Rather than spend time reading today, I encourage you to listen. Classical composer Lisa Illean creates music that is often serene, able to soften the knots in your stomach, head, back, or soul – wherever the pain currently resides.

If you want to read nonetheless and need to know a little bit more about the focus of her work, here are the composer’s words describing it.

Although most of the movements are inspired by oceans and waves, I picked the album for today’s photographs of caterpillars on common ragwort, who, too, are arcing, stilling, bending and gathering. They are cinnabar caterpillars who will molt into cinnabar moths, which play a key role in successfully controlling ragwort, a toxic weed poisonous to livestock.

They use nature’s tricks well. Newly hatched larvae feed from the underneath of ragwort leaves and absorb toxic and bitter tasting alkaloid substances from the food plants, becoming unpalatable themselves. The bright colors of both the larvae and the moths act as warning signs, so they are seldom eaten by predators, other than cuckoos! Not too many of those around here.

Here is the music.

Ragwort patch