Seeing, Not Merely Looking

[The following has no particular point. Life doesn’t have to be tidy. Sometimes you don’t know where you’re headed, sometimes you’re not even steering the ship, and today’s post is barely thought out.]

Here are photos from last summer:

Illness (not mine) and grief has gotten inside my OODA loop. It does what sorrow does. I grieve, pull it together, but collapse again. The situation will continue until it doesn’t. This will pass as all things do, but right now I can do naught but ride it out.

Thankfully, I’m back at my beloved homestead. How interesting to discover the deep attachment. Once I was nomadic. Home was not a place so much as a point of view. Familiar surroundings were unnecessary. If you’re content you’ll be equally content in a desert, a suburb, or wherever. Well it was until it wasn’t. I guess it faded with time. I only noticed it in my current stress. I didn’t know my homestead was… essential… but it is. I feel like I never want to leave again.

I landed at home, tossed my shabby luggage in the corner, and started looking at all the things I haven’t done. A summer ignored, a lawn gone feral, daydreams of motorcycle trips discarded. You cannot be two places at once. When you drop everything to attend an emergency, everything will be waiting when you return.

Yet this is my homestead and my connection with the land is good for me. It’s a tool with which I seek to right a weary mind. I have equipment, time (for now), and (barely) the health to work. Honest physical labor is good for you. You gotta’ start somewhere right?

I fired up the tractor and started mowing. The tractor has been idle and my land shows it. My hunting food plots were never tilled and planted. Corn that should be maturing right now lies dormant in a sealed bag of unplanted kernels. Dead trees accumulate instead of finding their way to the wood pile. I start small. I began to mow the fuckin’ lawn!

My heart wasn’t in it. Why would it be?

I found myself glancing at the milkweed adjacent to (and intruding into) my lawn. Surely there was a monarch caterpillar in there?

Lawns are stupid.

I shut down the tractor in mid swath. I stepped away from my ragged lawn and in a few strides was in knee deep weeds. I started methodically searching milkweed. There ought to be monarch caterpillars. Maybe I’d be lucky and find a chrysalis!

[For those of you that don’t know, most (but not all) years I capture a monarch butterfly caterpillar. I keep it in a jar near my desk with all the food and space and water it needs. I watch it mature, form a chrysalis, and emerge as a butterfly. Then I turn the butterfly loose. Try it yourself. It’s not as dumb as it sounds! Nothing on a screen; not Twitter (X), F***book, or TV is as pleasant. Nothing you buy with dollars does you as much good as watching a butterfly come to life. It’s a beautiful, sweet, innocent, childish, happy, pointless, inexpensive, sublime thing. Many times I’ve held a newly emerged butterfly in my hand. Have you? Why not? We all spend too much of our lives thinking about bills, car maintenance, and taxes. It’s a reprieve to see a being come to life right before our eyes.]

I’d seized on the idea of finding a caterpillar. I was happily moving from milkweed to milkweed. I forgot everything else. I was in nature. Not everyone engages with nature as deeply as I (and that’s fine) but for me it’s a big deal.

I “was in the now”. I wasn’t thinking about future or past, only the present. It was a good moment. Animals live in the presnt. Humans are cursed to lose immediacy. Most of us burn away fretting over potential miseries of the future rather than the glory at hand. I was in the “now” and it felt good.

It didn’t last long. My timing was bad. There were no caterpillars. Monarch butterflies had arrived, laid eggs, the eggs had hatched into caterpillars, the caterpillars had grown and then morphed into chrysalis, the chrysalis had matured, and new monarchs had emerged. The monarch’s cycle was over. I’d missed it.

That was it. I was done. I sat in the weeds near a ditch and let emptiness fill me. I think I missed the Perseid meteor shower too. I wonder if the skies were clear that night?

Sitting there in the weeds like an exhausted beast, I was spent. I was no worse off than I’d been when I’d entered but I’d been denying it. Now I wasn’t.

I grabbed a tick that had found its way to my cheek. Little bastards are everywhere! The trick is to catch them before they latch on; which I usually do. I flicked him onto my tick-proof jeans and watched him scramble away. Good test of the jeans. I guess I never stop observing.

The Stoics, such as Marcus Aurelius, instruct us to “get right with nature”. It’s wise counsel. Was it helping me; a ridiculous creature sitting cross legged on the dirt, up to my neck in weeds. I wasn’t feeling it. I’d found one blood sucking parasite and surely there were others. Is it not easier to be plugged into the Matrix? Netflix and chill, shut down the mind, abandon the soul?

The universe knows what to say, you just have to listen. A butterfly came into view. It caught my attention and I stared like I’d never seen one before. It flitted right past me into a bunch of thistles. The thistles are a good 5′ tall! They’ve grown in a shooting lane I planned to clear with my brush-hog. Even when I don’t brush hog the lane I usually drag a tree or two over the area as firewood and that mashes the vegetation down considerably. It wasn’t to be this year! My reward for procrastination was a sea of bright purple flowers. The monarch went from one to the other, methodically, unhurriedly but not missing any flowers either. It was unaware of the human sitting there… nor would it have cared had it known.

I assume it was a butterfly born this very month. It looked shiny and healthy. It didn’t have the tattered look you’ll sometimes see on the earliest butterflies in spring, the look of a being that worked hard to get to a just thawed northern outpost.

“Hello there.” I spoke aloud. Why the hell not? I can talk to critters if I want.

Butterflies notice motion more than sound. It didn’t spook because I didn’t move. I watched it work. It calmed me. I began to notice all the other pollinators. They were  harvesting what to them must have seemed a miraculous bumper crop of tall thistles. Bumble-bees chugged by like aerial dump trucks. Honey bees seemed less interested in the thistle. They were going nuts on the unmowed clover in the front of my tractor. High above me a hummingbird buzzed by.

I waited. Goldfinches like thistle. Would one show up? Sure enough one did; a flashy yellow streak zipping along to an unknown destination. Nice.

Another tick crawled on my forearm. For some reason I deliberately flicked him into the distance rather than submit him o a second experiment with the tick proof pants. Sometimes you’re in the right mood to be kind to all of God’s creatures; even blood sucking bastards.

Nature really does heal but I wasn’t ready yet. “That all you got!?!” I grumbled at the world. This was stupid and definitely tempting fate. If a rattlesnake bit me in the ass at that exact moment I would have deserved it. But I wanted something more. I see monarchs and finches all the time, I needed something that felt special. Not wise to make demands of nature but I’m as flawed as any of us.

Then it happened, a bird of a sort I didn’t recognize popped into view. That doesn’t happen very often. I used to “know birds”. I’ve since forgotten a lot but I’m rarely totally surprised.

WTF was that? An indigo bunting? A mountain bluebird? It wasn’t a jay or anything I’m used to. I could google habitat maps and try to guess what it was but why bother? It was the simple blessing of an unusually pretty blue colored bird that I didn’t recognize. A second one joined it. Then they both fluttered off.

I suppose I’d seen what I was supposed to see. I got up, brushed another tick off my hat, and waded through the weeds back toward home. I left the tractor where it was, clearly I’m not ready for that yet. After a thorough tick check, I fell into bed and slept for many hours.

Is there a point to this story? Maybe not. It’s just what happened.