Monarch Magic, by Molly Remer

When my father was a boy in the 1950’s, he had a butterfly collection. His friends would bring him dead butterflies to add his collection and ask him what they were called. He got so many monarchs that his reply would be, “Thanks! That’s a ‘common sicker,’” secretly meaning they were so common he was sick of them. Now, my father is 70 and his grandchildren rarely see a monarch butterfly, the population of them having declined by 85% or even more in just two short decades. This rapid change is one of the most clear and alarming, observable indications of the massive changes wrought by both climate change and industrialized farming in our very own lifetimes.

Each year, I watch for monarchs from my Missouri home, during their migration season that carries them over our heads and on their way to Mexico. Each one I spot feels like a brush with magic on the wing, a testament to endurance and to hope. I watch them careen along in their delicate and determined way across highways and rooftops, across cars and parking lots, across my own house, and across open fields. I watch them alight on thistles, on goldenrod and oak trees, vine and bush. I see one above the Atlantic Ocean at Daytona Beach. I see two above the weeds in the Dollar General parking lot in Alabama. I see one above the sunflowers by the overpass in Kansas City. I see two coming over the Walmart roof and into the Staples parking lot in central Missouri.

Each one lifts my heart, reminds me of hope and endurance, persistence and grace. Each orange and black marvel is a testament to survival and a reminder of the swift, uncertain nature of change. Sometimes I see their wing shadows cross my path and look up smiling just as a sunbeam radiates through their glowing wings. I wonder what it is like to see through butterfly eyes. I wonder if butterflies dream. I watch their wavering path across the sky, that curious combination of aimlessness and intention that somehow carries them across countless miles, devoted to the journey of return and re-creation. 

In 2021, I started a simple daily devotional practice, #30DaysofGoddess, that I have now maintained for over 1000 continuous days. Each morning, I step outside, into the “temple of the ordinary” of my own life and landscape. I sit on my porch swing and watch the world. I write. I think. I feel the sun on my skin and the earth beneath my feet. I give thanks to this earth that holds me and this landscape that teaches me so much. I notice what changes and what grows, what ebbs and what fades, what bursts into bloom and goes to seed. I marvel again and again at how much can be learned from one small square of woods and world. My spiritual practice is deeply rooted in the land on which I live. My whole life is shaped by the magic of place, by this, my “bloodland.” In 2020, I wrote this poem:

Some may say my world
is too small,
the size of a square deck,
a field of waving grasses and wildflowers,
a strip of brown and gray gravel road,
a tiny temple shrouded in oak leaves,
roses,
and incense.
How can you learn everything
you need to know from
a grove of trees,
a bowl of blue sky,
a patch of earth woven
of roots and stones.
This is my bloodland
and to me
it shines
with an infinite universe
of small stories.

Today, on a cooling October morning, I sit on my deck with my pen and page, writing a poem about monarchs. As I write, I happen to notice one right here in the oak tree and then notice three more coasting lightly above the trees. I step out on the deck and turn my head to the open sky to suddenly see them come in groups of two and three and even five making their way over our house and away into the blue sky. It is a trickling stream, but a stream nonetheless, of monarchs in motion, their migration in progress and me watching it, at just the right moment on just the right day. I have never seen so many at once and watch with joy, my heart beating faster, my eyes wild, calling for my family to join me in staring upward until my neck aches and my eyes water, the quick flutter of my own pulse a marker of an unexpected and enchanting return to awe. 

My husband and I go for our morning walk and the monarchs continue to come, some dipping so low they brush the tops of our heads. I stop in the road staring and pointing, “There’s another! Another! Another!” When we return home and stand in the driveway, watching three more monarchs above the field I turn to him and say: “I’m just so happy to be here.” And, I am.

The author Dacher Keltner, says in an interview: “…awe is the feeling of being in the presence of a vast mystery…” He goes on to say: “I believe awe is a basic state of mind that we can access pretty easily if we take time to notice it…” After a time of intense personal loss, he also noticed that finding awe can also be an intentional practice, a matter of will, it can be an experience we step into despite our grief and against the odds.

Three years ago, I dreamed of monarch butterflies dancing over the road above a pile of tiny acorns. I woke with a message in my mind: We all need time to kneel on the ground, to place our hands flat on the earth, to make friends with what we see, to remember that we belong here together. In these pandemic years, I find myself often worrying about community and connection, about climate and change, about environment and planetary strain, the thinning threads of friendship and relationship and what it takes to rebuild the fibers, to hold on to the threads. Sometimes we find we have intentionally let them go. We have given too much, been fuel for others dreams, have been left parched and wondering after having emptied our own tank into keeping things going that could be left to fade away. The thinning may be unintentional, an artifact of being small and human and pulled in many directions by many demands as well as by dreams and wishes and inspired plans. Sometimes we find we’ve stepped back too far out of the necessary network of tending and befriending and giving and receiving that keeps the world turning and love alive and connection as a truth and not just a nice idea. We need to remember that it is in the grit and blood of living that we find the magic of wholeness and humanness, that we need to extend our hands past quirks and differences and calendars that fail to match to hold on anyway. We need to attend to our place in the web and to the threads of those beside us and around us, not just the human but the entire whole. We are all in this together. 

Yes, there is sorrow and degradation. There is uncountable loss and a swift and alarming process of change and destruction unfolding all around us. And, yet, I am still so happy I get to be here, head tipped back in wonder watching the sky for another flash of black and orange cresting the horizon and making its way onward to a place I cannot see.

Noticing is a powerful magic,
there so much joy
right here
in the temple of the ordinary:
it is above me,
below me,
within me,
and around me.

Note: My most recent book, In the Temple of the Ordinary, vol. 2, was published this month.

The photo below is one I took during the walk described in this post.