On butterflies, bees, flowers, cgrysalis

They came out with their wings packed down like furled parachutes, like crumpled letters.  Even as they emerged it seemsed incredible that their wide wings had once fit in so slender a space.  As they emerged, their bodies were visible as they would never quite be again, once the wings expanded and came to dominate the creature, and during those moments they looked like bugs, like insects, instead of what they would be when they were all brilliantly colored wing like some sentient cousin of flowers.
Their bodies were still plump with the fluid they had to pump into those wings in the first minutes of their emergence to make them the straight sheets with which they flew.


                                ------Page 82, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit





                                ------ Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman