soliloquies in the outdoors
Spiders, like most insects, are cringey at first but tend to grow upon one’s thoughts… tactical predators, mathematical geniuses, eight-legged freaks, masters of silk, artistic abseilers… spiders weave their own little worlds, an ability once revered by older cultures, from cave paintings to the lore of Brutus… and now inextricably intertwined with the human conscience, …
Crickets and their brethren are basslines of the songs that abound the outdoors, vocalizing canopies or anything damp with their chirps and twirps… while the birds bebop from one branch to another, they skittle around with the same restiveness, punctuated with those quantum leaps every now and then… The chirps of crickets and cicadas have …
The praying mantis is a beautiful critter… id quod visum placet – as Aquinas put it – that which seen pleases – and more often than not, in spheres of both the animate and inanimate, this beauty comes at a price, a curse inflicted upon self or others… as Frost surmised… everything beautiful, that’s truly …
the wasp is villainous and the butterfly saintly… first impressions that hold true if one takes the black-and-white approach, but wander into the realms of grey, as natural processes often tend to do, and there is hardly any good or bad, seldom anything unconvoluted, and never anyone invincible… the immensity of these microcosms can be …
One can feel it… the humidity slowly but surely receding, the dry heat back for one more spell, sparring with what once used to be autumn before winter sets in… what the monsoons have contributed to the coffers of biodiversity will start waning out shortly, and those feasting upon it for the past few months …
Musings on flies, hiking in the Himalaya
Butterflies go deep, quite deep, maybe simply on the dint of the remarkable transitions they display that for millennia have flummoxed the best of minds… the Greeks and Indians ascribed the transformation akin to the transmigration of the human soul… palingenesis… Zhuang Zhou scratched his head, perplexed with this butterfly dream that seems to snowball …
If one looks at it from the perspective of ‘being’, or ‘consciousness’, insects can be intriguing… their interactions with humans are mostly harmless, the nature of their existence is seemingly linear and unassuming, even mundane maybe, yet they stand out enough for them to superimpose their behaviours and characteristics upon us… social organization, collective intelligence, …
Fly away, pretty moth, to the shade Of the leaf where you slumbered all day Be content with the moon and the stars, pretty moth And make use of your wings while you may… But tho’ dreams of delight may have dazzled you quite They at last found it dangerous play Many things in …