I’ve written elsewhere about the dramatic shift in my beliefs regarding police. How I arrived, over the years, at an unusual version of ACAB:
All Cops Are Buddhas.
Meaning: I believe that all beings have deep-down goodness, sometimes called buddhanature — whether or not it is fully expressed or developed in this lifetime.
But Kloncke, you might protest, Is this true even of serial killers? People who commit murder, assault, and atrocities? People who collude in cover-ups? People who ban abortions, bomb civilians, and try to eradicate transness?
We humans have long looked to butterflies for lessons on courageous transformation and beautiful migration.
A few years ago, my gardening-savvy neighbor Miya Saika Chen put me on to yet another piece of bio-wisdom from these miraculous relatives.
Did you know that many monarch butterflies have a “super generation,” born at the northernmost tip of their journey, with the adaptive strength to play a special role?
Born with delayed sexual maturity that also slows aging, the super generation lives10x as long as their parents, grandparents, and great- grand- parents — all of whom lived, reproduced, and died in relay-race fashion along the great trip north.
The super generation’s extra longevity (plus ravenous fat storage) enables them to fly from the northern tip alllll the way back to the southern tip of the migration route, where the ancestral journey first began. After overwintering there, they finally reproduce and the migratory cycle begin again.
As climate collapse accelerates, democracy frays, teen suicides rise, and the festering social wounds of colonization, racism, cisheteropatriarchy, and ableism continue to go septic, I believe we can learn from our friends the monarchs.
I believe we are called to make exponential adaptive moves, compressed within one lifetime.
I believe we are called to become a super generation.
A super generation of empathy.
A super generation of truth-telling.
A super generation of healing trauma and breaking intergenerational cycles of harm.
A super generation of embodied, relational wisdom and intelligence.
A super generation of lovingkindness.
A super generation of accountability.
A super generation of compassionate confrontation.
A super generation of spiritual wisdom, applied in the material realms.
Kloncke 