fireflies
lightning bugs
If you are in a hurry and you are in town, lightning bugs are barely a thing.
But this time of year if you have the where with all and time to sit somewhere at dusk and look out over a yard of grass, even a small one you’ll see them. If you walk in the evening after the sun has passed the horizon moving dots of light will show, first in your periphery, but soon enough everywhere if you are a available to it.
Thing is, when you first sit down, even if you have seen one out the window in the fading light, there will be none. If you point your camera at one it will turn off as if on cue. But as you sit a while you’ll see one and then a few and then they’ll be all over in the direction you are looking. You have to sort of zoom out. You have to let your focus not be on anything in particular. You have to look at an area. That’s not something one is frequently called upon to do.
If you want to watch lightning bugs with someone, it’ll have to be someone who you feel comfortable sitting quietly with and staring off.
The spry and keen of vision can catch lightning bugs in their hands. They can be fed to a mason jar or a caught frog both of which can be found and refound by their glow, unlike the things themselves.
A lightning bug drifts in the still night air sound tracked by crickets and frogs and the freeway shooshing past the south side like a growling river of cars, honking now and then, growling with spirit and advantage once in a while as the result of some aggressive pass.
I had to focus back in to document the sounds. It feels silent. The blink blink blink, the one long blink drifting in a direction at a pace you could catch from the air were it ever in reach. They know better. You might need to trundle giggling through the grass in bare feet with your hands out before a single one is available to your grasp.
The part of me that wants to catch lightning bugs is still as real as it ever was. But I don’t rise from the stoop that faces the raspberries and the tall grass. I just marvel. They occupy the branches and leaves of the great big trees along the alley. And it feels like they should, but they don't make a note, or a buzz or a peep, they just silently actively fill the darkening with their lights
There are places where they’re thick. There are places where an entire forest lights on and off at once because they sync up out there in the dark and all do the same thing. It's not like that here. Iowa lightning bugs are modest individualists. They say, I see what you’re doing there. It's great. I’m doing this.
There are only so many corn fed lightning bug princesses and the lightning bugs that want to hook up with them want the princesses to know that they’re not being oppositional, they’re just doing there own thing.
The princesses go, They’re just all like that. That's how suitors are.
Here, the suitors all see themselves as special and unlike each other. In places where the lightning bugs all do the same thing at the same time, I’m not sure what they think, but they are all together on it. It's a good show.
Some people never take the time to slow all the way down and be where they are.
Probly shouldn’t. There ain't a dime in it.
I love sitting in silent observation with a friend, soaking in stars, fireflies, glowing light, the night choir tuning up. The freeway and the air conditioners are nature, too, because humans are nature even if most of us won't admit it - even though every breath of air, sip of water, and morsel of food we have evolved to require here on this planet comes from the Planet.
You just done described one of my happiest places. I wrote a song about it once, called Silence, even tho the night is far from silent. There are few things holier than slowing down and being present in that deep way.