Milkweed

To me, there’s no more spiritual experience than immersing myself in nature. The explosion of life that exists at the edges of the human imprint provides a feeling of wonder, of connectedness with this wonderful and anomalous world.

One summer, I spent all my free time in a meadow in a city, a little patch of wilderness surrounded by tall buildings and the din of traffic, details that were muted by brightly coloured flowers and birdsong, where the grass grew to my waist and I could disappear into the bedstraw and watch leafhoppers emerge from their spittle and explore their miraculous world.

There were so many little details to discover there. The lives of the insects. The secret homes of rabbits and rodents. And the milkweed. Its fragrant, pale pink flowers, its curved young pods tasting of fresh asparagus, Its burst of soft, silky seeds. Milkweed, home to meadow royalty: the monarchs.

That August, the meadow was mowed down in preparation for a building site. The entire world I’d learned about, found solace in was gone. The milkweed was gone. This neatly mowed lot was a scene of death and destruction on a scale only I could see. I was devastated.

This year was a banner year for monarchs in the County. I say this with nothing more than empirical evidence, but that seems to be enough. They’re everywhere, their unmistakable orange wings floating through the air, a harbinger of the fall. An achingly beautiful reminder of that summer in the meadow.

The population was a puzzle until it was noted to me recently that other populations that rely on meadows and pastures have exploded over the past summer.

It’s been a year of record rains here, replenishing a depleted water table we’d feared only a year ago would take years to come back. With all that rain, fields were left uncut and so the wildlife that relies on them have been allowed to flourish.

It’s been a year of floods here. In the west, firefighters battled some of the worst wildfires ever seen. In the south, Irma, followed by Maria, caused horrific damage. They were unprecedented storm systems, even by Hurricane Alley standards.

They are frightening events when coupled with scientific warnings that the global climate is shifting, potentially causing even more disasters.

But there’s something about those orange wings that looks to me like hope. The thought that nature intervened, made it impossible for us humans to do the things we do that take away monarch breeding grounds, is reassuring. The world’s ability to right itself is reassuring.

If we are on the brink of a disaster caused by human activity, then nature will bring a cross wind. It will sternly sweep us away. It will stop our destruction by wreaking its own, and when it’s over, the world will have made room for the butterflies and their milkweed. I am sure of it.

That faith, as blind as it is, is as close as I have come to my spiritual self. There is nothing more human than that.

mihal@mihalzada.com