If when you were a young kid somebody would ask you to choose an animal with which you like to be identified, which one would you choose? The majority will go for one that represents strength, courage … that inspired freedom, and so lions, tigers, eagles or more imaginary as a dragon would head the list because since childhood our instinct for survival and society does not want us to relate to nothing that inspires weakness, that is why the butterfly is relegated to the category of scorn when someone is compare with this small insect. But since our trip took us to the border between the states of Michoacan and Mexico at the beginning of November, the butterfly, specifically the Monarch, became the living being with whom we feel identified the most.
It was an instinct that pushed us to turn our life into a journey where the route would be our home and the horizon our destination, as a profession and goal in life we wanted to be a traveler. So it was impossible not to be attracted to this butterfly that, even against the most logical rules of nature, just breaking its cocoon and unfolding its little wings for the first time begins one of the longest migrations known. Without GPS and no advice from previous experience, this insect so small that for many of you would go unnoticed follow its instinct and dare to travel the more than 5,000 km between Canada and the same forests in Mexico where so many previous generations their ancestors went to spend the winter.
Maybe society wanted to educate us to become another tool so the system can continue working, but sometimes the destiny they want to impose us is not the same as we feel.
I wanted to go around the world on a motorbike although this seemed to be just an impossible dream for a small girl from a neighborhood and a city like mine. But this was my feeling, so I started working to make real that dream. Then, once I was immersed in my adventure arrived the obstacles that sometimes left me in a situation when to keep going just seemed impossible, but I din´t give up because because to me those battles deserved from me to keep fighting, for me every day on the road no matter how hard it was, it was a chance to celebrate life.
It was shortly after the famous Day of the Dead in Mexico when we arrived in the forests of Michoacan, and are exactly those days when every year the mexican people wait for the arrival of the Monarchs, what´s means that each one of the thousands of butterflies that flew around me had just arrived from the far North in Canada. The curious thing is that not every monarch butterfly got that instinct that pushes then to fly to the other side of the world, only two generations at year are born with this traveling destiny, and when it happens they do not avoid the call, they accept the challenge because somehow they can feel that their life and the life of their kind depends on it.
Now I know that instinct is the ink with which the history of the human being is also written, there are no great triumphs that did not begin by skipping some rules, choosing the alternative path as a philosophy of life, trying, changing and discovering that falling is part of the lesson in that wonderful route to success. And if even fear keeps you from following that inner call, remember that Mother Nature will always help to those brave people who dare to follow their dreams, the same way that the migratory generation of Monarch butterflies can live up to 10 times longer than the generations that remain among the protection of the forests where they born.
In the life of the traveler sometimes a small butterfly becomes a great teacher, and sometimes a desert country in a psychoanalyst full of advice, and that was Namibia to us, the protagonist of our next post.
LEAVE A COMMENT