Keep Coming Back: The Monarch Way

The other day, out in the backcountry, on one of my favorite trails—the one that circles around through the pines and dumps me out just where I began—I found myself smiling.

I wasn’t smiling because the trail had looped perfectly. I was smiling because it hadn’t. It was thinking of enso circles. You know those Zen Buddhist brushstrokes that look like a three-year-old got their hands on a crayon and was like, “Hold my juice box—I’m making art here”?

A circle that wobbles, wiggles, and leans in all the wrong places and manages in the end to connect its tail with its head? A circle that throws caution to the wind and still remembers how to come back home?

The mind is like that, too. It zigzags and doodles in the margin of the day’s spiritual notebook, meandering through old stories, circling back into future worries, and sometimes, sometimes, without any particular sign or fanfare, it comes home.

Sometimes it lands like a snowflake on a lake. Sometimes it lands with the subtlety of a flying squirrel on a tin roof. But it comes home all the same.

And I realized that it’s the monarch butterfly who reminds me that my mind has work in common with a three-year-old and a Zen master. Butterflies with orange-and-black wings who have mastered the art of the loop across a continent with style and wildly superior costume design.

Monarch Magic: Their Wild Story

Monarchs are tiny things. If you weigh a butterfly, you’ll find that you’re holding almost nothing in your hand. It’s a miracle they can fly at all, much less ride solar winds over thousands of miles from northern U.S. states or Canada all the way to the mountain forests of central Mexico. But they do it.

They read the sun, and they have magnetic receptors in their antennae, and they follow a path they were born knowing how to find.

It’s so long that no single monarch makes the journey from beginning to end. It’s a relay across generations. But a late-summer butterfly might well be starting a path that was begun by a butterfly many months before, and its wings will still know the way.

The trip is not tidy. They go off course, land in unexpected places, get blown sideways by a storm, and rest on unplanned patches of wildflowers that catch their eye. But they keep on going. They recalibrate and they head for the oyamel fir forests that are the repository of their collective past.

They’re not aiming for perfection; they’re practicing persistence.

That’s why the monarch is like an enso circle in the sky. The migration path loops and shifts and stretches and still remembers the way home.

Training the Mind the Monarch Way

The mind, too, migrates, just in different dimensions. It takes excursions through past memories and present stories and future worries and hopes and those wild side quests that pop into our heads without permission.

Yet, it isn’t a big deal that the mind wanders; the mind simply is wandering. The magic is the moment we notice we’ve strayed, because that is the moment the mind begins to return.

The return isn’t graceful at first. You may find yourself drifting a hundred times in five minutes, or it may feel like you’re trying to corral your attention with a pair of oven mitts. But you are teaching your mind the way home.

Every time you come back—back to the breath in your lungs, back to the sensations in your body, back to the air on your skin, back to the forest all around you—you’re reinforcing an inner trail.

Over time, it gets easier. We learn to trust our ability to return, not because we’ve stopped wandering but because we know that wandering is just what the mind does—that’s it. You know how to come home. You know what it feels like to be present in your body and psyche. You know the difference between drifting and landing.

Presence becomes less a destination and more of a home base, your own oyamel forest, solid and waiting.

The great sage Milarepa says,

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“When you recognize your own nature, the path appears beneath your feet.” 

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Keep Coming Back to Your Wild Awareness

The monarch never apologizes for being blown sideways by the wind. It doesn’t label itself for drifting or pausing or arriving late. It simply orients, and it keeps moving. There’s a quiet courage in that, a courage we can all borrow.

Coming back to awareness is not a fireworks display. Sometimes it’s as small as noticing our breath when we drop into child’s pose in a yoga class or feeling our feet on the earth as we roam a trail or allowing sunlight to warm our face for one solid moment. All these small returns add up. They lay a map in our heart. They make presence into something familiar and strong.

And over time, your return becomes second nature, almost instinctive. Like the monarch, you’ll find that you trust the inner pull that brings you home, even after you’ve wandered far.

What matters isn’t how far we wander. What matters is that we come back—and that each time we come back, we close the loop just a little more and build our own imperfect, wild, beautiful enso.

One day, you’ll look up, out in the backcountry, or in the middle of your life, and realize that you’ve become your own migration route, guided not by perfection but by the steady pull of returning.

Simply pack a crayon.

Cheers!

Kether

Spunky Mind

“When the mind returns to itself,

the world becomes clear.”

— Lao Tzu

Spunky Mind Field Notes—

The Monarch Way

Nature Insight—The monarch isn’t out there trying to be perfect; it’s winging loops across a continent with the swagger of a creature that trusts the wind. It zigzags, detours, rests, reorients, and still finds its way home—basically the spirit animal of every wandering thought you’ve ever had.

Trail Wisdom—Your mind is allowed to meander. Let it wander like a butterfly following sunshine and side quests. The magic isn’t staying on track—it’s noticing the moment you drift and gently fluttering back.

Pockets of Nature Practice

• Step outside and look for something tiny that moves or dances—a leaf, bug, shadow, or breeze.

• Let it remind you that wandering isn’t wrong; it’s nature doing its thing.

• Take one breath like you’re landing on a milkweed leaf.

• Notice one sensation that brings you “home” in your body.

• Keep that soft, looping awareness with you as you go.

  
  

Field Note Prompt—Where in my life can I let myself wander without judgment—and trust that I’ll find my way back?

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Monarch Mindset Field Notes here.