In her moving essay "The Death of a Moth," Virginia Woolf meditates on the life in the creature flying and then dying within her arm's reach. It has a short life, "vigorously" lived with "zest," she claims, admiring the moth for the "fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world [that] had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body." For Woolf, the moth "was little or nothing but life."
My moth, the Salt Marsh Moth atop the dam at Lake Cheston, clasped the blade, pinned her pearlish eggs, knitted together her legs and wings and blades in protection of them, and then disappeared. She, too, has been like "a tiny bead of pure life" for me, "dancing and zigzagging to show [me] the true nature of life." Energy and then nothingness. Beauty, and impermanence.
Monday, she laid eggs, Tuesday, she protected them. Wednesday, she has gone, and I mourn her.
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