CICADA

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. --Frederick Buechner

I saw a cicada this week.

It was on the walk to work—during that routine, one-foot-after-another, six-minute plod from car to office. Most mornings are similarly unremarkable. This morning was not.

I've heard plenty of cicadas. I've heard their incessant august croaking, their late-night lament of the thick humidity, venting with every other living creature that's hoping for fall and the promise of something cooler.

I've heard them.

But this one morning I saw a flimsy, flittery green one, piggyback on the crackly mud-brown shell it had just clambered out of.

It's eyes were dewy and the wings a thin film, like blowing bubbles through a plastic wand. It was like listening in on a very tiny, very important secret.

It may have been the happiest thing that happened all week.

It was just a wisp of a moment, but it was enough to delight me with something I think I knew but forget most of the time: that the world is so very big, that the tiny things are so very important, that I am one creature among many, and that all those creatures are necessary and right and mysterious and beautiful and surprising and ought to be noticed and considered and delighted in because they exist.

Walk slow and listen well. Such fragile moments are easy to miss.

I hope that you know the incessant, fathomless mystery of life even as you plod along, one foot after the other. I hope that you dig down into the holy, hidden heart of it and that you are scandalously surprised at the grace you find there.