Today feels like full-on summer.
It’s hot and hazy, air heavy and close. Not a cloud in the sky, but the blue is less than bright: There’s a shimmering veil of pollen and dust on all sides, and heavy band along the western horizon that could be smoke, or could be a storm gathering in defiance of today’s zero-percent forecast.
Either way, it’s a day at once beautiful and simultaneously a reminder of the punishing heat that is normally part and parcel of June here.
There are other signs of summer now, too. Yesterday, in the middle of the scattered showers that provided more gentle medicine for the land, a butterfly fluttered past. It wasn’t just once; it was four times, and I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect it was the same one each time. Odder still, I had a fleeting impression each time that it was monarch, although it moved too rapidly and appeared to me only in silhouette agains the cloudy light.
It is nowhere near monarch season yet.
In a rare year, they might arrive in late July. More often, we see them from the latter part of August into September, once the monsoonal patterns have begun to spend their fury a bit. I can’t recall ever seeing one as early as the first half of June.
June here is the season of other butterflies: the small fluttering whites and sulphurs; American painted ladies; the first of the swallowtails; dilatory mourning cloaks not yet moved on along their migratory path. Occasionally, albeit usually later in the season, we’ll be visited by a white admiral or a black swallowtail, but the monarchs? They tend to keep strictly to schedule, and apparently decided long ago that in this place? This is not their time.
Yesterday’s wingéd messenger, though, remains a puzzle. It was too large to be a member of the first two categories; too small to be among the third. The color was wrong for the white admiral; despite their name, the only white on their upper wings is a broad bordering band against velvety black, and while this one appeared in the gray of silhouette, black it was clearly not. The size was, however, just right for an adult monarch, and the shape seemed to fit, too.
Which leaves us to wonder whether that is yet another pattern that has changed.
It might turn out not to be a bad thing.
To be clear, the colonialism-driven climate change that is itself driven force behind these changes in patterns and cycles is bad, no question. But we are finding that Mother Earth provides, and that some of the new guideposts for our days are actually beneficial. An example is our altered monsoon season, which arrived in May this year and has mostly taken over the darker hours for its activities: In a place as arid as this, where the earth too often, especially in recent years, has been dry as ash and bone, afternoon cloudbursts followed by a temperature spike near day’s end do little to discourage evaporation, the gift of the rain going in no small part to waste. Now, nighttime rains have the chance to soak into the soil, and our earth here this year is rich and loamy again.
I’ve always wondered why it is that the monarchs don’t show up here sooner. This would seem a perfect safe spot for them during mating season, and yet, they typically only arrive to do so near summer’s end. The image above is evidence of it: Wings captured it back in 2014, if memory serves on a day in late August or early September, that one perfect shot that a photographer can wait a lifetime to get, caught among the leaves of the aspen right above the table where we sat outside in the afternoon sun.
In some traditions, butterflies are messengers of the spirits. The messages our world has sent us in recent years have been troubling, filled with looming threats and reminders of dangers already here. But our messengers are also agents of prophecy, and perhaps that is the role of our monarchs now.
That our world’s patterns are changing is undeniable — and to a great degree, irrevocable now, irrecoverable too. But that does not meant hat we cannot still build a better world for our children using the new ones. Indeed, we have no choice in the matter; whatever else lies before us, this is a task that has been set us now.
Perhaps yesterday’s elusive and fragile spirit was meant to remind us of that task . . . or of the fact that we will not be alone in the effort. Mother Earth has long proven her commitment to evolution; our own dedication to adaptation can be no less. Maybe that’s the point of yesterday’s visitation, in the space between unseasonal cold and today’s mercurial heat: inspiration, delivered on resilient wings, to remind us of our power to change our world.
~ Aji
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