What's in a Butterfly's Name

We went to the Nature Museum in Chicago today. The butterflies are their major attraction. It's a greenhouse you walk through with all the butterflies on trees and flying around you, it's amazing, even though I squirmed a little. This picture is of a glass case with actual cocoons hatching, all hung up by species and stage of hatching, so cool. There were some that literally had a butterfly coming out at that moment--that's what they are looking at in the picture.

Butterflies have always been special to me because my name Vanessa is the name of a family of butterflies. I learned today that they are urban butterflies because they can eat a large variety of foods, so they can live pretty much anywhere. Haha. Apparently there are lots of Vanessa butterflies in this area. Bet you didn't know the name Vanessa was actually invented; Jonathan Swift made up the name "Vanessa" by switching around the letters in his friend Esther Vanhomrigh's name, and his poem Cadenus and Vanessa is about her.

Finally, a quote I love that is on my website (www.thousandfoldorigami.com): "The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign." --Primo Levi (1919–1987), Italian chemist, author.