The Pitchfork and the Butterfly
Where do ideas come from?
Hi Friends,
The story of a name
Since it’s been a while (nine months) since I started this newsletter back in November one week after the election, I want to circle back to the reasons behind the two names for people who have joined. The first name, Writing in Work Gloves, because writing is work, and on the farm we wear work gloves every day, and protecting democracy is work, and building co-operative, diverse, resilient communities is work, and reading to educate yourself or expand your horizons is work, and it’s a gentle reminder to myself not to take this project or myself too seriously.
Write with a purpose, but don’t be precious about it.
The second part of the title, The Pitchfork and the Butterfly, is more mystical but also more embodied. In November 2024, when I started writing this journal of a sure-to-be-fucked-up year in America—a year in which our political climate and future is changing so rapidly—wanting a record that I could look back on to see how and when specific things changed, mindsets, attitudes, political realities, etc., I was digging up dahlia tubers.
I had put it off as long as humanly possible. Frost had come and killed the plants. The ground was about to freeze. I had to do it. I filled ten boxes with dahlia tubers and put them in the basement. Hope incarnate. The germ of next year's flowers. The garden in a box, stored in the cold, damp dark. Rainbow colors. Neon pinks and purples. Future income. The success or failure of the 2025 growing season, farmer’s markets and PYO flower field depended on the contents of those boxes—tubers that looked like long, skinny sweet potatoes. Finicky, temperamental things.
It makes you understand why people said and still do say a prayer to the dahlia gods in November when they put them to sleep for the winter.
Now, in August, the butterflies are here. Ruby-throated hummingbirds visit the gardens every morning. Pollinators flock to the flower field and other gardens. This is “peak bloom”, a phenomenon which lasts a month. However, the dahlias have not peaked yet; they increase and increase until first frost, then all die at once. They follow a different internal timeline than the annuals we started in the greenhouse.
The August butterfly never experiences the November pitchfork, and vise versa, but the growing, blooming, dying dahlia plant connects them as three parts of the same process. Digging up six hundred tubers in the hard, cold dirt in freezing weather is not fun, exactly, but it becomes more tolerable when you imagine the butterflies and hummingbirds of August. Imagine them depending on you, depending on you doing your chores, getting your work done now, when it has to be done, when you don’t want to do it.
A pitchfork is a tool of protest. A weapon. It has a business end.
Pitchfork, flower, butterfly.
According to an article in the BBC, “Butterflies: The Ultimate Icon of our Fragility” (2021), butterflies symbolize ephemeral-ness and rebirth. The butterfly is hyper-sensitive to the ecosystem, and, conversely, an icon of hope.
“…the butterfly is a symbol of imperilled nature's most colourful and beguiling design, offering both a warning signal and a reminder of the audacity of hope.”
“In the 21st Century, it might just serve as a reminder that we still have the potential to change and survive.”
In Ancient Greek and European art it represents the soul, associated with Psyche, the goddess of the soul.
To me, it represents the way the mind flutters from subject to subject, gathering inspiration, and how lightly we have to work to catch a thought in order to write it down, often in vain. Butterflies do not want to be caught, and ideas do not necessarily want to be captured forever in a permanent form, typed into a manifesto or a work of staggering genius. They are just pretty, and passing, and in a way grateful for all the work you did when they weren’t around, grateful for all the flowers you grew for them, for the earth you turned over in March, and the tubers you dug up in November.
You don’t have to write down a brilliant thought for it to be useful.
It doesn’t, even, need to be useful—it can just be beautiful, and satisfying.
The butterfly is the ending of your novel. It is the first sentence of your memoir, the poem that came to you in the bathtub, the song that runs through your favorite book, the motif, the two lines of dialogue you can’t forget and will re-quote for the rest of your life. It’s your favorite line from “The Little Prince” and it’s what keeps you reading a promising book or watching a good tv show, or keeps you glued to your computer, trying, waiting, hoping to write it into existence, hoping to capture it, hoping to notice when it silently lands on the tip of your tongue.
Farm news
This week we hosted a flower art class and a family yoga class in the garden, and did the farmer’s market and weeded the PYO flower field (ten hundred-foot rows) and watered everything from a tank on the back of a truck, and lopped bittersweet vines, and tried but failed to catch the elusive yard chickens whose days outside are numbered, and took care of the sheep and goat and chickens in the coop, and collected aggs, and went swimming in the pond, and took the kids to soccer, and went to work, and went to the library, and ate peaches.
Late summer things.
Summer doesn’t end until September 21st, people. Remember that. And go pick flowers and get your vegetables and meat at a local farm.
Writing News
This week I watched David Sedaris’s Masterclass on writing essays, which was delightful. I think he is a genius. He says,
Write every day at the same time for two hours at your desk.
Write in your diary interesting anecdotes.
Incident + bigger meaning = an essay
His habit of writing his signature beautiful twelve page essays that become chapters in his books reminds me of the sermon-writing we did in divinity school. There’s similarities. End with Truth, he says.
He started as an oral storyteller, and writes always to read aloud.
“It’s not your job to be pretty all the time.”
Your last line should give the room goosebumps. Touch a nerve.
Always be the best-dressed person in the room if you are doing a book event as a writer.
“There’s no such thing as a folk writer. You can’t write unless you read.”
He wrote every day for fifteen years before his first book came out.