If I was a bee, this would make me hungry.
What are you hungry for today?
If I was a bee, this would make me hungry.
What are you hungry for today?
“I know that if odour were visible, as colour is, I’d see the summer garden in rainbow clouds.”
~ Robert Bridges
“Lavender, sweet lavender;
come and buy my lavender,
hide it in your trousseau, lady fair.
Let its lovely fragrance flow
Over your from head to toe,
lightening on your eyes, your cheek, your hair.”
Cumberland Clark Flower Song Book, 1929
The scientific name for the Monarch Butterfly is Danaus plexippus, a Latinized version of names drawn from Greek myth. Danaus, the son of an ancient king of Egypt (and a descendant of Zeus and Io), had 50 daughters (the Danaides); his brother Aegyptus had 50 sons. When Aegyptus ordered that his sons marry his brother’s daughters, Danaus chose to flee instead, building the first ship that ever was to make the journey to the Greek city of Argos. When Aegytpus and his sons followed, Danaus submitted to his brother’s will in order to protect the Argives (the citizens of Argos) from harm. However, Danaus ordered his daughters murder their husbands on their wedding night. 49 complied, but the 50th, Hypermnestra, refused, because her husband agreed to honor her request to remain a virgin. Plexippus (the second part of the Monarch’s taxonomy) was the name of one of the murdered brothers (it is also the name of a participant in the hunt for the Caledonian boar, but I’m not sure that relates).
Of course it’s the flight of these 50 daughters that connects the Danaides symbolically with the Monarch. It’s easy to imagine the butterflies’ epic migration each year, thousands of miles across North America to southern Mexico and back, as a ritual recreation of the Danaides flight. Plexippus may refer to the transformation all butterflies go through, from caterpillar to winged beauty.
Did you know, however, that it is only Monarch’s east of the Rocky Mountains that make that continental journey? The butterflies in western states travel to the Pacific Coast instead, finding winter refuge in groves all the way from San Diego to Santa Cruz.
In Mexico, locals have long associated the winter return of the Monarchs, which coincides with the celebration of el Dia de las Muertos, with the souls of dead relatives returning. While butterflies have been associated with souls in myths worldwide, it must be particularly poignant in Michoacán, Mexico, when thousands of the delicate creatures stream across the skies to take roost in mountain groves. One source claims the Masahaus name for the Monarch butterfly translates as “daughter of the sun” which is beautiful and appropriate for the orange beauty, but I can’t find any supportive documentation or, even more sadly, a story to go along with the evocative name.
I was very pleased to find this ribbon hanging by one of my submissions in the photo exhibit at the Orange County Fair!
It really was an honor, even just to be part of the exhibit. I think it’s the first time I’ve had artwork of mine on display since elementary school.
Here’s the photo I submitted, entitled “Off-Color”:
“Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.”
~ Jules Feiffer
While working on some passages in my current WIP, I remembered this old post describing a moment where the world seemed altered by an unusual fall of light. I thought it worth sharing again, while I work on a much overdue post about creative journaling for writers.
February 6, 2009
It was sunset, nearly, and a break in the rain made it a good time to run a quick errand. The clouds were still thick overhead, and in the east gray mountains were only darker shapes against an ominous sky.
To the west the clouds had cleared. Not completely, but a swath of blue appeared along the horizon, somewhere in the general direction of the ocean. And in the moment before the storm front could reassert its dominance over the day, the sun cast a brief, ferocious light across the valley.
Everything was caught in its golden glow – trees, hills, houses – and transformed by the stark angle of the light into something … Unreal, I thought. But at the same time more real, as if the shadows of everyday life had been burned away, leaving Plato’s ideal forms to shine through. No longer did I see a tree, a hill, a house; I saw The Tree, The Hill, The House. I saw perfection.
I briefly wished I had a camera, to capture that moment, to keep it and to share it. Instead, I have to make do with a few inadequate words (and we know language is never perfect). But even if did have a camera, and I was an expert photographer, I doubt film or pixels could have done it justice. True moments aren’t something you can replicate at will. All you can share are shadows.
I seem to have wandered away from my blog for a while…
Nin has recently posted some zoo pictures, so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon by posting some pics of our trip to the San Diego Zoo last month. We’ll start off with the meerkats, who are not nearly as cute as you think they should be:
The hippos, though, were amazing. They ran laps around the pool as we watched, as graceful underwater as the butterflies in the atrium next door.
The serval was probably the favorite of the big cats we saw that day, maybe because it was the only one that was actually awake:
The pandas were a little disappointing, because they sat with their backs to us most of the time. But still: pandas!
This is probably a baby panda, about 8 months old. But given we saw no sign of a head or paws, it might just be a very clever ruse:
Next time, we’ll have to try to get there at a different time of day, so we can see the little guy awake.
Speaking of little guys, we laughed at laughed at these baby warthogs climbing all over dad while he’s trying to have a nap. Mom’s probably off getting her hair permed.
And the opposite of little is big, like this huge polar bear, passed out by the pool. This photo was taken through glass, and I probably wasn’t more than 10 feet from him.
Look at the size of his paws! I couldn’t even get a decent shot of the whole of him in the frame, that’s how close we were. Thank goodness for the glass, though. I wouldn’t want to encounter something this big face to face, I don’t think…
And finally, proof that whatever crazy things spec fiction writers invent, nature has already made something weirder: the harpy eagle. Really, this photo doesn’t do justice how truly strange looking this bird is.
I’ll have some more pictures from our trip to the San Diego Wild Animal park in a few days.
Flowers and butterflies drift in color, illuminating spring. ~Author Unknown
