Remembering beauty

Normally, I start with a photo, something I've taken myself or picked up from a thousand or more other sources. But I'm starting with prose today because yesterday's pictures are too powerful to post, too searing, too woeful to be easily forgotten.

What happened yesterday in Afghanistan is beyond comprehension. I can't help but think that if Joe Biden, who's garnered too many years already, ever considered running again, after yesterday he'll have to reconsider because the images on every screen--Fox as well as MSNBC--won't be forgotten soon, if ever.

No matter what he says, what happened in the airport and throughout the country was beyond obscene, and the horror was attributable to a lack of preparedness, for which he is to blame--not alone, but his desk is where the buck stops.

It would be easy to say that yesterday was a day to forget, but, sadly enough, forgetting is impossible. The images are there. We've all seen them. That the nation is out of Afghanistan is a blessing; that we left the way we did is a curse.

So yesterday, another bright and beautiful day out here on the edge of the plains, I walked out to check my muskmelons, and when I did I couldn't help but notice the search for food in a patch of zinnias right out there beside the garden box. Two royal butterflies--one a monarch, the other what I believe is called a pipevine swallowtail. The pipevine didn't pose exactly, but let's just say that it certainly didn't object to the camera I stuck in its face. It was busy, very busy.

I read that a pipevine swallowtail has no natural enemies because they taste awful, but I was only interested in beauty, not lunch. 

Make no mind, however, because he most certainly was--driven, in fact.

Given the stage, the performance was especially grand, a reminder of the fact that the world is full of little dramas we choose to look past--and shouldn't really. The performance this pipevine put on was pure ballet.

Which is not to say the monarch wasn't beautiful. The difference was a matter of engineering. The monarch simply closed its wings to avoid being swept off the stage by the wind. Once it alighted on a blossom, it closed up its sales and there was nothing to shoot. The pipevine, on the other hand, used those wings of his or hers as ballast, the way an eagle soars in updrafts.

All of that made for a tipsy lunch, I'm sure, but there was no stopping him/her.

Diversion? Maybe. Escapist? Probably. Did paying attention to the dance going on in the garden somehow make the horror at the airport go away? No.

But it was a reminder of the importance of beauty amid the chaos, of finding the eternal somehow, of looking for the light even on the darkest of days.