I am sitting here in Anahola, at a white picnic table, back to the road, facing a craggy, shredded green velour outcropping, with the outline of a gorilla along its ridge. I shall call it Sleeping Giant. I have been looking forward to a story about the Monarch and the Buddha. I read a piece regarding the plight of the Monarch Butterfly and it got stuck somewhere, banging on the door to come out. It seemed like the only way out was a short detour through Buddha Land.
The Monarch can fly 2,500 miles from winter to summer and the whole army is replaced each year, plus the annual newbies take the exact same route, even landing on the same trees. We’re talking about a butterfly! I was struck by the wondrous nature of their story and how many living things have their own magical tales of existence, too many to even imagine.
Our hero relies on the milkweed that grows in the Midwestern Corn Belt. Oops, where’s Groucho because you have just said the secret word, Corn!! It is the land of Monsanto and their favorite elixir, Round Up. Say goodbye to milkweed, which was pretty much minding its own business, while supporting millions upon millions of these regal butterflies every year. An equal number of dollars have far more importance than the same number of those elegant creatures. Over the past twenty years, 90% of these black and fire orange angels have been executed by greed.
There is a Zen phrase, dependent co-arising and when it was explained to me all I could remember is that you have to imagine a butterfly in Africa being able to have the flutter of its wings felt on the neck of someone walking the streets of Brooklyn. It is the idea that everything is connected to everything else in a kind of magical flow going forward and backward in time, too. It has also been called the infinite circle, a concept too big to put in your mind pocket. It is like the world has no skin, nothing to separate any of us from each other. Everything that ever has been or will be lives within this one borderless universe.
We live in a false hierarchy of our own creation, one that is laid out vertically, with us at the top and at the bottom, something that is so small it likely hasn’t been discovered yet, let alone named. The time is far past for us to tilt this ladder a bit more level, creating a little leverage for at least some others to become important, but never as important as we are, God Forbid.
We are playing this bizarre board game, where we make the rules and change them whenever it suits our immediate need for gratification, a diet of greed, hatred and ignorance, which rise endlessly, an idea attributed to the Buddha around 2,500 years ago.
If we thought of the entire Universe as an intricate symphony, it would take changing an infinite number of notes before you could sense the slow burn of discordance. The list is growing. The plight of the Monarch reminded me that we are insane to think our actions have no consequences. We happen to have a multi-millennial track record of behaving predictably when it comes the planet we inhabit.
Here I am, parked on that white bench in Anahola, faced with the extinction of more plants, insects, birds and mammals than it is possible to imagine. It is predicted that 50% of all species will vanish by the middle of this century. There are man made catastrophes everywhere you look. We could give up hope or its opposite, attempt to change a system that will not tolerate change, never has, never will. There is a huge space in between, one we can call the Middle Way. This asks each of us to take a look at the Monarch, the royalty of the natural world and to tip that ladder into a more horizontal plane, where all life has priceless value.