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Posts Tagged ‘monarch butterflies’

Status of status

Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday, The Garden, tagged , on September 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Returning to our regularly scheduled programming…

According to Monarch Watch, overall monarch migration numbers east of the Rockies are down.  The autumn migration is underway with Mexico-bound monarchs just broaching drought-stricken territories in Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas – as the report put it, 1000 miles of hell – a nearly flowerless / nectar less and waterless expanse.

Our six intrepid adventurers remain chrysalis-bound as days grow shorter, nights colder, and nectar bearing flowers in my own garden begin to fade.  Emergence is expected within two to eight days.

Will these stalwart individuals survive their transformation?  Will  daytime temperatures and nectar supplies still support life when they do emerge?  Can they endure the journey south and navigate  inhospitable terrain to find their own kind?

…Wait, this sounds like life after divorce…

Stay tuned.

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Mr. Saturday Night

Posted in Reflections on the everyday, Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Mr. Saturday Night is no longer —  I miss him already.

Mr. Saturday Night was an adventurous monarch caterpillar given to escapist feats. Placed in a jar for his own protection against winged predators, he had a penchant for wriggling out air holes and heading on down the highway, or at least the end of the shelf.

Big, striped, and saucy, that boy had a way about him.   Nobody could put down a milkweed leaf like he could.

And he is gone.

Yesterday, after hanging upside down for about a day, he sloughed his skin and disappeared into a jade-green chrysalis about one-third the size of his formerly formidable caterpillar form.

The root meaning of metaphor is to transfer, carry over or across.  Metamorphosis is to change, or transform.  Metamorphosis has always been a florid metaphor for human transformation.

We all know the story of the caterpillar and the chrysalis –  monarch butterflies are beloved for their beauty, their shape-shifting, and their migratory bent.  To me, they represent a life-long interest.  When young myself, I witnessed the same journey I now see again in Mr. Saturday Night and five of his closest friends.

Everyone sees what they will.  After years of troubling divorce and continuing instability, the permanence of the change in Mr. Saturday Night – his reduction to goo,  his sturdy reliance on unshakeable instinct to lead him forward – leave a deep impression on me.

Prior form is utterly gone – we have the shed skin to prove it.  Yet he survives, interior, contained, and changing.  His instinct, our faith,  he needs only to endure and follow his path to the sky.

At their age, my children are saddened by the disappearance of these beautiful caterpillars, they wonder at the change – and wait to see if nature holds good on the promise.  I do too.

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