strength and courage

Every year, I get a few praying mantis egg cases, attach them to plants around the yard, and hope for the best. Other than about a dozen babies two years ago, though, I've never seen the anticipated explosion of little mantid babies running around, preparing for a summer of devouring nasty bugs and looking cool as hell as they do it.

So far this year, I've put two cases into the container garden we have on our patio. This morning, while I was watering, I noticed that one of them had hatched, and we had a flowering plant (I forget what it's called, so take away all of my ranks in Identify Plants) that was covered with tiny babies.

I took some pictures. None of them are particularly good (I'm try again tomorrow) but here's one of them:

In case you miss it at Flickr, I wanted to share this comment from Amanda Peckinpaw:

The Greeks attributed to them supernatural powers.

There's also this, "The mantis comes to us when we need peace, quiet and calm in our lives. Usually the mantis makes an appearance when we've flooded our lives with so much business, activity, or chaos that we can no longer hear the still small voice within us because of the external din we've created."

Chinese: strength and courage.

Because I have that thing in my brain that makes me an artist, I'm constantly looking for and often finding symbolism in pretty much everything in the world, but I didn't know about this particular one. I'm so glad Amanda shared it with me, because what I need more than anything else in my life right now are peace, quiet and calm. I'm going to need a lot of strength and courage to get there, so I'm happy to take some inspiration from the dozens and dozens of little baby bugs in my yard.