Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World Read Online Free

held an inexplicable amount of significance for diverse cultures. In Mexico, the widely observed Day of the Dead holiday has its roots in indigenous mythology. The P’urhépecha, also known as the Tarascan, believe that the first two days of November are a special time of year when their deceased loved ones are able to visit them, possibly in the form of monarch butterflies.
    Historically, Celts believed women became pregnant by swallowing the souls of butterflies. Chinese culture indicates that butterflies are the joining of two souls, their wings halves of a sacred whole. And every contemporary American college student with a butterfly tattooed on her belly, ankle, or shoulder must have a different explanation for why she was drawn to the image.
    In this information age, the monarchs’ mystique is part of their appeal.
    Despite recent advances that have led scientists to believe the sun plays a role in assisting the butterflies’ navigation, it is unknown how the fragile-winged insects make the many decisions necessary to keep them alive as they battle storms and choose their moments of passage in high-stakes situations, such as crossing the Great Lakes. It is also a mystery as to how they find their way back to the very specific spots where they gather in Mexico’s mountains in concentrations of millions per acre.
    No single butterfly ever makes the round-trip from Mexico to the northernmost reaches of North America. Most of the males die near their ancestral breeding grounds, but female monarchs move north in the spring. There, they lay their eggs. Each subsequent, short-lived generation moves a little farther up the continent along corridors of wildflowers.
    In early fall, the chosen generation reliably starts the migration cycle anew.
    Wandering Cerro Pelón, I found Dan lying on a patch of open ground, playfully calling out for the monarchs to cover him. Judy was watching her grown son with a satisfied smile on her face. “God gives us more than we even know to ask for,” she said.
    Though I was raised a Sunday-school-going Lutheran, I usually shirked away when people started talking about God. I always imagined there were political, social, or moral motives at play rather than spiritual ones. Also, coming from North Carolina—the Bible Belt state where I was born, raised, and still lived—I was hesitant to use the word “God” because people from my part of the country often used it interchangeably with Jesus. And—while I thought the cultural manifestations of his handsome, bearded face brought a lot of people peace—I didn’t think it was necessary to go through Jesus, or for that matter, anyone, to get to divinity.
    I’d called myself spiritual but not religious since I was twelve years old. Yet, as I stood on that mountaintop at twenty-nine, I still didn’t have a good grip on what that meant. But in the presence of open-hearted Judy, in that extraordinary place, I was actually starting to suspect that I had been limiting my way of thinking about the word “god.”
    Mythology mastermind Joseph Campbell wrote: “God is not supposed to refer to a personality . . . God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery . . . We are particles of that mystery, that timeless, endless, everlasting mystery which pours forth from the abyss into the forms of the world.”
    That, I could get behind.
    It wasn’t social or political. It was not a religious affiliation. But it was something.
    I did not turn from Judy, and she had nothing more to say. Together, we stared into the day’s abundance, appreciating the tangible rewards of our resilient, monarch-focused faith.
    Dan, whose students were never far from mind, finally stood up and said, “I saw a butterfly with a hole in its wing just like Holey’s, but, I mean, I don’t really think it was Holey.”
    “You never know,” I said. “It’s pretty amazing that any butterfly with a hole in its wing could make it