How Strange!

Hamlet claims that he "could be bounded in a nutshell and count [him]self a king of infinite space, were it not . . . [for] bad dreams." The imagination is vast, indeed, and inviting and disturbing, but not so "infinite" these days for me as the minute intricacy of finite space. Witness the hummingbird moth, the dragonfly, and the swallowtail -- evidence that the "real world is" as Robert Heinlein has said "strange and wonderful."

A humming blur whirred past my right ear and dipped and flitted among the very petunias I was deheading. As I worked, the hummingbird moth worked, without once attending to me, unconscious or uncaring of the looming figure bending and snapping. How strange, I thought, and turned for my camera. We continued in the pink and purple like this for several minutes before, taking its fill, the flier departed and I completed my task.Later, in Jill and Ronn's garden, a dragonfly took his post atop a hosta stalk, shot off, shot back, and dined on a bumblebee, content to have me lean in, watch his great hinged mouth working on his meal. How strange that meal: he intent on eating, I intent on him, neither disturbed by or disturbing the other.The swallowtail lay loosely stretched across the cone of red day lily, his outstretched right wing flapping now and again in a waft of breeze, his proboscis curled in the well of yellow. Exhausted, perhaps drunk with pollen and day, he ignored me, leaning in and in, admiring the finesse of color dusted and woven into his wings, the shine of his antennae, the stillness of his eyes.
How strange we three who spent part of the day in each other's company, so out of compass yet so companionable.