Exotic Butterflies. Happy Sunday!

“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus

When we visited my daughters in Denver last November, we spent a day on the east side of town, at the Denver Butterfly Pavilion and Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. Both were special in their own ways. They have a Tropical Butterfly Enclosure at the Butterfly Pavilion where they raise and release most of the species of butterflies that you would see in the tropics of Central and South America. It is very impressive with interesting plantings of tropical plants and water features that really give you, especially when combined with the artificially high humidity and heat, at least a bit of the feeling of really being in the tropical rainforest. I had to shed my coat, definitely needed in the November Denver mile-high weather that day, very quickly. And the butterflies were spectacular. Many of them I had seen in Honduras, or Panama, or Peru, but never in the numbers, and never as closely as in the Butterfly Pavilion in Denver. My only really good shot of Blue Morpho Butterfly, common seen flying through the forest in the tropics but almost impossible to catch perched with its wings open, is from the Pavilon that day. 

The butterflies in the image are two different species, the Postman (perched) and the Cattleheart (hovering). Both are very common in Central America. The behavior is interesting too. I have seen other species do this, where one or more butterflies hover over and around a perched butterfly...but always they have been of their same species. The Postman and the Cattleheart are not even in the same family. 

Whatever is going on here, there is no doubt that we humans are facinated with butterflies. Tropical Butterfly Enclousures like the one in Denver can be found in may cities in the US, and they are always busy. We like to be surrounded by the delicate beauty of what are, after all, bugs. Most humans also have a thing about bugs, though fascination is not the word that comes to mind. :) Yet who does not like butterflies? Maybe because of their bright colors and interesting patterns, their grace in flight, and perhaps even their fragility...we can get beyond their insect nature, and appreciate their beauty. Too bad we can be so generous to each other? It takes a generous eye, very often, to get beyond the “human nature” of our fellows to see the bright colors, the grace in motion, and the fragile beauty of our fellows. It is easy to dismiss each other as just another messed up human being just way we dismiss most insects as just another bug. Still, the generous eye sees the butterfly in every bug, and the beauty in every human being. That is the light that fills us. Is it a challenge...certainly. Can we do it? Certainly...in Jesus and by the grace of God...looking out of generous eyes. Happy Sunday!