Back and Singing in the Trees

Dog-day Cicada (Neotibicen canicularis)

A cicada's song is the quintessential music of August, a sonorous vocal offering from a small jeweled being that emerges from the ground, sheds its nymph skin, climbs high into the light-filled trees and sings for a mere handful of days before expiring and returning to earth. It's a joyful and ecstatic element in the slow irrevocable turning of one season into another.

I often find abandoned cicada skins on the poplar trees in our Two Hundred Acre Wood, but I always feel blessed when I meet a newborn still clinging to its shell in all its pink and green splendor. Adults go dark within a few hours, but they retain lacy, darker green wings all the days of their lives. Only male cicadas sing, but oh, how they do sing.

Call it "cicada mind" and cherish the notion. Our task is one of cultivating just this kind of patience, acceptance, rapt attention and unfettered Zen sensibility, of embracing our allotted days fully and singing wherever we happen to be, then dissolving effortlessly back into the fabric of the world when the time comes.