Its beauty is not a performance; it is simply the form its life required.
Field Notes
Some people need every room to confirm who they believe themselves to be. They enlarge themselves through attention, admiration, and control, until everything around them becomes part of the performance.
But the living world is often most extraordinary when it is not asking to be witnessed. The beetle does not know it looks ornamental. Its elaborate antennae are not a claim of importance. It has no image to protect and no audience to persuade—it is only fully, unconsciously itself.