Outside our boundaries, the world is falling apart, a trajectory long-guaranteed by a culture’s unwillingness to divorce from and divest itself of raw colonialism. Inside our four walls, there is no small amount of stress, too; this is tax season, the time when we pay rent to that same colonial government for the privilege of existing, even upon our own lands. It’s an infuriating time in a season already unsettled at the best of times.
And yesterday was an infuriating day, as I struggled to make sense of lines and dates and numbers, my exasperation growing with every passing hour.
It was also a good day, one filled with hope.
It’s early yet for spring here; even on days when the mercury reaches sixty, as yesterday, the gale-force winds ensure that the air still wields the deep bite of winter’s fangs. Being out of doors now is mostly a chore in itself, and it’s impossible to do any of things we associate with the season yet — no planting, no gardening, not even any preparatory irrigation.
And so when I was summoned outside yesterday into the embrace of the chill wind, I was not in a particularly serene frame of mind, to say the least.
And in one moment, no more than the beat of a butterfly’s wing, my mood suddenly shifted: In the face of all that is terrible now, the overriding emotion I felt was hope. Hope, and an abiding calm assurance that in fundamental ways, all is still right with the world. And if I can believe that, I can also believe that we will come out the other side of this more or less whole.
Why?
Because at an impossibly early moment, the first butterfly of the season arrived. It fluttered right past me, then was followed almost immediately another. The second one alighted on the grass a couple of feet away from me and stayed there for several minutes before following its companion.
Over the course of the afternoon, I would see several more — not the monarchs shown above, but painted ladies that share the same colors and similar patterning, with the occasional tiny white fluttering here and there — and as unlikely as their early appearance was, it was equally impossible to see them spiraling on the winds and not feel the buoyant and beautiful sensation of hope in its purest form.
This is hope, fundamental and elemental, unattached to self or to any goal or agenda. It’s the kind of hope that is part and parcel of faith — in the world, in the spirits, in our collective humanity. It’s not enough, of course, to lift those already ill from their beds and bid them walk, never enough to raise the dead. But for those of us currently occupying this state of suspended animation, isolated from each other and from the rest of the world, it’s a reminder that hope is rooted thoroughly in facts and experience, rewarded and even proven by the earth’s continued spinning on its axis, but the appearance of the butterflies on their customary migratory path.
For migration itself is grounded in hope: Why else travel, but for faith that a good life awaits? The butterflies, when they sense that conditions are as they should be, take such assumptions on a kind of faith, a hope that is coded deeply in their DNA, but is our own sense of hope any less deeply inscribed upon our spirits?
After the years of drought that we have had, of wildfires in the winter habitats and an atrocity of concrete and steel beams slicing through their southern refuge, their appearance here now seems not merely transformative by transcendent: a blessing and a gift, a reminder and a lesson, and a reward for the resilience and the work that are both necessary for hope to live and thrive.
Today is, once again, both warm and cold, few clouds to mar the turquoise sky but a fierce wind howling from the southwest. And outdoors again this morning, I found another gift to bolster the hope I felt so clearly yesterday: a down feather left by a red-shafted flicker, resting gently upon the earth. They are elemental spirits, too, their feathers bright tools of prayer and ceremony. It was, incidentally, a feather in all the colors of the painted ladies, and of the monarchs too.
There is a long hard road ahead of us. It is hope that drives us to take each step.
The butterflies have found reason to follow the path. That gives us reason, too.
~ Aji
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