This morning in my inbox

Thank you to my friend Lisa for sending me this quote. Beautiful, gentle, poetic.

I thought you would enjoy it too.

 . . . in the end, whether people know how small a portion of time is given to the butterfly, how large a portion to the caterpillar, does not matter. For they can never infect the caterpillar with their anxious urges to "Become!" A small apple-green caterpillar who climbs a toadflax plant, who somehow loses a foothold while walking across a stem to get to a leaf, slips and is hanging on by only its two front crochet-hook feet, the wind swinging it back and forth over the creek, is not thinking, "Alack! I shall fall into the icy water! I shall be swallowed by a fish! I will never, now, wrap myself in silk and wake up with powdery, iridescent blue-and-green wings, fly away with them to fields of cornflower, and mate, and feed on the tears of wild buffalo! My life, my eating, my climbing--it has all been meaningless!"

    Rather, it thinks, "I'm swinging, I'm swinging, I'm swinging."

-- Amy Leach, "You Are Going to Fly," from Things That Are: Essays