Intricacy

The Monarch's (Danaus plexippus) have arrived everywhere I look these late summer days. Flapping nonchalantly, so vulnerable, on a drafty breeze to land on our torn and eaten flower garden. They have come all the way from hidden forest groves in the mountains of Mexico. Migrating like passerine birds over thousands of long miles and back, dying and laying their eggs along the way. The intricacy of that beauty stacked layer on layer like fresh coats of paint blows my mind! And yet....

"I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, "Do you know that in the head of a caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine."

~Annie Dillard