From the desk of Teresa Jordan, Executive Director – I am grateful for a crisp day during which the sun shines, I have the swooping display of a bat in my yard, apple spice tea is brewing and the birds are flocking together to face their huge treks across the expanses to the south.
I found out this week that for my whole life I have been blissfully naïve about the monarch butterfly migration … until now. I did know that theirs was a massive trek, and that monarchs group in trees in Mexico. But now I know that the monarchs do not migrate together; they make the journey alone and find the group at their destination. Then even more shocking, I learned that these butterflies never make it back to my yard. They will set off and then females lay eggs that hatch and those new butterflies emerge from cocoons and keep on heading north. The butterflies in my yard in the summer are two or three generations apart from the ones that left last fall.
This new knowledge makes me think about all of the journeys we begin and count on others to take up and finish. While we don’t really think about it many of the decisions that we make will affect coming generations, and it is up to us to make sure that they know the way and can find what they need for their own summers. Maybe like monarchs more than birds we are wandering on our own, but the tree in Mexico is not far away; there we can find others ready to help, to plan, to dream and pass on the knowledge of how to get home.
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