Long sunny days of summer are when insects multiply. Sitting by a still pond or among tall grass, you can hear their chorals. Ri ri ri… a continuous mid-range hum that stretches longer than the midday sun. Insects ensemble is a childhood memory for me, bringing both tranquility and a sense of desolation. Like an abandoned house, or an empty world back in hundreds of millions of years ago, or a future without inhabitants hundreds of millions of years from now.
Imagine, on a beautiful late August day, you sit next to a decaying tree trunk. The stillness of surrounding fields accentuates the insect chorus. It’s mating season, perhaps there is a mass wedding somewhere beneath wildflowers. The cicada officiant rises, singing along ri ri ri, a hymn of the ephemeral: “When time bites into the fruit of knowledge, the soul is conceived in the egg of the earth. We have been here, 480 million years ago, hatching to the nursery rhyme of this fleeting existence. Then came a giant species, destined to roam. Their lives were busier than springtime worker bees, transforming the invisibility of time into something tangible, naming all the days that once had no name…”
As the prayer ends, insect couples begin their mating dance. The ri ri ri sounds reverberate across the field, stirring the dreams of some child who has drifted off to sleep. The noise of playful children or the boredom of midday might make you rise, forgetting the song of the insects. Just as they forget the long shadow your presence cast over their wedding ceremony.
The stories continue being told, about giant beings whose footsteps span lifetimes greater than the brief existence of insects. These giants tread a delicate boundary between accepting limits of their fate and longing to bite into the infinite core of sacred knowledge.
The giants walked, jumped, and flew, and evolved faster than any other species in their brief history, sprinting through hundreds of millions of years on earth. They no longer listen to the nursery rhyme of the insects: “The sun is a giant egg, birthing angels of light. They descend to earth to bless us, all the while dreaming of the light from their homeland. When the day fades, and the sun sets, they wander as souls, drifting toward the void with dreams of a shattered egg.”
The giants picked up a few fragments, jumped and aimed for the sun. Who will reach the end first? One thing is certain: the final land on earth will be accompanied by the sweet nursery rhyme- a promise with the dust, shared equally between the justice of the insects and those giant beings in the vastness of time.