I wrote this initially about two decades back, ironically during an apparently rather tedious, science-related conference. I first posted it at another, now defunct website. I re-posted it again at WP in September of 2015, just before some travels to the general area where I witnessed this event.
I was eleven-years old, and it left a deep impression on my still young mind.
“不知周之夢為蝴蝶與，蝴蝶之夢為周與。”
“Did a man dream he was a butterfly,
or is a butterfly dreaming it is a man?“
–Zhuāngzǐ (c.369 BC – c.286 BC).
Science has been at the center of nearly all of my adult life. Ironically, however, I find some reassurance in that science doesn’t have answers to every question. To be honest with myself, I don’t want to know everything.
Bewilderment can be a marvelous sensation, hinting at possibilities that some wondrous magic perhaps awaits just behind the curtain. The joy in watching a good magician is in the mystery. And life itself is filled with mysteries — experiences that liberate stories far more wonderful than anything possibly rendered into mere description.
Finding myself alone one autumn afternoon in the years before being endowed with the all-knowing condition of teenager-hood, my eyes fell upon one of those magnificent, but mysteriously unexplainable phenomena. Rounding a corner along a trail through the hills near my childhood home, the very landscape suddenly transformed into a rolling, whirling, orange and yellow cloud of pulsating wings.
A tremendous gathering of monarch butterflies had settled into a ravine of wild oaks and milkweed near the edge of the Forest of Nisene Marks, draping everything in a living fabric of what entomologists refer to as the “imago stage of lepidoptera” — or “butterflies” for the rest of us.
In one of life’s great mysteries, scientists have no idea how, or even why tens-of-millions of monarch butterflies travel thousands of miles across the North American continent, ultimately to converge on just a few locations. Moreover, a single migration is accomplished through generations. Each delicate butterfly’s life enduring only a fleeting few weeks, it will be the offspring of many generations on who complete the cyclic annual journeys started by distant ancestors.
Of course, scientists know some things. Experiments show that southward migrations can be triggered by cold weather. But this only tells us that the butterflies don’t like to get too cold, and that’s not really very surprising.
Some also think that monarchs orient themselves to the sun during their travels. But they don’t know how the insects compensate for the sun’s different positions over a day, or at different latitudes. And even more mysterious is how a butterfly, so many generations removed from any who previously congregated at some special location deep in a Mexican forest, can ultimately return to that exact spot.
Scientists are also just as mystified by how monarchs form “roosts” along their migratory routes, such as the one I happened upon in the local hills near my childhood home. These delicate insects don’t travel in flocks, like birds. Rather, they migrate alone.
Yet, these sudden gatherings of sometimes vast numbers of butterflies will form spontaneously over a few hours, with members converging from every direction onto a single location. It’s as if countless flyspeck minds suddenly resolved that this particular place should be called “home.”
And just as suddenly, they’re gone.
Maybe there was a message for that solitary witness. After all, what is “home”, and what is it that draws us to gather in such places? And why is it that just when we might think we’ve discovered such a place, it just as suddenly disappears?
The world around us changes. The young and the old alike, move on. New generations take their places. We awaken to a changed landscape, perhaps even one in which we no longer find refuge. Maybe home isn’t a place after all?
And so we migrate. And if not in our bodies, then in our hearts. We go on to what comes next and gather anew. We gather with our friends and fellow travelers, our families, lovers and companions, or perhaps just our faith in something greater. That, or we die alone.
And how we know when it’s time to travel is not by the temperature of the air, or by the positions of the sun or the stars, or by changes in some physical field. Instead, we look inward, toward something else entirely, to something unquantifiable. We turn to a counsel for which there is no science.
Standing within a swirling sea of pulsating wings, some brushed my face while others took momentary refuge upon outstretched arms. I stood in place until my muscles ached, until I knew that I’d be missed among my own. But the warm memory of the experience remained, like the magical iridescence of orange dust that was left on my skin afterward.
Returning to that same spot the next day, but for a few lifeless husks they were gone. Now even the hills where nature once performed that blissfully mysterious act of magic for an awestruck child have been tamed by other humans in search of homes for themselves. And I too have moved on. But every journey has a destination, even if we don’t know what it is.
Luminous Aether 
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