Of course I think it providential that our friends at Google, celebrating Peter Carl Faberge's 166th birthday, have splashed images of six gold, enameled and bejeweled eggs across this morning's search page. After gardening at nose level with a stand of butterfly weed late yesterday, I have my own offering --- more complex, just as beautiful and considerably less expensive. More enduring, too.
Felled by its own cruelty and excesses, tsarist Russia was toppled by Bolsheviks and with that fall, the House of Faberge, too. But the house of milkweed bug continues to churn out millions of black and orange enameled little critters annually.
My only question: Do you think because of their relative sizes, a milkweed bug looks upon its four-month lifespan as any less generous than a bison, its potential for 25 years?
Or consider this fat caterpillar, also grazing at nose level Tuesday and not long emerged from a monarch butterfly's egg. Soon it will spin its silk pad, and pupate into plain chrysalis stage before bursting forth, also gloriously orange and black, in two more weeks.
Believers occasionally us this emergence symbolically to represent resurrection, but resurrection seems such a shabby conjurer's trick when compared to metamorphosis.
Felled by its own cruelty and excesses, tsarist Russia was toppled by Bolsheviks and with that fall, the House of Faberge, too. But the house of milkweed bug continues to churn out millions of black and orange enameled little critters annually.
My only question: Do you think because of their relative sizes, a milkweed bug looks upon its four-month lifespan as any less generous than a bison, its potential for 25 years?
Or consider this fat caterpillar, also grazing at nose level Tuesday and not long emerged from a monarch butterfly's egg. Soon it will spin its silk pad, and pupate into plain chrysalis stage before bursting forth, also gloriously orange and black, in two more weeks.
Believers occasionally us this emergence symbolically to represent resurrection, but resurrection seems such a shabby conjurer's trick when compared to metamorphosis.
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