The Complete Life Cycle of a Monarch Butterfly: Something I found today on The Gardener’s Eden blog while investigating shade-loving plants.

I envision a full/lush/crowded/healthy border of plants on the northwestern side of the shade garden, grounded by hostas, featuring a trellis for climbing autumn clematis. I have so much time for imagination.

Lately the monarch butterflies have been flittering. Their grace in flight, their sudden stillness. This is what we want from books. A look, a glance away, absorbed concentration, a transformation, a lingering.

See (read) Carole Maso for inspiration. Read Virginia Woolf. Footnote. Pause. Exploration.

A thousand before have written. A thousand afterwards.

A flight of butterflies.

Number them for precision.

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List of Iberian butterflies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) on a Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sometimes you need to get in the car even though the temperature feels like it is a hundred degrees Fahrenheit with humidity because there is a garage band practicing somewhere in your complex and it is too hot to complain. You get in the car, roll four windows down and drive toward the beach, only you don’t turn towards the beach but keep going. There is no one in front of you and no one behind you. You drive through a grove of trees and even though you are not going fast, and even though you are not in a convertible, it feels like it, and you think this was why that commercial from the seventies was so good, the one that said, You start to live when you start to drive, and in this heat, you feel like you are living at last.