Over the last week I have been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior, a story that looks at the effects of climate change on the monarch butterfly. The ways in which she is able to weave scientific concepts into a story of human longings, confusions,questions, and heartbreak is a marvel. Her ability to educate and inform while pulling the reader into the lives of every day people, trying to do the best they can in the only place they’ve ever called home, has given me much to think about.

In Minnesota this summer, we often talked of the absence of the monarch butterflies. There was much speculation about why there were so few. As the summer started drawing to a close and fall began to set in, their absence was obvious. Normally the coneflowers and other flowers of purple in our garden would be dotted with the delicate wings of these miraculous beings. But not this summer. I believe I saw only one monarch the entire season. Kingsolver’s novel highlights the migration patterns of these paper-thin fliers. Until this year, we would see them in our yard and know that soon they would be on their way to Mexico. It is a totally miraculous thing to think about. Beings that are born in one place. Fly to another. Give birth. Die. And then the children and grandchildren make their way back to an original home.

My head was still buzzing with this story when I read these words from a morning devotional: “I give thanks for the ancestral experience that I inherit in every cell of my body.” Of course. The ancestral experience is not just for butterflies! It is in all of us, isn’t it? The way in which these two encounters of words intersected in me had me reflecting all day about how those who came before me are imprinted in so much of who I am and what I do.

Sometimes I will catch a glimpse of my hands out of the corner of my eye and see, not my own hand, but my grandmother’s. It is an unnerving experience until the comfort of it washes over me. There are times when a particular tone in a song touches me in a way that seems deeper than anything logically understandable and I sense that somehow I am connecting through time with something, someone I once knew.

There are also places that seem to hold greater meaning, landscapes that feel like home though I have never lived there. Landscapes that have a familiarity to my eye and that tug at my heart in a special way. Stones that ground me. Water that causes my breath to become even and sure and earth that feels more solid beneath my feet. Does this make sense to you? Does it fit your experience?

We carry within us, within the very cells of our bodies, the gifts and curses of our ancestors. Their lives have shaped us in ways that may seem mysterious and sometimes even cause great pain. This inheritance has instilled courage and allowed us to step out into paths that surprise. Like the monarchs we have within us a pattern that flows out, urging us to follow, until we make our way home.

Today my heart is filled with prayers for the monarch and for all those whose flight behavior is being challenged or altered by larger forces. May we each know the fragility of our living and give thanks for the inheritance of ancestral experience.