Kardia Kaiomenē: A Stunning Range of Beauty

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
Mary Oliver

We've been told that Spirit often speaks by seconding the motions. The transcendent gets our attention by shimmering the same thing over and over again. This month, Spirit grew some wings. One of the books on our bedside is Sue Halpern's Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly. We bought it in Ypsilanti a few days before we headed West last month. On a recent day on the Deschutes River, there were dozens of Monarchs dancing in the sun, fifteen feet above the earth. Apparently, these were taking a rest stop on their Spring solar-powered trek from Southern California to Canada.

The next day, we attended an Immigrant Solidarity Network town hall meeting at the local Presbyterian church. One of the community organizers stepped up to the mic wearing a shirt that read "Migrant." Above the lettering was a giant Monarch butterfly. Coincidence? We think not.

We are slowly metabolizing messages from the Monarch. One is that life is precious and beautiful and what is sacred defies functionality. Conservation biologist Karen Oberhauser from the University of Wisconsin testifies that Monarchs probably don't have big-picture ecosystem importance. "But just the fact that they connect people to nature," she adds, "is reason enough to make us care." The Monarch population west of the Rockies is down 86% this year due to drought, climate change, massive wildfires, herbicides and insecticides, as well as non-native milkweed that carry a deadly parasite. Like us, there is much that threatens our thriving.

Monarchs also prod us to reflect on our own migratory journey from suburban Southern California to Southeast Michigan to Central Oregon. Along the way, we've been introduced to America, both the myth and the reality. There's a wonderful podcast interview with author Anand Giridharadas. At one point, he says:

A lot of folks are incredibly decent and upholding an incredibly indecent system. And the way you get from one side of the river to the other, from those decent people to the indecent system, is the bridge of faulty assumptions and weird myths and bad ideas that have managed to really rise to the fore and conquer a lot of our culture.

This has been precisely our experience. Like the Monarch, the people we have met in the past five years possess a stunning range of beauty. Unlike the Monarch, we all tend to uphold an oppressive system with our silences. The system of America is spun together by myth-making (sustained by media, families, faith communities, social networks and more) that claims we are more exceptional than anyone on the planet and that there is more than enough to sustain our insatiable appetites.

The Airey family circa 1920 in Central
Washington (via England and Canada).

Yet another message of the Monarch is that the migrant story, for these butterflies and for all of us, is intergenerational. The Monarch's yearly trek from Canada to Southern California and back again takes 4 generations. We harken back a century to great-grandparents who were scattered from England to Germany to Norway to Ohio to Pennsylvania to Minnesota to Illinois. From one generation to the next, almost all of these made their way west of the Rockies. We carry their unfinished stories with us. We are commissioned to move them along in a redemptive manner. More love. More justice. More sacrifice. More compassion.

Monarch butterflies were named after King William III of England. It seems spot on that "the kingdom of God" that Jesus animated in the Gospels reflects the Monarch's winged migration more than an old bearded powerful white man on a throne. The Monarch ingests poisonous milkweed to protect herself from predators (who would get food poisoning in turn). Likewise, we humans are challenged to forego the fast food of American conventional wisdom to feast on the truth. Only this can really protect us. Like the God of Steadfast Love, so much of the Monarch's migration is a baffling mystery to scientists studying them. And like us, these beauties can only thrive in beloved community, laying down their lives for their friends.

The Monarch pleads that there's plenty more to pay attention to. Spirit is all around us. We are simply invited to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts. Steadfast Love is conspiring. She only needs a little opening to sneak in and shake things up. We are inextricably connected, tied together in a dance of mutuality. The song is Steadfast Love. And she is seconding the motions all over the place. Let's keep listening for it.

Nephew #3 was born on April 24.
Milo Brooks Lamont!

Staying safe above Benham Falls.

We hit the trail with Peter Nilsen-Goodin, who drove
from Portland to spend the weekend with us

Our dear friends Stacy and Dale Fredrickson hosted a
Descending Like a Dove book gathering in Denver in early April.
Our godchildren Trey and Iree are growing up too fast!!!!

More from Denver! Re-connecting with old friends.
Jonathan Barnett and Dale Fredrickson (far left and far right)
were members of the first News Release Basketball team that Tom led in 1997.
And John Ko was born 12 days after Tom. They grew up on La Sierra Drive
in Mission Viejo together! John lives in Fort Collins, CO now.