Vanessa means "butterfly" in Greek. No wonder I feel I have an affinity with these creatures. They start out as green crawling caterpillars who know nothing but eat leaves and sleep. They spend their caterpillar days like bums. Crawling, eating, drinking, crawling again. Life is meaningless.

Soon enough, they come to a point in their lives when they get tired of the meaninglessness of it all. They decide to bury themselves in the pupa of self-pity and take a deep sleep. When you see a pupa hanging on a leaf or twig, you'd think it was some dead skin of a tree, or dust that just gathered beneath a leaf. But no... inside the pupa, one great transformation is happening.