a reverie on interdependence

I only noticed the milkweed today. I’ve walked on this path for decades. The path follows alongside a pond before it meanders into the woods for a portion of its route before circling back to the water. The 60-plus acre property was built as a seminary in 1904. My memory circled back to taking CCD classes with the seminarians when I was in junior high. In the ‘80s it was sold and became a conference center which remains today with the grounds are open to community in the neighborhood. It’s beautiful, especially on a sunny fall afternoon like today when I noticed the milkweed.

Milkweed is mostly gone, it seems. Seeing it circled me back to when I was a young child, and we’d play with milkweed pods in a field near a rose nursery. The greenhouses in their neat glass rows, looking like the plastic houses lined up on a Monopoly board, were quite far from us. The field was wild and untended, a perfect spot to play hide and seek, pretend to be anything we imagined, and use all of the wild, unkempt props that nature left for us to play with. Milkweed pods could be anything from hand-held missiles in a game of war to the roofs of mossy hutches we built for the fairies of the field. The wispy white feathered seeds could be wished upon and blown away as the afternoon shadows grew longer and we kids had to hurry home for supper.

Seeing the milkweed by the pond took me vividly and instantly to those childhood fall afternoons. It’s remarkable how the mind can do such a thing. Very much like the magic of the fairies of the field. And then, I thought of the Monarch butterfly which no longer swarms by the hundreds in my town, because that field and most of the properties like it from my youth were turned into housing developments long ago. Of course, we now know that the Monarchs lay eggs in the milkweed.

All of this reverie reminds me of our keen interdependence, the circles of seemingly separate lives, folding in on each other, necessary for all existence. And that reminds me of Zhuangzi’s dream –

One day at about sunset, Zhuangzi dozed off and dreamed that he turned into a butterfly. He flapped his wings and sure enough, he was a butterfly – What a joyful feeling. As he fluttered about, he completely forgot that he was Zhuangzi. Soon, though, he realized that that proud butterfly was, in fact, Zhuangzi. Was it Zhuangzi who had dreamed that he was a butterfly, or was it a butterfly who dreamed that it was Zhuangzi?

Maybe Zhuangzi was the butterfly and maybe the butterfly was Zhuangzi.*

May you be abundantly showered with the magical awareness of our interdependence.

* Zhuangzi Speaks, translated by Brian Bruya © 1992

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10/21/2024