Idiosyncrasies

This is easily one of the CRAZIEST videos I've ever gotten. I was rafting down a river when a Yellow Jacket came, landed on my bright pink waterproof phone pouch, and started drinking from the water droplets that had gathered there.

MAYBE YOUD FEEL BETTER JF YOU LOOKED AT A FUMKIGN... WOOLLY APHID!!!

she still makes these and they’ve only grown more wonderful over the years. The wood-fired surfaces really give them life.

Theres a sentiment I'm noticing in the tags that I'd like to address. I dont think learning to love bugs with all your heart means forcing yourself out of discomfort you have with them overnight. It's about observing a different sort of being going about its life and deliberately trying to reframe your observations through a sense of wonder and delight. It's about cultivating a positive interest and curiosity for their ecology and behaviors. It's especially about trying to uncouple the value we find in them from how 'convenient' they are to us; to face head on the part of us that wants to assign moral evil to another organism who just happens to live life in a way that is not harmonius with ours. You can love insects in this way and still recognize your own health and safety needs. We are animals living side by side within a biosphere. This is how it is, sometimes.

It's hard to explain to the uninitiated that you can just go for a walk just about anywhere with a bit of green (and sometimes even in the heart of a city) and find like a dozen neat little unique guys if you're patient and observant.

I used to be very afraid of spiders...But I read a poem from the point if view of a spider, saying how she didn't knew being seen would cost her life and it struck a nerve, one day I saw one in my room and just... Observe, I told her to stay a bit far because I felt afraid and somehow she... Understood me(? That's what I felt, she always walked to another wall or to her home (a box in my room) when I went near, after a while I named her "Gorda" and talked to her daily