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Butterfly and Beauty

Part 1

The dark brown butterfly with yellow trailing edges flew east about waist high 20 yards along the line of trees before turning and flying west down the middle of the road to the point it had begun, only a few feet in front of me. Then it did the same oval loop several more times, pausing occasionally to sit in the road, sometimes with wings up and other times with wings down parallel to the road surface. I had been waiting for a vermilion flycatcher, a recent migratory arrival that I knew had set up a nest close by. But the butterfly caught my attention and was entertaining me now. The butterfly’s path was so predictable and it had flown so close to me each time, that I began wondering if it would land on an outstretched arm. Finally, I risked putting my arm in its path as it approached . . . it landed on the arm near my hand.

You have to understand, it being spring and a weekday there was no car traffic on the refuge in all this time and, uncharacteristically for spring, very little wind. The early afternoon sun was comfortable and the light came filtered through the newly minted cottonwood leaves and trees alongside the road. In short, it was a day Walt Whitman would have described as perfect for loafing. In no hurry to see this marvel of flight leave, I began talking and singing to it softly. Beyond continuing to stay in the same place on my arm, I’m not sure if he or she was listening to me. Getting over being startled that the butterfly had accepted my invitation, I began looking more closely at the dark wings with blue spheres above the yellow, top wing edges. I can’t remember the last time I looked so closely at the pattern on a butterfly’s wing.  I'm certain it wasn’t my voice that eventually ended our one-sided conversation, as my wife has assured me that she was only joking when, in an album she later made of our first dates, my voice was described as that of a “gut-gored buffalo.” Eventually, the photographer in me won out and I reached for my cellphone camera. Instantly, the butterfly fluttered off, crossed the road and was quickly out of sight.

 You too have had it happen. . . for a moment, something breaks through the boundaries or walls that separate us from another living thing and the life-force in each of us connects though we be as different as . . . as a human and a butterfly.  It is a gift that can’t be bought and is hard to cultivate, and difficult to describe. I felt I had been blessed by what I later learned had been a mourning cloak butterfly, typically one of the earliest butterflies to mature in the spring. I had been able to get a photo of it before it landed on my arm, but it was at a distance and in no way did its beauty justice. So, I am inserting a link to an unidentified photographer’s image so that you can see what I saw closely for a few minutes on this gorgeous spring afternoon:  https://www.butterflyidentification.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Mourning-Cloak-Butterfly.jpg. Go ahead, check it out, I’m not going anywhere.

Part 2

Later that evening, still awash with the afternoon’s delightful encounter with the mourning cloak, and the brilliant vermilion flycatcher above, I watched a news broadcast about the murders of civilians in small towns in the Ukraine. They described in detail how some of the deaths had been preceded by torture. And while it was not new news – accounts of human barbarism and unimaginable cruelty (I too had been a soldier once) – it contrasted so sharply and so personally with what I had experienced on the refuge this day, that it made me wonder if I had a right to be happy seeing butterflies and vermilion feathered birds flitting about among cottonwoods with fresh, mint-colored leaves all smelling so much of spring. Is it only the schizophrenic who can juggle, unintegrated, beauty and ugliness? Or, are we approaching a time when, from a growth of consciousness, the luminous in us will dissolve the darkness?

Looking for an answer to my own dilemma, I found some hope and much comfort in the words of the poet Mary Oliver from an interview. And these words reminded me of the value of a wildlife refuge and its importance in my life and the opportunities nature offers and the lessons it can teach. Talking about the struggles she had encountered in her childhood and in her life later, she said, “But I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world.”

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If you would like more information about the healing power of nature and birds, please visit Holly Merker's  website,  www.Ornitherapy.com and view her facebook page, /ornitherapy. Her book of the same name, co-authored by Richard Crossley of Crossley's ID Guide series, has a wonderful self-guided journaling section that promotes self-awareness through bird observation . . . highly recommended.

If you would like to hear about some aspect of my Year of Refuge, just leave your thoughts and queries in the Comments section. And a reminder that all of the images on this website can be purchased. I also post images from Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge on my Facebook.com/DonBoydPhotography page. As always, thank you.