Buckminster Fuller

There is nothing in a caterpillar

that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

~ Buckminster Fuller

I had no idea who Buckminster Fuller was but I came upon these quotes by him, so I did a search. Buckminster was the inventor of the geodesic dome.

Click on Buckminster's name above and you'll be taken to his biography. He was an interesting character - got kicked out of Harvard in the 1920's after entertaining a dance troupe in his room; spent his youth off the coast of Maine in Penobscot Bay; was suicidal after the death of his daughter to polio and meningitus and yet chose to live to answer one question: "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?"


The first quote above is interesting to think about. Because it's the truth, isn't it? We have a tendency to "despise the day of small beginnings." Who knows that the lumpy bumpy caterpillar is going to one day flutter amongst the flowers? It doesn't really look possible, does it? And yet we see those butterflies flitting about in our gardens every year.

Some days I definitely feel like a caterpillar. And to be truthful, who really wants to be a caterpillar? Ah, but don't we all want to be butterflies? But without the caterpillar stage, there is no butterfly.