Aurelians | Broccoli Magazine
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“With an air of poetic drama, butterflies seem to embody the glory and finiteness of living. ”
A single butterfly is a thing of disproportionate beauty. You could understand why a person might feel compelled to snatch one up and pin its wings inside a frame. But a swarm, an abundance of butterflies—they are a kaleidoscope, a flourish of natural might, powerful and mystifying at once. As luck would have it, the word for a group of butterflies is, in fact, a kaleidoscope. Isn’t it nice when language works out that way?
As I am writing this, a kaleidoscope, then, of butterflies—painted ladies—is migrating through Los Angeles and its sprawl. They are tumbling down the hillsides like wind-drunk leaves. They are drifting and darting over the highways in waves, on a one-way passage from the deserts near the California/Mexico border up to the Cascade Range. You would be hard-pressed to have a conversation with someone in the city and not find talk turn to these winged visitors. We are transformed by their presence—and that has long been the case.
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