Katydids are just so freakin' cool. I get emotional watching them fly. They have such great presence, elegant, well-composed, brave seeming.
I saw a mantis flying the other day and my first thought was, that's a really cool katydid -- wow!
And the grasshoppers around here in flight, dark flags for wings, produce a totally different impression; a thicker, shorter lived eruption than the katydid's intelligent arc. Then there's the katydid's translucent wing motion, stock-still carriage with its spread-eagle array of wing covers, legs and antennae -- so open, yet so stiff.
And katydids take me out of the human scale to a place where things are bigger, older, more suggestive of eternity. I guess it's the smallness of insects that makes them so suggestive of deep time; and the briefness of their flight, momentary, vulnerable. Some kind of cognition is manifested by these saltations from leaf to underside of leaf. Some kind of awareness of the world which precedes and supercedes my own. Some kind of hope is proved by the evidence of wings. What a great getaway -- no wonder they're so cool and collected.
reading light
goldenrod and do...
tire swing
I saw a mantis flying the other day and my first thought was, that's a really cool katydid -- wow!
And the grasshoppers around here in flight, dark flags for wings, produce a totally different impression; a thicker, shorter lived eruption than the katydid's intelligent arc. Then there's the katydid's translucent wing motion, stock-still carriage with its spread-eagle array of wing covers, legs and antennae -- so open, yet so stiff.
And katydids take me out of the human scale to a place where things are bigger, older, more suggestive of eternity. I guess it's the smallness of insects that makes them so suggestive of deep time; and the briefness of their flight, momentary, vulnerable. Some kind of cognition is manifested by these saltations from leaf to underside of leaf. Some kind of awareness of the world which precedes and supercedes my own. Some kind of hope is proved by the evidence of wings. What a great getaway -- no wonder they're so cool and collected.