A birthday butterfly

“The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.” George Carlin

It's my daughter=in-law's birthday today and in my beautiful diary, poised above her day is a butterfly. It is an illustration from an old book on insects. I'm not sure which one, but one in the State Library of Victoria's collection anyway.

This year the theme is 'close up' and features close ups taken from various old illustrations of the natural world. Each month begins with a beautiful montage of three images - a bird, a flower and some kind of landscape plan. Here is half of the double page spread that introduces June - summer to me, winter to the Australians. The texture of the wings of the owls is what jumps out at me here - the way each feather folds over the next. Each one completely distinct and separate. It's from one of Audubon's paintings in his Birds of America. The pages were one metre high! This is what the entire page looks like:

The carnations are from an 1807 book called The Temple of Flora by R. Thornton - and texture is the thing here too. There is even an art deco quality to the carnations. Unlike the birds they don't look quite real but are somewhat stylised. The colours are interesting too - I don't think I have ever seen a black/grey carnation. Yes I have seen carnations with a striped sort of pattern but not quite as stylised and almost regular as these here. I love them and I love the colours which are those muddy sort of colours that so appeal to me.

The plan is from a German book - Nürnbergische Hesperides by J. Volkamer.

The State Library doesn't make much of the plan in this month's collage, but I have just noticed a foodie connection and coincidentally one connected to my recent series of posts on Thai food and green curry paste in particular. For surely that is a kaffir lime! Coincidence is a wonderful thing.

And here's another one - coincidence I mean. I collect quotes. I have a small book in which I write down things that strike me. Mostly they are from the novels I read, but sometimes from elsewhere. I am currently sharing these quotes with my family on a quote a day basis. Today's quote was by Ann Patchett and was from her novel Bel Canto:

"Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it."

Well I was certainly not born to make great art - my art teacher at school hoped I was not planning to take the O-level exam when I was forced to opt for art over music as a choice of subject because I simply had no technical ear for music. I'm not sure whether I appreciated art back then. Curiously our art lessons did not include art appreciation, although our music lessons did. But I was taken to art galleries. I remember buying postcards of art that appealed when I was at university, and I began collecting photographs that struck me in magazines and making a collage on the wall in my university room. I remember that eyes featured hugely and I remember the face of a gorilla. I may even still have that one somewhere. I know I kept it for years. And in later years I have steadily grown in my appreciation of art - I have metamorphosis like a butterfly.

But I ramble. My non- foodie subject for the day was butterflies and my lovely daughter-in-law, and wives and mothers in general. They are butterflies are they not? And caterpillars at the same time. For, as caterpillars they work hard, mostly unappreciated and undervalued - even despised perhaps by the world at large, certainly often ignored. And yet they became wives and mothers largely because they were beautiful - at least in the eye of the beholder. But the superficial beauty of the butterfly is short-lived, although their ephemeral youthful beauty also metamorphososises into real, enduring beauty of spirit, of grace and of love. It's a sort of metamorphosis in reverse - from butterfly to caterpillar and back to butterfly, although the butterfly never truly went away.

So happy birthday dear daughter-in-law. "A whiz in the kitchen" in my appreciative son's words, but so much more. A beauty.

A few butterfly quotes:

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“Butterflies are not insects,' Captain John Sterling said soberly. 'They are self-propelled flowers.” Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.” Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“A fallen blossom returning to the bough, I thought -- But no, a butterfly.” Arakida Moritake, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology

“Alongside the practical thought something else struggled and, like an escaped butterfly, took wing: the assurance of something wonderful awaiting her. Just around the corner......” Norah Lofts