Drinking my third cup of coffee and trying to achieve an acceptable level of awakeness, I saw the headline about butterfly time and sleep in the WSJ and hoped it would have some short term tips for me. Alas, it was not to be, but it did have some wonderful language to start a gray winter Friday. Here in Seattle, we're in the midst of the cold and wet, and spring is still just faint promise. But this morning, the monarch butterfly gives me hope. In language that fits in as well as an essay on life as a science column on genes, Robert Lee Hotz says:
"What good is a butterfly?" said entomologist Lincoln Brower at Virginia's Sweet Briar College. "It can tell you about the fundamental biology of all creatures on this earth. There is something so fundamental about finding your way."...
Now, in the depth of winter, the monarchs can sense spring. By March, they will be returning north....
In its biochemical essence, the monarch butterfly is a distillation of time and light, given wing....
Weighing barely an ounce each, the butterflies have been clocked at speeds of up to 30 miles per hour, observed as high as 12,000 feet and seen to fly 375 miles over open water. There are at least three major monarch broods in the Americas but only the largest, which lives east of the Rocky Mountains, travels such daunting distances -- farther than any other known insect species....
And he closes with:
In small things considered is the world revealed.
The world revealed, indeed. Words to ponder.