Lori’s Story

I’d been told that pregnant women often describe feeling their babies first movement as something akin to the flutter of a butterfly’s wings. And indeed, that’s how both of my sons introduced themselves to me, from the inside, a flutter. Ariel, my daughter-in-law is all in a flutter these days with her second child moving about inside her. Dancers all of us, right from the beginning, butterflies and homo sapiens.

Merriam-Webster – Flutter (a) to move with a quick wavering or flapping motion (b) to vibrate in irregular spasms

I have experienced a, new to me, external flutter. Which is lingering, inspiring and cracking something open, under my skin, still a week later. I just spent 2 days inside the wintering sites of the migrating monarch butterflies in the Trans-Volcanic mountains in Central Mexico. It’s a hike to get to them and not for everyone I suspect. Added visual, it is a thick fir forest, in the mountains, only rocky slender uphill paths. Suggested mode of transportation, horseback, with which I have an ongoing fierce dance with surrender, trust and control, this horse dance, I usually avoid. I like cowboys and all, I would just rather keep to my own feet. The air is very thin at this crossroads, I don’t actually want to walk, I side with trust, I’m off giddy-up.

At first you see a butterfly here and there, up a couple hundred more feet and yes indeed more and more, then at the top of a very scary narrow path, I beheld fir trees thick with monarchs everywhere I look and an open meadow appears which was full of low flying water drinkers, we are now at 11,000 feet and the world ahead, behind and above is all in a flutter. It was like being inside a snow globe, but butterflies.

Oddly the soundscape, is silence, complementing the fluttering life force which is fiercely peaceful. This overwintering site is thick with fir trees, where these butterflies cluster together in large groups to survive the winter. In the low meadow which is full of tiny blooms which the butterflies are pollen-feasting upon, the pollen turns into sugar which then energizes those orange and black wings to open and with the help of the sun, voila, a grand fluttering takes place. Our guide likened their wings to solar panels, apparently, they need the sun to fly about! Who knew? These butterflies are mating now, and they will be leaving these two overwintering groves within the next 1 ½ weeks. Some will travel as far as 2,000 miles. And all that time, I kept liking it to the treacherous and lengthy journey human sperm and eggs undergo towards each other and that little family in Oakland.

Generation upon generations knowing exactly where to go? Then I wonder where am I supposed to be, where am I supposed to go? I’m a long way away from rural Michigan. Then with a flutter inside that snow globe I realize that these Monarchs I’m now dancing with will soon to be traveling to Michigan and it was their family flown up from Mexico that I danced with in the milkweed fields so long ago as a kid. And the next generation in the fall will migrate south to this very place in Mexico where I find myself today.

Side note

According to pre-Hispanic folklore, the migrating butterflies carried the souls of ancestors visiting from the afterlife. For centuries, Mexico’s monarchs have served as a powerful cultural symbol of connecting the living to the dead.