Fireflies are like love, plentiful and so self-sufficient. So, words tend to be redundant when describing them in terms of beauty, for example. Best if artificial lights are turned off at night, completely. City lights, streetlights, safety lights, the lights of enlightenment, all off.
And soon!
You only have a few more weeks in Maryland to gaze at them. Ephemeral and endangered, metaphors and analogies emerging.
Endangered because of our thoughts and paradoxes in language, our sanitizing landscaping practices, our protective poisons for immune systems, our cities, our electricity and lawns… and by us, I mean to say we, the humans…
The city of Greenbelt, in Maryland, declared itself a firefly sanctuary. No pesticides, no mosquito spraying. For more details and inspiration visit their website.
It is a bold move, one that I try to enact in my tiny home territory, where unkempt gardens flourish, no lawn is allowed to grow, native grasses can and will, together with impossible invasive plants, where the Eastern Shore plate shifting wasteland ideal prairie rules no longer necessarily apply – a place gone amok, for more than twenty years. Sometimes strangers come by and all they can say is “Oh, my…” What I realize is that in “my” place, it happens partially by conviction, and it also happens by happenstance (wow) and complete lack of fueling moneys. And the consumptions and developments associated with them, the moneys. Amusing that fireflies flourish here.
So back to them and the enchantment of summer evenings:
They are strange creatures who live two or three years of their lives as luminescent larvae in between the layers of leaf litter - that is about 90% of their existence…
Stanley Kunitz, one of my favorite poets talks about the layers and here are some of his words:
“In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” (excerpt from The layers, by Stanley Kunitz)
To read the entire poem click on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54897/the-layers
Firefly “eggs hatch after about 3 weeks and emerge as larvae. This is the longest period of a firefly’s life and it is spent eating snails, slugs, and small insects such as mosquitoes. After a year or two as a larva, the firefly will pupate underground for about 3 weeks before emerging as an adult in June or July…”
At the end of what we call one of their life cycles, they emerge again as lighted beetles and play for a few weeks at courtship for mating, for laying eggs and for dying… “The entire adult portion of a firefly’s life is spent trying to attract potential mates for 3-4 weeks, using their unique form of courtship; flashing poetry through bio-luminescence.”
https://www.firefly.org/facts-about-fireflies.html
What I also learned is that, as adults, they imitate, they cheat, they behave like tricksters of the nuttiest special kind, switching flashing patterns, baiting, and trapping, in a veritable folly carnival of light for mating. Throughout their entire lives, they remain fierce carnivores and cannibals… that kill and eat each other…
And because, and since the internet, we now live in the House of Easy Quotes, next time you think of the Devil, remember that Lucifer stands for Light –
“In a firefly’s tail, you’ll find two chemicals: luciferase and luciferin. Luciferin is heat resistant, and it glows under the right conditions. Luciferase is an enzyme that triggers light emission.”
In his fascinating book Metamorphosis, Italian philosopher Emanuelle Coccia reflects upon the ever changing natures of all forms in life, animate and inanimate. In one of the last chapters of Metamorphosis, starting on page 162, he talks about the end of the prejudice in favor of wilderness - that space reserved for the dangerous yet enticing pure paradise of the wild, outside of us and so exempt from moral judgements. He says: "The myth of ‘wild’ nature, on the contrary, sees the city fantasizing an outside self that would allow it to purify itself from the excesses of civilization and to balance them out. ...it does not belittle but instead exalts all that is supposedly devoid of culture and technics..." and further down, he suggests that "To overcome this prejudice – to have done with savagery and the wild – it is therefore not enough to affirm that man is an animal species: it is necessary to put a stop to the impulse to idealization that afflicts both human life and non-human life, placing them in moral opposition.... Biology should be transformed into a phenomenology of the cosmic mind... And this phenomenology will not always be a day trip to paradise."
I will continue to reread sentences in Coccia’s books because meanings are constantly shifting, but for me, the sacred and the profane find a ground for conversations in transformations and in the ephemeral firefly flickerings of our summer nights.
For now, for the moment, turn off the lights!
Some additional fun resources about fireflies:
The most comprehensive guide I could find about their flashing patterns is this Texas field guide - https://www.firefly.org/field-guides/texas-fireflies/
Firefly as tourism and industry (?)
A new esthetics for gardening:
https://www.chesapeakebay.net/news/blog/fireflies-shed-light-on-the-benefits-of-a-natural-yard
I likes it!
So many fond memories of watching them, and capturing them (ugh), as a child. I had no idea they were luminescent as larvae! They communicate to us from the wooded part of our backyard, deep enough beneath the canopy that I hope they are safe from the bats that wing about overhead. Loved this essay, Erica.