The Holiness of Monarch Butterflies

As we reached the tiny clump of trees festooned with butterflies as thick as jungle foliage, we Yanks buzzed about, snapping pics, taking notes, storing up impressions with which to later regale our friends back home. The Mexicans by and large sat silently in the forest, kids in laps, eyes somberly fixed on the massed monarchs. It was difficult to read their emotions, but 1 believe that many of the Mexican visitors to the Chincua Monarch Sanctuary were driven by the same urge that might have led them on another weekend to the Virgin's shrine at Guadalupe: a sense of the holy. And further. think that unless those of us with our Vibram soles and fanny packs can reclaim a sense of the holy, the monarchs will remain endangered. By holy, I refer to whatever it is in the ceaselessly spinning DNA and chemical machinery that causes a creeping caterpillar to rearrange its molecules into a winged angel, and sends that angel fluttering across a continent to a patch of fir trees in Mexico it has never seen before.

The philosopher William James said, "At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe." What I think I saw on the faces of the Mexican visitors to the Chincua Sanctuary was a dignified and unquestioning acceptance, an understanding that what they saw was natural and right and utterly essential to the completeness of creation. The poet E. E. Cummings wrote of acceptance "for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes." Science and politics alone will not save the monarchs, any more than they will save other threatened species and habitats, any more than they wall save the monarch meadows and milkweed stands along my path. What is required is something that we have mostly lost in the high-tech, high-velocity, virtual world of the developed countries: a deeply felt, unintellectualized, instinctive "yes' sense that behind the gaudy delight of 20 million butterflies hanging on fir trees, there is a natural and infinite power that binds all life in a holy web.

A reverence instilled by appreciating nature is the only thing that will save it.