The first time I said out loud that I wanted to see every butterfly in my home country of Denmark in a single year, I didn’t know anything about butterflies.
I had seen the peacock, the mourning cloak, the small tortoiseshell, the brimstone. I also thought I had seen “the white” and “the blue.” I didn’t know there are three different whites in Denmark, and a whole procession of blues.
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I later found out that there are 64 Danish species in total, but I didn’t know that from the get-go. Also, I was convinced that the brimstone butterfly was yellow.
The brimstone is not yellow. It is the color of fresh asparagus.
My butterfly expedition was a foolish project. It was useless. There was no reason I should spend my rather scarce free time hunting for insects. I had other things to attend to: meetings, packed lunches... I couldn’t explain its purpose even to myself. I wandered over coastal meadows, through deep forests, looking for small creatures with four scaled wings—but also looking for the reason I was even there at all. In landscapes I hadn’t known existed until now. What was I looking for? What did I want from it?
The project was useless, but it turned out to be necessary too. As I slowly grew at home in the discipline—as I got to learn the species names, to tell apart the shapes of the insects’ wings, their flight over the grass, the way they defended their territory—the character of my outings changed. I began to see more, simply.
What I would have once considered just another dull field suddenly transformed into a whole universe in itself: a dazzling place of shimmering blue butterflies, amber-colored caterpillars, and beetles with shells like a seal of wax. The butterflies, I realized, changed the way I moved through and sensed the world.
Up until that point, I’d thought of species loss as a distant, abstract statistic. I knew the grim outlook for global warming, and I worried about it with my rationality. I knew that global insect abundance has fallen by roughly a quarter over the past three decades—and that global wildlife populations more broadly have collapsed by nearly 70 percent since 1970. I knew that 1 million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction within decades.
But I hadn’t taken in that reality with my senses, with my own experience—not until I met specific, individual animals. A pearl-bordered fritillary, for example, now in critical decline across northwestern Europe, was, when I was a kid, a perfectly ordinary butterfly, its wings catching the light like a wet goldfish in the air.
The mere ability to see, I realized, is essential when we are to teach ourselves and our children what we lose when we lose the species with which we share the planet. Baba Dioum, a Senegalese forestry engineer and environmentalist, said it better than anyone back in 1968: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
We, in other words, can change nothing if that drive for change is not fundamentally driven by love. And so, I began to think, we are living in a delusion if we believe that a life within planetary boundaries will simply arrive once we’ve electrified our cars, sorted our waste, and preserved some rainforest.
As I got more familiar with the language of the natural world, I discovered that I was playing. I sweated, I blundered around, I laughed out loud and cursed when I failed. A bramble tore the skin on my arm, a nettle stung me to hell, I forgot myself, I drifted around curiously after whatever was colorful and beautiful and exciting.
And it was fun to play. But the play also opened onto something I can best describe as poetry, or perhaps even the spiritual realm. At least a very mystical one.
Sometimes my hunt for the butterflies was utterly rudimentary, almost eventless. But then there were the moments when I was standing out there—in a bog, a field, or a forest—when a current would open inside me, or I would feel a sudden surge of freedom and rootedness at once, an awareness that something was calling, and that I wanted to answer. Perhaps I can best describe it with the words of C.S. Lewis: I was surprised by joy.
Later, I wrote a book about my butterfly journey, and when it was published, I received hundreds of emails and messages from readers sharing their own experiences with butterflies. I realized that all these accounts bear witness to the fact that many of us are still, more or less unconsciously, deeply connected to the kind of wisdom that humans before us drew from the natural world.
The butterflies, for so many of the people writing to me, represent signs from their departed—a best friend returning every spring as a brimstone; a small tortoiseshell resting on a mother’s grave. But what was striking was this: None of the people writing to me had previously considered that this experience is shared by other people too, across times, geographies, and religions.
But there it was. A testament to the fact that we are born with a sense that nature is not just our surroundings, but our origin. That we belong to it.
Once, we humans arranged our lives around rituals and myths meant to honor the colossal web of life we are part of. People told each other stories about the wonders of the world. They said a prayer of thanks. That practice was built into our norms, our culture, our institutions. That is no longer the case for many of us; at least not for me.
But one day it struck me that what I had been doing with the butterflies was a form of prayer. The kind of practice that people across ages, times, mythologies, have used since ancient times to carry themselves toward the numinous—a deep and mysterious knowledge that lives somewhere in all of us.
Did I see all the Danish species of butterflies? Almost. I became a fairly decent butterfly hunter. I learned their names, drove to parts of the country I had never heard of, slept in the back of my car in a sleeping bag and long johns, photographed 61 species, and put my 61 ticks on my long list. But in the end, it turned out my hunt was never about the list and the ticks. It was about opening myself up to a wondrous realization: that life is made up of a series of tangible miracles, welling up right before our eyes. If only we choose to see them. 
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Lead Image: Lea Korsgaard