Lepidoptera

     History is like a butterfly.
     Time is the body that directs the motions and holds the entity together. Its directions seem haphazard, but usually the destination is achieved with unpredicted ups and downs and being blown about in the wind.

     History itself is the wings. As a whole, it is a beautiful, complex image that both confuses and awes. History is somewhat symmetrical and repetitious which is expressed by identical wing patterns. However, altered experiences age time differently and create the tatters on the wings of history that reveal the diversity of the past. History repeats but is not repetitious; it merely echoes the reverberations of time gone by.
As a whole, the story of history is fascinating as are butterflies.. Looking more closely, history, like a butterfly's wings, is composed of smaller pieces. The scales of a butterfly's wings are the individual stories of history from the starving struggle of a beggar to a desperate last stand or how a storm of the century instigated political policies for generations.

Once the shimmering beauty of the scales is rubbed off, the original pattern becomes faint and hard to notice just like lost historical accounts cloud the past.

     The last similarity involves both external and internal influences. History is influenced by time just as the geography is by climate. While man is able to choose his own path, nature and precedent narrow his maneuver's possibilities. A butterfly is buffeted in the wind but can choose to land anywhere it likes while flitting about in the tempest's current.
     Beauty is all around from the big picture to graphic details. Triumph to tragedy, impoverished to impossible, and rare to repetitious, life and history inevitably march on.

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Agatha Tyche