Wandering to Mexico

Photo from Wikipedia

A Monarch butterfly winds its way up into the leafy oak, leaves like the butterfly wavering in the breeze. The sun is softer today. A front has come through with dry, cooler air. It is a May-like day as if in  springtime. The soft wind recalls for me the mountain pond, the breeze into which we tossed my mother's ashes six years ago. The butterfly knows nothing of my memories. Its will is that of the air which lifts it and takes it to whatever it is that  sustains it.  The Monarch has no apparent mate, perhaps having reproduced some worm that has yet to make its cocoon. Nor does it seem to have its tribe, the vast migration over the summer from Canada to Mexico. How, I wonder, can such a fragile, wind tossed being, will its way, find its way, from Canada to here, from here to Mexico. The Monarch is my kindred spirit, a wanderer.

What strikes me today, as the breeze refreshes Atlanta's air, as a hurricane damages the coast of the neighboring Carolinas, as war rages on in Iraq, as religious intolerance kills children in the Middle East, as my country debates the absurdity of a Supreme Court ruling that some businesses are exempt from the law of the land thanks to the religion of the owners; in short, as the Earth spins around the Sun, is the detachment, the seeming unconcern, unawareness of this solitary butterfly. It just is. It eats what it must. It appears tossed this way and that. And yet, it goes on in its vast quest for life (and death) in Mexico.

Jack