The butterflies at X on Lake do not begin with a lesson. They are already in the bushes when you arrive. We leave two zones of shrubbery alone: no pesticides, no hard tidying. Wild fauna spills where it likes. The lake stays bright at the foot of the hill. The butterflies stayed. That is the review that counts.
A monarch look-alike tips over a flower as if the flower had moved. A small yellow one crosses the path in a line so crooked it seems to be arguing with the air. Butterflies are a barometer: if they are here, the land is still healthy. First, watch the flight.
The stone has called a meeting
The cabbage-whites miss the flower, find it, miss it again, then sit on a warm stone as if the stone had called a meeting. Robert Graves thought the wobble was a gift: an honest, slightly foolish way of getting anywhere, made of guesswork, hope, and the hopelessness that keeps going. Down by the lake or the turtle pond, the cabbage-white only knows it is somewhere. And that somewhere smells of wet earth and bougainvillea, which will have to do.
How not to fly
If you get lost in the shrubbery, you are in good company. The butterfly is on its own errand. Flowers get pollinated sideways. Miss one bloom. Find the next. Do not correct yourself too fast. Straight is not the same as true. Fly only the approved line and you arrive where you were sent. Lurch a little, and the day still has interesting weather in it. Graves thought this foolish path was a picture of original thought.
The devil is heavy. The butterfly is not.
Nietzsche describes his devil as the spirit of gravity, the one through whom everything falls. This is the habit of making life heavy: the voice that calls play a waste and a crooked afternoon a failure. The butterfly argues back without a speech. Almost no weight. A real errand. No wish to be profound. Even a little god falls asleep by a well because he has chased butterflies too long. Nietzsche does not scold him.
If these bushes make you lighter, you have not left real life. A solemn mood cannot keep up with a yellow wing.
An errand the size of a thumb
Graves wrote of the caterpillar that nibbles leaf by leaf under the honeysuckle. It has heard the rumour of white wings. It is not impressed. When it is old it will build a small green tomb out of a leaf and dream. Wings, or a sound sleep: either way, it thinks, it will miss its share.
The caterpillar is already a life. The promise of wings does not pay back the days spent as a worm. Those days were the life, not the practice. Inside the chrysalis the old body comes apart. What the crawling life would call the end of the world, another writer said, the master calls a butterfly. An ending can hold the seed of a beginning. It can also just be an ending.
A monarch look-alike crosses toward the rice field and does not come back. A life the size of a thumb has finished its errand. The journey was the errand.
Somewhere will have to do
You do not have to solve the lake, or the bush, or yourself, before you are allowed to be here. Somewhere is a place. Wet earth is a place. A stone in the sun is a place. The cabbage-white has already accepted the terms.
Please do not seek nets. Count the butterflies instead. For as long as you follow one little sprite from bloom to bloom, the spirit of gravity has less to hold. Butterflies show whether the small web is still working. Lose them, and you lose more than a pretty stroll. Two wild zones on thirty acres are how the count stays possible. Leave the bushes alone.
The flight is crooked, and that is not a fault. The lightness is a real idea. Becoming something else is a real ending. And the point of the path is the path. A butterfly that flew in a perfect line would have missed the shrubbery. The shrubbery was the work.
When something small and bright settles, on a stone or on a sleeve, with the lake doing its slow bright work behind it, be still for as long as it needs. Not because you have captured a lesson. Because it is here, and soon it will not be, and the wobble it makes when it leaves is the whole philosophy, written in a hand too light for the spirit of gravity to hold. Come smile with them, if smiling is what happens. Mostly, come and notice that the barometer is still moving.
Et voilà. Lessons the butterfly does not stay to teach.
