Cicada Wisdom

 

We made it east for a late summer vacation.

Over the last months, we had heard the buzz about the cicadas (one bad pun per blog entry allowed). Every 13 to 17 years, these harmless insects come out from the ground to mate. Supposedly, the noise from these creatures reached an ear piercing 120 dB, louder than a jet aircraft or a jackhammer. People were posting pics, videos, and even recipes of cicada delicacies.

My mom was so excited, she had saved us a collection of these beautifully mysterious insects. On our phone calls leading up to our trip she would remind us that she had (dead) cicadas to show us.

“Great, mom. Can’t wait.” Luckily, she couldn’t see my facial expression. Meanwhile, my kids were jumping up and down for the opportunity to see grandma’s dead bugs.

Well, we didn’t see live cicadas. They were well on their way to burrowing in the ground until 2038 when they will emerge again.

But there was a curious thing we did see. Trees that looked perfectly healthy with brown ends of their branches. Being a New Mexican and a physician, I immediately diagnosed the problem as either a lack of water or some fungal/parasitic disease afflicting the tree population.

It was neither.

The browning of the trees was in fact a phenomenon called “flagging”. It turns out that the cicada females lay eggs in the smaller end branches of trees. This leads to a natural pruning of the tree and as the branch breaks off and falls to the ground, the cicada eggs get a free ride to the dirt to live for the next 17 years.

                                                        An example of flagging

I thought about flagging and what it can teach me and all of us.

Heading into a 3^rd wave of covid, we probably have some dead branches on the surface. We might be ashamed by how this looks to the world. We might even pathologize un-necessarily, thinking of these as a sign of disease, drought, etc.

Beyond looking into the mirror at ourselves, we probably notice some dead branches in the people and community around us. Again, eyesores that might make us wonder if all is well…or if all will ever be well again.

Nature, and particularly the billions of cicadas that came out to play in 2021, are reminding us that flagging is necessary, a normal part of life’s hum. It brings about new life, both for the tree and the insect world. Flagging helps shed stuff that needs to let go of, dropped to the ground. And that seemingly dead branch that has fallen is actually bringing new life through the cicada it carries to its burrowing spot in the soil.

And this process of flagging is not bothered by the mega-quick Instagram/Twitter speed of our current world. In social media time, the dead branch would fall off and sprout new life in seconds. Our personal and societal flagging that will bring new life and new ways may be on a much longer time course, like our cicada relatives. Well, hopefully not a full 17 years…