I like June bugs--it's not an issue in the part of Maryland where I live.

#parenting

#nature #fledglings

Credit: Guardians of Nature (Facebook) "You flick the porch light on a June night and within minutes the soft-winged crowd arrives — and most people never look closely enough to see how beautiful, and how harmless, the regulars are. None of these is eating your house or your sweaters. The fabric-eaters are tiny and live in dark closets; these big showy ones at the bulb are pollinators and moonlight wanderers. Meet five you'll see this month. The luna moth — pale green, long-tailed, the size of your palm — is the showstopper. It has no mouth and only about a week to live; it's here to find a mate, nothing more. The rosy maple moth — small, in sherbet pink and yellow like a frosted candy — looks invented. It isn't. It's one of the most common big moths in the East. The underwing moths — drab gray bark-mimics at rest — flash startling orange or red hindwings when they jump, a trick to spook a hungry bird. The sphinx, or hawk, moths — fast, heavy-bodied, hovering at flowers like a hummingbird at dusk — are some of the best night pollinators you have. And the tiger moths — furry, boldly patterned — whose caterpillars are the woolly bears you'll meet crossing the sidewalk in fall. Five moths at one bulb, and not one is a threat to anything you own. They're the flowers' night shift, and the reason your porch is briefly the most interesting place in the yard. Turn the light off when you're done. They've got a moon to follow." #moths #nightpollinators #backyardwildlife #nature

Thank you for noticing. The new flag is already up on the pole. I am thrilled that happened so quickly.

Credit: Guardians of Nature (Facebook) "The little pink-and-yellow moth stuck to your porch screen has never taken a single bite of food. It never will. It can't. It's a rosy maple moth — the smallest of North America's great silk moths, colored like cotton candy for a reason worth knowing. As an adult, it has no working mouth. No tongue to uncoil, nothing to drink with. The equipment simply isn't there. Everything it will ever do — fly, find a mate, lay the next generation — runs entirely on fuel it banked months ago, as a fat green caterpillar chewing the leaves of your maple. It can't hear you, either. No ears at all. It reads the whole world through feathered antennae and its feet, chasing one signal on the night air: a mate's scent. And the pink and yellow aren't decoration. Against spring's flowering branches, that pastel is camouflage. So it has a few short days — no hunger, no sound — just the single errand it spent an entire caterpillarhood saving up for. It isn't starving. It was never built to eat. The meal was the childhood, taken on your maple tree." #RosyMapleMoth #SilkMoths #BackyardWildlife #NativeI #Nature

I feel exactly the same way.

"Love comes from within you. When you ask for love from one another, you miss the very source of love. When you give love to another, you find the source of love within you. "Inasmuch as love grows in you, so in you beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul." ~ St. Augustine Art by Donna Young

#bathouse

Credit: Pyramid Consciousness (Facebook) "The world does not reward what you think it rewards. Shakespeare wrote this line in Measure for Measure, but it cuts deeper than any single play. It is an observation about the structure of reality as most people actually experience it , not as they were taught to expect it. The corrupt climb. The honest stumble. The one who compromises reaches the position that the one who refused to compromise was passed over for. This is not cynicism. It is precision. Every genuine wisdom tradition has had to reckon with this fact. The Stoics did not promise that virtue would be rewarded in the world. They promised that virtue was its own reward, that the inner state of the person who acts rightly is fundamentally different from the inner state of the person who rises through corruption, regardless of what the outer circumstances show. Seneca wrote to Lucilius that the good man can lose everything except his goodness. This is not consolation. It is a different definition of winning. Jung understood that the psyche registers what the social world ignores. The person who rises through manipulation, dishonesty, or the exploitation of others does not escape the consequences of what they have done. They carry it. The shadow accumulates everything that was suppressed in the pursuit of power. What was gained outwardly is paid for inwardly, often in ways the person cannot even name. The figure consumed by the serpent above, the solitary figure sitting below, both are present in every life. The question is not whether you will fall or rise. The question is what you will have become by the time you find out which it is. Virtue does not protect you from falling. It determines who you are when you do." #PyramidConsciousness #Shakespeare #Virtue

“Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.” —James Hillman