Second Sunday of Lent: Trying to sit quietly in balcony chair and warm sunlight but shadows keep flitting across my closed eyes. Every time I look, nothing there, until finally I catch a smallish butterfly streaking by. Then another. And another, until I realize there’s a dense column all driving overhead in the same direction. Later I learn of the one billion butterflies migrating north to Oregon and beyond…because the rains this winter in the interior deserts dropped annual rainfall levels in single weekends, and dormant seeds and bulbs under the desert floor bloomed into carpets of flowers that caterpillars loved and survived into a billion butterflies going north. We notice a billion butterflies, but how often do we notice just one?
Second Sunday of Lent: Trying to sit quietly in balcony chair and warm sunlight but shadows keep flitting across my closed eyes. Every time I look, nothing there, until finally I catch a smallish butterfly streaking by. Then another. And another, until I realize there’s a dense column all driving overhead in the same direction. Later I learn of the one billion butterflies migrating north to Oregon and beyond…because the rains this winter in the interior deserts dropped annual rainfall levels in single weekends, and dormant seeds and bulbs under the desert floor bloomed into carpets of flowers that caterpillars loved and survived into a billion butterflies going north. We notice a billion butterflies, but how often do we notice just one?