuries of lineal theories that stated that genetic composition was unchangeable and most recently, even geneticists believed that the double helix of the DNA was what makes each gene replicate itself.

But butterflies have always told us that this cannot be the only way, for they change totally while having the same genetic composition from life to death!

They always told us what we accept today: that our genetic composition is not fixed, but can change according to external stimuli, even if at random.

We also know that we share most of the genes with other species, and that we have some genes that have remained closed and others that opened up, and even some that were opened once in humans, but then closed somehow. Wow.

I wonder. That might mean that I could potentially have the genes to fly like butterflies! The only difference being that in me, those genes have not opened. But I could become a butterfly. Why not? Maybe if I try hard enough!

Flying means changing

It is the morning of January 30th, 2008. This year I will turn 60 years old. Six decades of walking in this planet and more recently writing about women and the butterfly effect. It’s high time I fly, for the love of life! I could not continue talking about the butterfly effect without having an inkling about what it is like to fly.

I believed I could fly that day because I believed in me and in the butterflies. I was convinced that without us or the butterflies, there can be no butterfly effect. But since I do not have the flying genes opened yet, I had to find myself a parachute and get on an airplane.

And upon flying I literarily realized that women have many ways of flying and have done so very often in our lifetime. For some it is learning to say yes, for others it is learning to say no. For all, it is learning to say ENOUGH! For most of us, it’s all three most of the time.

Arecibo in Puerto Rico is located in the furthest northwestern corner of the rectangular island; it is where sea and land turn to move south into the Caribbean. Well, I must say after my flight where I saw that corner from above, that it is not only land and sea, but also air, wind and the ethereal (energy fields). They were my companions in flight, lifting me, but so were the ocean and the waves that kiss the shore, like I did when I finally landed!

January 30, 2008. It is a clear day below, but full of clouds above, way above at 7,500 feet where the small CESNA airplane takes us and then lets us out at 210 miles per hour, a speed that lasts an eternal six minutes before the parachute opens at 5,000 feet above ground. I embrace myself at first, faint from sheer panic for about thirty seconds, and then, only after recognizing the fear, am able to open my eyes, and extend my arms like wings. From this soaring flight I could enjoy the most magic view of the high sky, framed by a layer of clouds, opening up to the sight of my island’s spectacular corner where sea, shore, wind and energy dance to the rhythm of life below.

Jason is my trainer and companion in flight. He says that in his Extreme Divers School there are more men than women but his experience tells him that it is because women have been socialized to think that they cannot fly. “Yet they are braver when it comes to finally trying” he concludes. Then he explains. “Many couples come here to try for the first time and it very often it ends up that the men stay on ground to watch their partners take off and land with the parachute. Maybe women are more adventurous, and you certainly need that to fly.”

As I listen to his philosophy about the whole thing, I wonder if it isn’t that we women have an urgency to learn to fly. Since we were born women, our wings and flights were cut short or cut off just because we were female. That is my speculation. We need to reinvent our world and the world as we know it, and in order to do that, we have to learn to fly.

My mind takes me back to the plane before I took flight. I look out the window of the small airplane through the special lens that was given to me to project my eyes against the inclemencies of the wind. We are already above the clouds, way beyond them. I sit on the floor of the CESNA having lost track of place and time, not because of traveling by plane , which I have done a million times, but because I will have to get out soon while it is still in flight. The wind and the ethereal will soon become my only home.

My eyes focus outside the window again. All of a sudden my adventurous spirit weighs more that my sixty years treading this planet by foot do, or the extra weight that my body carries complete with parachute and other paraphernalia. Panic invades me. Jason knows what I am thinking. He reminds me that I told him in an interview a few minutes before that I have come to his School determined to learn to fly and learn from it. Intentionalities - that, plus experiences, plus imagination and the breath of the wind… that is what life is all about.

I recover my strength and the meaning of my flight. I do not look outside but return inward into my self. I recall sixty years of life. My mother always says that I was born with an angel looking over me all the time. She invokes the angel because she fears my adventurous spirit so much. Yet she has seen that even when if the worse happens, I always come out well, happy and standing.

This time I will be flying, I hope that the angel my mother saw next to me when she gave birth to me is with me right now. I definitely have to fly today! The new period in my life that opens at sixty reminds me why I am flying. I cannot keep talking about the butterfly effect in women’s experiences and contributions without knowing what it is like to fly. I have to do it before the book* comes out.

Jason interrupts my meditation to open the small door of the plane, letting me know that the time to jump has come. A thread of cold blood runs though my veins, mixing with the cold wind that comes though the cracks of the semi-opened hole in the plane. But I am ready. No stepping back. There is no other way to go but forward and out. I rock my behind while sitting at the edge of the opened door, feet hanging out, lenses placed on face, heart pounding like a drum, parachute well checked and attached. And Jason connecting himself to my gear and backpack in five strategic points so that we take off together in this first flight of mine. How lucky we will take off together! Some flights require company even if no one can really undertake them for you.

I throw myself out, pulling Jason with me. Uf, the speed, the wind, the absolutely new sensation of loosing all control… they all make me dizzy. For a moment, I lose consciousness. When I finally recover, the sight and the feeling is almost orgasmic. Puerto Rico – the land that saw me come to life six decades ago - extends itself majestically in front of my eyes. My body has no limits in space and time.

I extend my arms in flight, stretch my legs as if trying to turn them into a tail and let myself ride the wind. All is so natural that I feel there is some ancestral memory in that form. We turn, twist, laugh and mediate, challenging all the laws of gravity that Newton invented.

When we arrive at 5,000 feet, we pull the string of the parachute. It becomes the force of gravity itself, pulling us up and sustaining us in the middle of nowhere until it starts our fall down to earth, slow and easy with us guiding its speed and direction..

We land in the same place where the CESNA had taken off half an hour earlier. It is the small airport of Arecibo. Everything looks the same as when I left. The only one that had changed is me.

The landing is soft and easy, but I am so taken by the whole thing that I am speechless. The memory of my first breath of life at birth overwhelms me. I throw myself face down on the ground and thank those who have made my life possible. We need roots in order to fly!

The World of Miss World

And of course, since the most unbelievable things happen to me, guess who has come to fly for the first time just as I arrived at the airport to make my feminist flight? The candidate from Puerto Rico to the Miss World contest, Jennifer Guevara. Young, hyperactive, sure of herself, surrounded by media.

She is beautiful. Big black eyes and long black hair, dark skin and stylish long legs, Arawak, Carib and TaĂ­no, pure blood, I think.

“Oh, no – she answers to a journalist question about fear – why am I going to be afraid, flying is nothing.”

”Volver a los 17”, like the song by the Chilean singer and composer, Violeta Parra, about going back to being seventeen comes to mind.. Jennifer is twenty, the time when any girl who has had a good life, free of violence and sexism, has had a supportive family, community and friends (we are very few indeed, but we exist) believes the world is there for us to ride . At that age and in those conditions, ours is the flight of the butterflies, no less. Until others start cutting our wings little by little or in one single slash, until you even loose the desire to fly.

I never found out what her flight was like, because at the sight of Miss World, surrounded by cameras, journalists, and enthusiastic onlookers, I had told Jason I needed my own personal, intimate flight with no one else in the plane.

But I will be able to see her flight on television, as UNIVISION filmed it for a report. Of course I will never know how she really felt because publicity hardly includes that dimension.

Jennifer, if you read this some day, I would like to interview you as a feminist and elder. I want to know how you felt, not the details of where and when you flew.

Surfing the wind and “metamorphosizing”

DKim Todd* claims that humans have always been drawn to nature’s mystery of the metamorphosis of the butterfly because it departs from classical theories about the evolution of the species.

Biologically – she says – metamorphosis is an extraordinary adaptation that speaks of hope because it is a radical change. What happens to the nature of a butterfly - and maybe our metamorphosis in life - is that it is a radical way of growing and letting new things emerge. But on the other hand, many fear metamorphosis because it is a process of change where you never know beforehand what you will become. Furthermore, it challenges us to rethink what we have been before, and how we can change our lives and the world in which we live.

It reminds us that many creatures on this planet had their origin in different life forms so that change is the spice and imperative of life, thus we cannot expect to stay the same forever.

Linguistically the word “butterfly” has had many meanings. For the Aztecs it meant "fire", "death" and "change" among others. For Aristotle it meant “psiquis”, “breath” and “soul”. The larvae have been considered a “mask” and in Latin, “pupae” means “girl” In English it, means a puppet waiting to be brought to life in order to fly. Chrysalises in Greek means “gold”. The word “imago” used as synonym of butterfly implies that all other forms before her were just masks, keeping it from sight so that the new form could de free o danger in order to be able to emerge.

For me, metamorphosis means flying. And flying means many things. I learned today that to fly is to let the breath with which we came to life take us and keep us strong while we work to change ourselves and the world around us so the planet and all its creatures can keep on breathing and soaring on the wind… ourselves included.

Flying involves constant change, , but change from within, enhanced by the butterfly effect of others, breaking silences and breaking barriers in order to fly with the winds of change, change that inevitably must emerge from the alternatives we are building in these terrible and precarious times. When it seems there is no road or path, we simply have to fly.

Viva! Hooray! Viva flying! Viva my sixty years, viva each of us and our struggles for a better world and better lives, vivan the butterflies and their butterfly effect, in all of us!

End
  • * Women, Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Effect is the book I have just written, published by Editorial Farben/Norma in Costa Rica this first semester 2008.

  • * Kim Todd is the author of Chrysalises, Sybilla Merian her own metamorphosis.