The power of lightning bugs

By Patricia Hunt
Published: August 15, 2008

We finally got a break from the unrelenting heat, so I turned off the fans upstairs and the air conditioning downstairs and the world came in through my open windows. I had almost forgotten what it sounded like.
There are crickets and cicadas. There are people and sometimes music. Cars pass on my busy street, but late in the evening, the traffic dwindles, and at times I can almost imagine I am out in the countryside. I feel connected once again to all that lies just beyond my four walls. It’s like going barefoot in the spring, except it is my ears that are going naked instead of my feet.
I was reminded of summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina. I would lie in my top bunk with a blanket covering me. Inches from my bed was a big screened-in window separating me from the outdoors, just the thinnest membrane to keep mosquitoes at bay and the skunks and raccoons apart from the children. The wire could not keep me from feeling that I was of planet Earth, not merely in it like some alien set down here from another sphere. Listening to it was not really so different from listening to the breathing of the other campers or the beat of my own heart.
Good horseback riders tell me they can feel that horse and rider are one. I was never good enough to be anything other than an anxious kid perched atop an animal I didn’t fully trust, but I think I know what they are talking about. On a late summer evening when the cicadas tune up, nearly drowning out human voices, my little self and my problems and my theories about the way the world is and ought to be become less substantial, more ephemeral, as I listen to music more ancient than Bach or the Beatles or Indian flute songs.
I have a friend who lives in the country on land with the thickest infestation of lightening bugs I have ever encountered. Summer evenings they put on a dazzling show. As a child I caught them and put them in a Mason jar until time to let them go before I went in to bed. Now I have no need of all that labor; I am content to watch the hundreds of little lights blinking in the night and am reminded that before Columbus landed there must have been people watching the very same sight and perhaps laying down their problems for the moment as I lay down mine.
Sometimes I wish I had time-lapse photography of my little piece of earth over tens of thousands of years. What grew on it? Who passed through? Was there ever a structure on it before my house was constructed? Did anyone love it? Could thousands of years have gone by without any human footprint? What will become of it 100 years from now? A thousand?
Summertime thoughts are different from wintertime meditations because so little separates me from my surroundings. No heavy coats or boots. No sealed-up storm windows to hold in heat and hold out sounds. If it rains, it doesn’t matter so much if I get wet. I won’t catch my death of cold. In summer, it seems less a curse than a good design plan that you shall “return to the ground for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In summer it is easier for me to believe that the dust of the ground is blessed, holy, the humus from which life is created.
The hard iron earth of winter is cold and forbidding, unfriendly to bare feet and unyielding to the spade.
I am sure the weather will turn again, and the fans will whirl, and I will fuss and fume about having to go out into the sweltering heat, but I have been alerted that fall is not so far away as it once was. I have been taken out of my sealed-off world and grounded again in the soil and sounds that have nurtured my ancestors far, far back into time. The power of the lightning bug and cicada cannot be over estimated.
Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.