moment - what's yours? We spend a lot of time and energy wallowing through the muck here at DK, witnessing and discussing acts of oppression and incompetence. The defilements are inexhaustible. I feel it's also important to celebrate the moments of beauty and pleasure, because we're never going to get to a place where everything has been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Conflict is an essential and intrinsic part of the human experience, but so is pleasure.
My last most beautiful moment was watching a monarch butterfly feast on swamp milkweed blossoms, in a garden that I'd helped to plant.
The garden was a memorial garden, at a public school in DC, to a woman I'd never met, the school librarian, who'd died young, and loved gardens. I'd been working in the summer heat for a few hours, digging up turf and pulling out weeds, in preparation for an expansion of the garden. It takes a ridiculous amount of work to keep a native garden going, even a small plot like this one. I was working with kids from the Mayor's Conservation Corps, a city initiative providing summer jobs to DC youth, to keep them off the streets. Most of them weren't particularly appreciative of the experience, but some were working hard. I'm glad of any opportunity to share the pleasure of gardening with others, so I let them work at their pace, and paid no mind to the complaining.
I consider work like this a luxury, and I pity all the drones working in air-conditioned offices on computers, while I drip sweat and work my muscles, hands and forearms caked with dirt that I wipe across my brow. There was a time when most humans worked like this every day, all day, and there remains a visceral connection, a groundedness, to working the earth.
I'd stop to cool down every 15 minutes or so, and one time I saw a monarch butterfly flitting down the road, dodging cars, wandering lost. I wish I could once see the world as they do, with their floating bouncing pattern of chaos, because I can see no order to their flight. DC's not a very good place for butterflies - it's mostly roads and buildings, and monarchs are particular to milkweed, have no use for lawns or all the non-natives that gardeners often plant.
I wanted to run out and somehow direct the monarch to the milkweed in the garden, maybe pluck a bloom and use that to entice it, but instead I leaned against my shovel and watched as the fragile fleck of orange weaved and fluttered like a leaf in unpredictable breezes, and then honed in, dove towards our flowers and started working them over like a predator. I moved slowly in, sat and watched for a few minutes as it suckled and probed the flowers.
The round trip from here to Mexico took 3 or 4 generations - maybe this butterfly's great-grandparents had flown these same streets, last summer. And maybe its ancestors have been coming here for centuries, millennia, maybe since before humans lived here. Maybe they outflew native american wildfires, and found oases during droughts and ice ages. Maybe they've watched the Europeans turn swamps and forests into fields and then cities. Maybe they'll still be coming after we're gone.
A moment like this makes me want to plant acres of milkweed, makes me want to raze buildings and break up roads and parking lots to plant meadows. I do this work hopelessly, in that I don't expect to be able to fix things, or change the culture. But at the same time, this work, as trivial and insignificant as it is, gives me hope, because I've chosen to work on things that I care about, things that are meaningful to me.
And when a butterfly flies hundreds of miles to land on a flower that I helped plant, that gives me hope and inspiration.
So now you, what's your last most beuatiful moment?