River of souls

Day 3: Monarchs nectaring at El Rosario Sanctuary

I went on pilgrimage to a sacred site. In search of the winter home of my beloved Monarch butterflies.

Monarchs fill me with wonder and delight. They carry happiness on their wings. In summer, whenever I glimpse the flash of orange wings through a window, I rush out into the garden, like a child, to greet them. 

Entranced, I watch them circle and float on radiant wings. I pay close attention to which plants they prefer, how long they stay to sip nectar, whether or not they visit the milkweeds. When they leave, if they return.

Like everything we open our hearts to, the Monarchs speak to us, and teach us. 

Monarchs and their epic journey south speak to the wild, abundant, mysterious presence of life on this being we call Earth. 

Some see Monarchs as a symbol of transformation, and of the soul. Mexican peoples have believed for centuries that Monarch butterflies represent the souls of their ancestors who are returning to visit them, when they arrive around November 2, on Dia de Muertos. Children of the sun, they call them. 

A caterpillar miraculously dissolving, then reassembling itself inside the chrysalis to emerge as a butterfly: this is one mystery.

The billion Monarchs who fly for two months to arrive in the fir forests of Michoacán have never been there before. Yet, somehow, each migrating generation knows where to fly — how to find this precise place in this wide Earth — where the guardian fir trees protect them from intense heat of the sun, rare snow storms, and cold winds that would otherwise kill them, and end their ancestral migration. 

Another mystery. Monarch upon Monarch, mystery upon mystery. 

Day 1: El Rosario Sanctuary

When the sun came out, then we witnessed the most spectacular sight: thousands upon thousands of Monarchs left their trees and took to the air. I no longer had to look at them through binoculars. They were here, zooming just above our heads as we walked down the mountain.

I walked silently, in a dream, amid the surreal magic of tens of thousands of Monarch butterflies winging around me, pouring down the mountain like a river of joy. 

A river of souls, speaking truths to us.

Whispering that our souls are alight. 

That our souls co-exist among millions of souls — all striving, all invisibly connected past present and future by a great web of life that flows from and around this planet into the universe. 

That our souls understand mysteries that our minds do not. 

That our lives are ephemeral, yet beautiful beyond words. 

Day 2: Sierra Chincua Monarch Sanctuary 

See now through my eyes...

Here, resting inside these many mysteries, millions and millions of Monarchs crowd thickly over the fir needles. 

Large clusters of butterflies cling to branches, literally bending them downward with their collective weight. They roost on trunks among the lichens and mosses like dense ruffles of stiff taffeta. Like rust-colored leaves that never fall to the ground.

I saw this. This, I saw with my own eyes. 

The sight was so vast, so strange, and beautiful, and astounding, and overwhelming, that it was difficult to encompass the reality, even as I stood looking at it. 

I looked, and looked, and looked, at the millions of Monarchs roosting in the silent, enchanted trees, or flying very high, black against the bright sky, and it still did not seem completely real. 

On the third day, when the temperature rose, and the sun came out, that was the day the Monarchs came to greet us, their relatives. Then they began to fly in great numbers, accompanying us along the path, flying just above and alongside us as we walked down the mountain. 

Are you my soul guide? I whispered as they flew past. Are you the psychopomp on my journey through the Underworld? 

Then, at last we came to a place where there was an opening, a corridor among the fir trees. And that is where I experienced the wonder, of a river of monarchs, a river of souls: the loveliest sight I have ever seen. 

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The journey: I flew across North America, rode on a bus for three hours, up and up into the Sierra Madre Mountains, to the small town of Angangueo. The next day, we took a 20-minute drive in pick-up trucks to the sanctuary entrance, then half-an-hour on horseback up the mountain, followed by a 15-minute hike to the viewing area.

A sense of calling

Over and over I notice middle-aged and older people acting with a sense of urgency to do the things important to them now, while they can.

A coworker travels to Peru and China, leaving less-adventurous Europe for when she's older.

Friends venturing into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area on their own, where you paddle and portage your gear through wild lakes haunted by the calls of northern loons under a sea of stars.

Traveling off the beaten path to Cuba and Cusco, before health concerns make such travel difficult.

Picking up and moving to a new house or city. Daring to quit a traditional job — to give up wage servitude and lose health insurance and a measure of security — in order to gain greater control of one's own life through self-employment.

One who retired and went to the Dominican Republic to build houses through Habitat for Humanity. Another who retired and wants to leave the country to teach English as a second language. One a master naturalist who began a nonprofit on environmental education and stewardship in one's own neighborhood.

As for me, I always thought travel was my dream. I am fortunate to have pursued that dream, to the extent that time and money have allowed.

(My other dream was to be a writer of novels. And I did write two unpublished novels, whom I love very much. But ultimately I loved the idea of being a novel writer more than the reality of how much time it took away from being outside with the sky and wind and trees....)

As a young woman I expected to always be excited by the thought of traveling to new cities and lands. Now I've changed, and travel doesn't hold the rewards it used to. Travel (or maybe it's more fairly called tourism) often leaves me with the overall uneasy feeling of consuming rather than learning.

Maybe I'll figure out a more satisfying way to travel, maybe I won't, but the point is I feel in transition with it. Neither here nor there.

Today I'm taking stock. If that's not the dream around which to arrange my priorities anymore, then what is? What is the thing I feel I must do before it is too late?

Small acts of devotion to the earth, repeated over time.

Applied dreams, inspired by a desire to help, heal, restore.

Actions that are radical, because taking positive action is radical.

Tending actions that begin small, in partnership with earth, and that then build on themselves through a positive feedback loop, as the land begins to flourish, repaying many times the care lavished on her.

Actions that do not consume, but rather feed, give, nourish.

I am so particularly moved by instances where one individual took upon themselves a momentous task to restore a forest, or a jungle, or abandoned ranchland or farmland, or a prairie — and then did this work faithfully and often alone, for many years. This to me is love in action.

I am not a mother. Where are my children, my small legacy to the earth?

It is the trees I planted with the earth, the gardens I made with the earth.

I feel a sense of calling. I believe that if it feels like a calling, then one should listen.

In spring, I begin once again in my own back yard, planting, with the help of the earth, in this new place.

But I will keep my ear to the ground, trusting it will tell me what comes next.

True song

I woke to the true song of the robin.

All alone he sang, a brave voice in the darkness before dawn, claiming his rightful territory.

He sings of spring, a mate, rain, old berries yet uneaten, insects wakening under dead leaves. Of sunlight flooding through bare tree branches and twiggy nests earthworms wriggling forth from the earth to drink of its cold moisture.

A week ago in Santa Fe, the air smelled of dust, pinon smoke, apricot blossom, and juniper.

I still feel a slight sense of dislocation, a neither-here-nor-there. A ghosting feeling, as if my body arrived but some part of me (my spirit?) is following more slowly, maybe migrating northward and on the wing like the robins, not yet at my destination.

Air travel is especially abrupt when traveling between such dramatically different landscapes, with bare time to transition from Southwestern spring to Northern spring.

There: A high desert clarity. A sea of dry air that steals away all moisture from one's nose, in which skin takes on a map-like texture, an atlas of lizard trails and pebbled riverbeds and beetle-traced tree bark.

We walked through arid gardens of soft sands, yarrow, dusty gold, sage and subtle greens against the backdrop of pine-dark mountains, under vaulting arcs of cloud...

Down streets so quiet one could hear the gentle patter of blossoms hitting the ground...

House finches with rosy throats warbled their songs in the fruit trees, plucking blossoms one by one and drinking their nectar before discarding them to flutter to the stones below, and the adobe walls were painted by soft shadows.

We followed in the footsteps of ancient peoples, through the canyons, cholla, cottonwoods lining the small river (like but unlike their eagle-eyried kin along the Mississippi River), dusty paths, vast walls and fortresses of ember-lit and golden limestone towering overhead, glowing against the blue sky.

We climbed into cool-shadowed cliff dwellings, blew dust from our noses, carried water for the journey, rested in the shade, rested in the quiet, the quiet of an ancient place. All wild places are ancient, and sacred, but some strike one so more than others, like this one.

What would it be like, getting to know even one mountain? To watch such an eternal being through every shift of light, season, weather? Calming, I would imagine, an object of contemplation, meditation, inspiration, like Pedernal Mountain to Georgia O'Keeffe.

Oh how beautiful the paintings, but just as much the life of an artist following her vision, the photographs made of her working in her kitchen and garden, a life all of a piece, making sense.

Maybe that is what lingers most of all, a calling I have heard before and hear again. My true song. Will I listen this time?

A human-shaped life

This is Fort Zachary Taylor State Park in Key West, our March getaway.

I should just write about that: The butterflies, pelicans and gypsy roosters. The soft clacking of palm fronds outside our open bedroom window at night, which kept fooling us into thinking it was raining. The charismatic otherness of Key West—its roguish uncle, dirt-under-the-fingernails, bootlegger brand of romance. It was lovely.

I can't, though. When I tried to, my brain formed a perfect logjam. 

Not writer's block. Writer's block is not why I've been away. It's more: I feel increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of time I spend in front of screens, and I haven't figured out what to do about it vis-a-vis blogging.

(Yes, there's an immense irony to writing online bewailing how spending hours staring at screens keeps us from getting out and experiencing the world with our senses.)

These words I read yesterday hit me like a truck:

"The present is going by and we are not in it. Maybe when the present is past, we will enjoy sitting in dark rooms and looking at pictures of it, even as the present keeps arriving in our absence." —Wendell Berry

Right there, one of my deepest aging-person fears: That writing, blogging, photography, reading, television, social media have already taken the place of living the majority of my life, and that I have no time left to waste on a single one of them. 

And by living my life, I mean directly experiencing, engaging, smelling, touching and feeling it, instead of living through another's experience. 

Will I feel comforted to know when I have grown too old to walk under the trees that I have 80 Pinterest boards where I've collected pictures of somebody else's present? 

No. (Though they are really nice boards.)

My Rational Side recognizes this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. I have loved engaging with many of these activities. They have enriched my life and experience, and given me a way to contribute my own voice to the Great Conversation of the living. I may be missing the point by contemplating heaving them overboard.

But my Fear Side says: Every minute you stare at a screen (a page, a monitor, a viewfinder) you are frittering away another precious moment of your time on Earth, human. 

"Yet our organic attunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing intercourse with our own signs. Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses—once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth—become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary."—David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

I am not alone in these questions. A certain restless contingent of web-loggers are squirming like wild salmon swimming for home against a raging river current, trying to find to a place that feels more home, more authentic, more wild and human-shaped. 

So where do I stand? Does writing make my or others' experience richer, clearer, more meaningful? Or does it keep my awareness "folded in upon myself" and distract me from living in closer connection with physical reality?

Maybe the real question is: What will give me peace right now? 

So I needed to post this. And that seems to answer at least one of my many questions. 

And what the hey, here's another photo from Key West, where such fraught questions take sail on turquoise seas, never again to trouble the horizon.

One thing

One thing: October.

Every day a stone of honeyed amber, warmed by a constant sun.

Was it lovely for you? Was it a topaz jewel in your heart's crown?

Grasses, trees, sky, all hopelessly beautiful.

I say "hopeless" because it is now December, and thinking about October feels like coming across a picture of an exquisite dessert made for a king, by a master pastry chef who died before you were born. It is a dessert decorated with gold leaf and sugared violets, thick with cream—so bewitching that your mouth waters just looking at it.

But the receipt is lost, and winter has come. May our memories and a good fire keep us warm, though still we long for that lost taste.

Since I last wrote here, I've been growing flowers. 

Since I last wrote, I've been traveling.

I've gone walking on a floodplain island, where white-tailed deer run on pathways that weave in and out of the Otherworld and cottonwoods...and where two rivers meet.

I came home to watch goldfinches raiding my garden for hyssop seeds. The leaves of snowberry, juneberry and chokeberry glowed brighter and brighter, reflecting back the long hours of sunlight they'd collected all summer. Gladdening my heart.

In my memory, I spent days watching bees drink from asters.

My list of goals shrank. I let a lot of things slide. I had nothing to say.

Under a waxing moon, I wonder. Will a reading of the astrological transits cast some light on this sense of obstacles, unknown thresholds? Sometimes the mystery is too mysterious. Sometimes peace is sought, and sought. It is worth a try.