I couldn't find a monarch butterfly... wrong season for it here; but I found another that I like... flitting around as if it were summer... and a bee working the winter Iceland poppies and the rosemary in our back yard.

  NOT A MONARCH...

Being something of an Arkansas traveler myself, I've been in love with the monarch butterflies since I first learned about their long trip when I was a little kid. My family moved from Arkansas to California when I was twelve, and the trip changed the world for me.  I was the oldest of six kids making the trip, and I can remember not wanting to wear the sunglasses Mother bought for each of us because I wanted to see everything the way it was/is.  I wear sunglasses now, but the impulse to see the rawness of things is still strong in me.  I got over resisting the impulse to not let a lens come between me and reality.  Now I'm committed to looking for truth through the lens of a camera.  

Mrs. Mitchell, a science teacher at Live Oak High School, told me about the monarchs when I was in ninth grade. My family had traveled 1900 miles from Glenwood, Arkansas, to Live Oak, California... just about the same distance the monarchs fly.  I've been in love with them since, and I admit to being afraid for them.  With Montsanto and climate change working against them, I'm afraid these beautiful, heroic creatures will become extinct. Knowing that no single monarch ever makes the entire round trip almost turned me into a mystic when I was an adolescent. How could I not respect my own instincts and hunches if that little creature could find its way to a place two-thousand miles away where it had never been...  My friend Jerome Garger reminded me today that the monarchs are in danger.  Give it some thought.  How do we persuade Montsanto to get on the side of the butterflies... instead of the side of the profit-at-all-costs god?  How do we convince farmers that bees and butterflies are important to them, even if they don't feel kinship or respect for them?  How do we turn stubbornly ignorant climate change deniers into believers in the possibility, even probability, of a world with much of the beauty and meaning gone from it?

And speaking of working bees, my friend Clyde Yoshida of http://vibrantsoap.com/ was busy this morning... the outdoor market at Park and El Cajon Boulevards.