The weekends have acquired a routine.  I wake up, read the newspaper, and despair.  Then I head outside, take a walk, and get saved.

The bleakness I don’t ascribe entirely to my meds.  There’s a line between genocide and suicide, and, in festering conflicts abroad and at home, we’ve crossed it.

But in the mountain park above my backyard yesterday, a different line has been crossed – from cocoon to chrysalis.  Butterflies popped from the drying grasses like puffs of bright smoke.  So many and in such variety I had to come home and look them up.  Checkered and Yellow Sulphurs.  Cabbage Whites and Melissa Blues.  Even a pair of “Mormon Fritillaries” — who wouldn’t want to see THEM mate!  Above me, Tiger Swallowtails wheeled like drunken raptors, and squadrons of dragonflies – Hoary Skimmers, Electric Dashers and Paiute Dancers, striped in racing black and neon blue — rose to the call of a clean-washed sky after a week of rain.  When Kaisha and I walked again at evening, the insane zigzag of insects had given way to an insane zigzag of bats.   June may have been the month of blooms, but August promises a month of wings.

From my human perspective, this pageant is as peaceable as a kindergarten field trip.  But I know that in their own eyes, these creatures are fighting, killing, feasting on each other’s entrails and struggling against resource limits, just as we are.  Had they powers of speech, I shudder to think what epithets and slurs they would invent for each other – the bats especially!  Still, whatever traumas they suffer and inflict are blown away on the morning breeze; whereas humans are condemned to remember past wrongs as deeply as the names of our children, and to sort victims and perpetrators into taxonomies as precise as any lepidopterist’s.  Conversely, when it comes to envisioning the future — even so far as seeing where our tightening circles of vengeance and re-enactment will inevitably lead us — we tend to be as blind as, well, bats.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in remembrance.  But I believe more in recovery.  And I believe our debt to the future is greater than the claims of the past.  To pay it, we’ll need to move beyond fetishizing what kind of bug we are.