One generation commends your works to another;
they tell of your mighty acts.
—Psalms 145:4
During the thirty-ish years my grandmother spent teaching third grade, she was known as “The Butterfly Lady.” Every summer, she would venture out into the fields around town and collect monarch butterfly eggs from the milkweed that shot up through the grass. She’d gather at least one egg for every student, and these eggs would hatch into hungry caterpillars kept under the safeguard of clear plastic cups in cardboard trays. These “pillars” had to be fed with leaves for a week or so before they’d climb to the top of their cup, hang to shed their skin, and form a chrysalis.
I was a fortunate witness to this phenomenon early in life, holding freshly sprouted butterflies from the time I could form sentences, watching them pump their wings until they were healthy enough to fly. Seeing this life cycle engraved some of my earliest memories. Of course, as a child, I only saw the birth, growth, and fluttering away parts of this cycle. It wasn’t until later that I learned how the cycle ends.
As of late, the monarchs have been slowly disappearing. Humans have created a world where the coming generations have a daunting task to survive. A friend and I were talking the other day about whether we’d care to bring our own offspring into a world so fraught with danger and perils, as the pending apocalypse seems to be at nigh. But after further reflection, we figured the apocalypse has always been coming, always just around the corner. Your parents thought so, their parents thought so, and their parents thought so too. And yet, the generations keep on coming.
Hundreds of monarchs flew from the cups my grandmother hung in her classroom. The impending doom of declining numbers never gave her an excuse to give up trying. She kept up with this tradition until, as all life cycles do, hers came to an end. If any lesson can be gleaned from this story, I suppose it’s one of optimistic persistence, where our own generation can aspire to be like her, raising one little metaphorical caterpillar at a time and hoping to see them flutter off into the world on their own.