By Vincent

INTERNAL FLIGHT

Have you ever wondered how something as fragile as a butterfly can possibly know where it is going…

Think about that…

A monarch butterfly, weighing less than a gram, can travel thousands of miles between its breeding grounds in the United States and Canada and its overwintering grounds in central Mexico… crossing mountains, forests, fields and open skies… generation after generation, somehow making its way back toward the same regions visited by its ancestors…

How does it know? There is no map…No compass…No GPS… No one standing there saying, “This way.”

And yet… It goes…

Maybe the more interesting question isn’t how does it know where to go?

Maybe it’s… What allows it to trust the journey? The monarch doesn’t control the journey… It can’t control the weather… It can’t control the wind… It can’t control the storms… It can’t control where the next meal will come from, what predator may appear, or what obstacle may suddenly stand between it and where it is going…

And yet it flies…

When the conditions become impossible, it doesn’t fight them…

It surrenders…

It stops…It waits,,, and when the conditions change… It flies again…

There is something deeply familiar about this if we are willing to look beyond the butterfly…

It reminds me of a male female couple I know learning to ballroom dance… both people had strong personalities, strong willed and use to “pulling the levers” within their business…they struggled and struggled and were ready to quit… when they told their dance teacher they just couldn’t do it and decided ti quit,,, the teacher looked flat them and said he leads…she must surrender and trusts and must follow… And yet she does the lion’s share of the work… She creates the movement, the beauty, the grace and the amazement of the dance… she is mostly the center of attention 

But what happens if she doesn’t trust the lead? What happens if she decides she needs to control every movement? What happens if she anticipates the next step, resists the direction, or refuses to surrender to the dance?

The dance becomes difficult…The beauty disappears…The connection is lost…And eventually…The dance falls apart…

Perhaps life isn’t so different…

The monarch, in many ways, surrenders to what is… A big, intense storm arrives? It doesn’t waste its energy trying to make the storm stop…

It waits…The winds change…The moment becomes right…

And then…

Back on the path…It trusts something within itself… It was born in nature… It is a butterfly… It doesn’t spend its precious energy wondering whether it should have been born a bird…It doesn’t compare its wings to someone else’s…It doesn’t question why its journey isn’t easier…

It simply does what a Monarch butterfly does…It follows its path…

And that path isn’t without obstacles…

One of the monarch’s essential sources of nourishment,,,the milkweed plant,,,is becoming increasingly difficult to find because of deforestation,,,habitat loss,,,herbicides and pesticides…There are predators along the way as well…Yet the monarch carries something within itself that protects it… Monarchs are toxic to many birds, and predators can become seriously ill from eating them…

Think about the paradox in that…

The very thing that makes the monarch vulnerable also contains part of what helps it survive… 

Perhaps there is something in that for us… lean into our vulnerability…

Because what if some of the things we perceive as obstacles aren’t actually there to stop us? What if they are part of the journey? What if the storm isn’t the end of the journey… but simply a place where we are being asked to stop?

What if the detour isn’t a mistake?
Does surrender mean giving up?

And what if our desperate need to control everything is actually creating more resistance than the circumstances themselves?

How do we travel? How do we move through our lives?

Our journey can be literal, of course…But there is another journey happening all the time,,,the internal flight…

Do we surrender? Do we trust? Do we follow? Do we welcome our vulnerability as strength?

Or do we fight?

Do we insist that the journey unfold according to our plan? Do we cling to where we think we should be going,,, even when something within us is quietly saying,,, “Not this way… not yet… wait”?

How often do we mistake resistance for strength? How often do we mistake surrender for weakness? And how often do we become so busy trying to control the journey that we fail to experience the journey itself?

Perhaps we hold ourselves back.

Held back from what we need…
Held back from what we want…
Held back from what we are becoming…

And perhaps, most importantly…

Held back from happiness and peace…

The monarch doesn’t need to know every mile of the journey… It doesn’t need to know what tomorrow’s wind will bring… It simply needs to know when to fly… when to stop… when to wait and when to begin again…

Maybe our journey is much the same…

Maybe trust doesn’t mean knowing where we’re going… Maybe trust means knowing that we don’t have to know… Maybe surrender doesn’t mean becoming passive… Maybe surrender means becoming willing to move with what life is presenting rather than constantly fighting against it… Maybe the path isn’t something we find… Maybe the path is something we learn to recognize…

Maybe you don’t need to find your way home. Maybe you’ve been on the journey home all along.

So…

Where are you in your flight?
What storm are you trying to fly through?
What are you resisting?
What are you trying so desperately to control?
Where in your life are you being asked to stop… to wait… to surrender?

And perhaps the deepest question of all:

What if the thing holding you back isn’t the obstacle in front of you…but your resistance to what the journey is asking of you? Where are you in your flight, your journey… and what would it take for you to surrender, trust and follow…

Maybe you don’t need to find your way home.

Maybe you’ve been on the journey home all along.

Namaste’