I like to be reminded of my irrelevance, about how my adventure here is ephemeral.
Being tickled by mist & gazing up at rushing waterfalls & slushing through half-melted snow reminds me how water lives only to fall. It’s a humbling thought. Humans, too, exist in a perpetual cycle: we flow, evaporate, freeze...
You, as an individual, nourish others with your nutrients just as their natural gift sustains you. If you think about it, this responsibility to remain an essential component in one’s development is extremely challenging when our state of existence is in constant flux. How can I be a steady pillar for a friend if I have just noticed a crack at my base?
Over the long weekend I gawked at the marvelous landscape of Yosemite. It was a treat to disconnect from wifi & cell service & the screeching rattle of BART to drown in beauty. One afternoon a butterfly flitted in front of me as if it were a guide navigating me up the mountain. This got me thinking (Emily, thinking?! Shocking, I know).
My knowledge of butterflies remains as a kindergarten level, so I decided to conduct a bit of research. Here is a list of tidbits that piqued my interest:
Monarchs cluster together to stay warm. In the chill of an evening, an entire generation can be wiped extinct. They rely on each other for existence like humans rely on water.
An adult monarch butterfly lives between 2 to 6 weeks.
The butterflies travel south to Mexico each year. Every successive generation travels back north, meaning the migrants will never return home. In fact it will take 3-4 generations to reach the northern United States. Each moment, then, that a monarch perches on a window sill or takes a pregnant pause on a flower is a brief decrescendo in its short-lived journey.
Imagine if we could fill our 50 plus years with as much delight & community & deliberate transition as a butterfly who has just emerged from metamorphosis. What a luxury it would for a monarch to be gifted even 1 more year of intentional, magical, and simple pauses.
For they, too, realize that silence is still time spent with the world.