Connected While Apart
Neighbors

Who is our neighbor: the Samaritan? the outcast? the enemy? Yes, yes, of course. But it is also the whale, the dolphin, and the rainforest. Our neighbor is the entire community of life, the entire universe. We must love it all as ourselves. 
(Brian Patrick in Earthspirit: A Handbook for Nurturing an Ecological Unity by Michael Dowd)

Dear Mayfield,
Such a familiar biblical question:  Who is our neighbor?  A question often heard only as one about human neighbors is more and more frequently being asked these days in terms of a much broader, interspecies assortment of neighbors.  Beyond asking the question with a wider lens, we also need to ask it not only in terms of what we can do for our neighbors — the whales, the dolphins, the rainforest, and the butterflies — but also what they are accomplishing for us.  In our previous web note featuring a hackberry emperor butterfly, I lifted up the butterfly habits and behavior that reveal both their reliance on a combination of atmosphere, sun, water and soil and ours too.  Today I will mention another learning that butterflies regularly extend to us even though we don’t think about it that much.

Yes, we know that our commitment to preserve and expand habitat for butterflies and other pollinators has a direct positive effect on our food chain.  But beyond their nectering, what butterflies feed on is wrapped around another teaching too.  These small creatures have to be very attentive to feeding sources that supply essential minerals for their diets. Those sources include carrion, bird poop, rotting fruit, other animal waste products, and human sweat on our skin and clothing.  It isn’t very appetizing is it?  They maintain their strength through what has been discarded, excreted, and left behind.  In our longstanding throw-away culture, this is a magnificent example for us to re-examine our default toss-it-out tendencies.

Playing closer and closer attention to species other than our own, we are likely to see more clearly a way forward that serves the wellbeing of all, the health of the entire web of life.  I don’t want to share a butterfly’s diet, but I am interested in what the diet can help me to understand.  In this world where their pollinating energy promotes an abundance of life, their sources of nourishment  are reliably renewable. What a gift!
Peace, Martha

Special Note — T.J.’s Memorial Time
There will be a memorial time celebrating the life of T.J. Lusher in the Mayfield Monarch Waystation at 11:00 am on Wednesday, September 2, 2020 (her birthday).  Please let Diana Swanson know if you are planning to attend, diana_swanson@comcast.net.  In order to be ready for this celebration with a set up that honors appropriate social distancing and safe health practices, it will be helpful for us to know about numbers ahead of time.  Those who are in attendance are asked to wear a mask.