Monarch butterflies fly about five miles per hour.
In the summertime, which is the only time we see them up here in the northeast, that 5 mph pace is charming rather than slow, a fluttering that indicates the idyllic laziness of the warm season. In the portrait of a good, hot, perfect summer, the grass is green, the sky is blue, the clouds are white, and the turning of the world is slow, just like the pace of the bead of sweat rolling down the back of your neck, and the flutter of that royal yellow butterfly down in the left of your vision is quietly calming. Both of you have somewhere to be, but in the heat, neither of you see any reason to rush.
As the weather starts to turn, that summertime 5 mph becomes alarmingly slow, as we throw a scarf around our necks and hurry off into the gray evening. We hop into a car and ramp the mileage up to 60 an hour, five destinations a day, time spent gazing at the world turning now spent cultivating a career to put food on the table and keep the cable on the television.
But the monarch can't change its pace. And the monarch can't live in the cold evenings of fall in the north either. So the monarch has to use its beautiful and desperately slow wings to migrate to warmer weather in order to survive the harsh climate of the changing seasons, five painstaking miles by five painstaking miles. All the way to Mexico.
Monarch butterflies are the only insect to travel 2,500 miles away to survive the winter.
When I learned this information, I was on a nature trail, back at home to work as a camp counselor after my first semester of college. The trail guide was gesturing at a milkweed plant with his walking stick, telling us about the marriage of this stalky, chemical-imbibed plant with the monarch butterfly (another fascinating biological concept about the same little bug). The world was slow around me as summer crept in, but I was starting to speed up at the prospect of whipping a mini-bus full of kids for the following three months. However, I was still able to conjure up my portrait of summertime ideal, the sharp colors of the grass and the trees and the sky, the sunspot in my eyes, the bead of sweat on my neck, and the little yellow butterfly picking its way across the scene in little loops and jerks, charming and slow as ever.
We'd seen one earlier on the path. The monarchs, and all butterflies I'd bargain, fly unlike other airborne creatures. The giant wings keep them up by some sort of aerodynamic force, but because they're so bulky, each time the wings flap the butterfly's entire body is thrust in a different direction, giving a distinctly, and yet delicately sporadic look to their movements. They do not fly in the pointed and soaring way that birds do, they fly in a halting, thoughtful way. Butterflies pick their way to their destination point to point, leading a quirky connect-the-dots path to the next milkweed stalk.
Or, you know, the whole 2,500 miles to Mexico.
Curious, and a bit disbelieving, I asked the guide how many times the butterfly could make that journey- from the eastern states to Mexico and back to the eastern states again. I was prepared to be amazed if the number was bigger than two, expected the answer to be one, and pictured the little yellow butterfly in my summer vision picking its connect-the-dots path all the way down to the Gulf.
What I didn't expect, was for the guide to cross one foot over the other, lean against his walking stick, and put on a half smile.
"Well, the thing is, one monarch can't even last the whole journey south."
I'm pretty sure my brain shot to another planet when he said that, attempting between one heartbeat and the next to wrap itself around the magnanimity of the metaphor that had just presented itself to me.
The guide continued to explain how the monarch utilizes its marriage with the milkweed plant to have its eggs- safe in a plant that has chemicals only attractive to the yellow butterfly itself- and thus has children that complete the journey southward or northward depending on the season, which from the start they are able to sense, while the original monarch dies on the way to a safe resting point.
And I began a whirlwind of thoughts that questioned exactly how it could be that the little butterfly, fluttering happily about to the left side of my summertime portrait, yellow color standing out nicely against the blue of the sky, 5 mph pace taking its little body on a looping path amongst the clouds, could itself be a portrait of the arbitrary nature of the human endeavor for success.
The butterfly isn't aware of this, of course. The butterfly is too busy sucking up nectar to fuel its wings' flapping 300 times per minute.
But here in my mind, I wonder, what human could ever relinquish the idea that his or her pursuit of an individual life is for a great and spiritual purpose? We are big, and smart, and thoughtful! We have scarves to protect us from the cold, we have cars that can take us to Mexico in a span of hours, we have artistic minds to paint idealistic portraits of the silly butterflies and their suicide journey, we have a tumultuous life journey that we live for more important things than simply survival and the continuation of our species!
In my mind, the monarch flutters with its 5 mph pace through the scenery to land in a halting, jittery way on a stalk of milkweed in the middle of my summertime portrait. The bead of sweat on the back of my neck is growing cool, and for the first time since May, I wish I had a jacket. For the first time since school ended, I think about all the work I have to do, in order to graduate, in order to get a job, in order to put food on the table, and support children, and pursue a meaningful, well-lived life for the sake of being remembered kindly and leaving a good place for my offspring.
The butterfly flutters off, and I think for a few minutes about how it'll travel as much of 2,500 miles as it can in pursuit of the fleeting warmth, and by the time it returns to my summertime portrait it will be long gone and replaced by its great grand-butterfly.
Not that butterflies use that sort of ancestry system like we do. We're living in a society here. They're living in our summertime portraits, connecting the dots all the way to Mexico and back, laying eggs in the milkweed, and sucking up nectar to survive. To compare ourselves to something as small as a butterfly, well.
I'm not sure it would be right for us to try and make the journeys of these beautiful, endangered, slow-moving butterflies in their pursuit of survival seem as desperately important, nor as utterly meaningless, as our own.