The Divinity of Fireflies

Years ago, growing up in Virginia, I fell in love with fireflies.

I dare anyone who has ever watched the dusk settle in, only to have hundreds of tiny amber-lit creatures rise from the grass like little sparks of the divine, tell me they haven’t fallen in love with fireflies. With life. With the planet. With the mysterious power of Mother Nature to enchant just by going about her business. Maybe the love affair (your love affair?) lasted for one glorious summer, only a few hours, or, like me, for a lifetime but, surely, love arrived. Somewhere in the heart of everyone who has beheld the magic of fireflies is a candle fueled by wonder, awe, and the memory of tiny lanterns floating towards the heavens in the warm summer months like clockwork with the setting sun.

Perhaps you had an aunt or uncle or friend of a friend in the magical lands fireflies inhabit whom you visited once as a child. Or, like me, you were lucky enough to live in firefly country. I made it well into adulthood before I ever realized that there are places where fireflies don’t make an annual appearance. Fireflies were so synonymous with summer that it never occurred to me that I would one day have friends, best friends, who had never seen one. I was 28 when I moved to Seattle, WA, where fireflies simply don’t feel at home in the temperate, even-keeled climate of the Pacific Northwest; while it lacked mosquitos and horse flies (huzzah!) I never quite forgave my new home for the lack of fireflies.

For many natives’ of the Pacific Northwest, fireflies are almost mystical creatures from storybooks, though not quite fiction or myth. After all, they know people who vouch for the existence of fireflies; yet, to the stranger of fireflies, second hand accounts don’t quite make them real.

But I had seen them. Loved them. Their loss when I moved west to make my way in the world compounded the melancholia that comes from growing up and the ever widening gulf between the carefree summers of childhood and the responsible, sensible adult life which comes, if you are lucky, with two weeks of paid vacation per year. Everything felt harder without fireflies to remind me that anything might just be possible.

When it came time to leave Seattle after 20 years, I was asked, often, why I was abandoning such a beautiful place and so many wonderful friends to move, vaguely, “east.” It was a fair question; one I didn’t entirely have an answer for. But I did know one thing:

“I have to go in search of fireflies.”

Six months after I drove away from Seattle, I settled in mid-coast Maine, a bastion of summer fireflies. Following a winding road of false starts, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life in an unfamiliar place with only a handful of family and friends nearby, I ended up going back to school and being ordained as an interfaith minister. That blessed event was the culmination of two years of active, deep contemplation and ever-expanding perspective on all the ways the divine shows up.

There are so many kinds of goggles humans put on which help us to recognize the Divine. Some folks wear “Christianity Goggles,” others “Judaism Goggles,” “Islam Goggles,” “humanist goggles,” Buddhism, Shinto…the list goes on and on.

My Spirit Goggles are decidedly earth-centric, Pagan, rooted in the feminine divine with a deep nod to the sacred masculine. I search for and try to see the divine in almost everything, though some things, people, and events are very much harder to embrace as holy than others. Especially in the last few years as a basket of woes filled with political divisiveness, the scourge of racism, the climate crisis, a global pandemic, and the ever widening gulf between the haves and have nots has become almost unbearable in its weight and grief.

If forced to name the root of all the pain and lack of community unity we are experiencing today, I’d say it’s that so many of us have forgotten to see the Divine in all the tiny, beautiful moments, blossoms, synchronicities, dog-kisses, and firefly happenings of our day to day lives. The divine is always at hand; but our goggles are covered in the schmutz of fake news and divided perspectives.

The Beauty is that healing lies in the simple shift of our gaze back to the day to day, minute by minute acts of love, kindness, and connection which permeate the fabric of this world…the miracle of trees, otters, goldfinches at the feeder…. If we can keep turning our gaze back to the Divine in its myriad, surely unlimited manifestations and move toward that which rekindles wonder, awe, and the belief in magic…well, I think that’s the cure for what ails us.

For me, I start with the existence of fireflies.

Where will you start?