I cling to the pole, white-knuckled.

I am dangling in an open gondola at the top of a Ferris wheel. The only thing keeping me from plummeting to the ground is a small gate. My son Lucas is staring at me wide-eyed.

A caterpillar eats 5x its weight a day.

By the time it has stripped the kale in your garden naked, it will have grown 1000x in size from the moment it hatched. It will stop, spin a cocoon, and hang in a chrysalis like a beachside tourist in a hammock.

Have you ever dismissed something as “useless”?

You might want to think again. Just because we don’t see the usefulness doesn’t mean it’s garbage. We just don’t yet know what its purpose is or where its value lies.

Go ahead, pick those bright yellow dandelions.

Plonk them in a green vase. Watch them shrivel up into ugliness. You don’t have your shit together enough to throw them out, so you ignore the dried-up mess. Pretend they don’t exist for so long, you forget all about them.

Sunflowers chase the sun, the object of their desire.

When they are young, their heads rotate to soak up as much warmth and light as possible. But as they get older, their stems become too rigid to move and track the sun.

When on your daily walk you hear bees fussing over a clump of hemp dogbane, stop to watch them.