Brood X
For some people, it can come as a big surprise to learn that I love a week-long silent meditation retreat.
“How do you do that? It must be so hard for you not to talk for seven days.”
I try not to take it personally. But it isn’t the quiet that’s hard. It’s sitting with myself - all those thoughts and emotions. Looking at my flaws, mistakes, impatience, judgements - the struggle is being with myself, just as I am, with kindness. And - my tush gets super numb.
While on retreat, I know I’m supposed to be looking inward, but I can’t help looking around and spotting “Coolest Cushion”, “Longest Male Ponytail” and “Nicest Socks”. I write “Bombas” down in my journal so I can order some “no-shows” when I get home. Is this a lesson in presence – or presents?
After a few days, I feel so exposed I weep in front of people I don’t know, like I’m in an Adam Sandler parody. By the time I head home, my fellow meditators are no longer strangers. As if powered by the magic of shared experience, we love each other even though we haven’t exchanged a word.
The pandemic has often felt like one long, silent retreat. But this past summer, life felt more like a sci-fi movie when my son and I took a trip to my home state of Ohio.
I may be a secular Jew, but I do know about the Ten Plagues. The Ten Plagues were allegedly sent by God to help free the Israelites from an evil Pharaoh. It’s a fun part of the Passover meal, dipping a pinky finger into my Manischewitz and counting out each one, wine drop by wine drop:
Frogs, lice, flies, beasts, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, killing of the firstborn.
As a parent, that last one really freaks me out.
2021 has been the year of plagues: a virus, floods, fires - and trillions of cicadas. They aren’t exactly locusts but - close enough. Last May, these flying bugs made an appearance in fifteen Midwest and Eastern states and the District of Columbia after seventeen years underground. This natural phenomenon was called Brood X.
Because of Covid, my teenage son Theo and I hadn’t seen our family in Ohio in almost two years. My mother is ninety-five, so that was all the emergency I needed to get to Cleveland once we were vaccinated. Despite my weakened immune system, we donned our masks and boarded a plane.
We checked up on my mom, then drove from Cleveland to Cincinnati to see some of our relatives. I knew we’d be entering the full-tilt cicada season, but I kept Brood X to myself, unsure if my teen would find countless numbers of airborne clumsy critters awesome - or a reason to protest. Some Cincinnatians fled town to escape the Brood, but I brought my kid into this scenario fully aware of what we were in for - or so I thought.
As we sped south on the 70, the first cicada smacked into our windshield with the splat of a thousand mosquitoes.
“What the hell?!”
He was mesmerized.
“It’s like a hummingbird hit us!”
I was relieved.
“Ew! Don’t roll the windows down!”
And we were obsessed.
“We’re running out of washer fluid!”
As we got slammed by one cicada after another, we became fascinated and wanted to learn more.
You might think that these bugs were subterraneously snoozing for more than a decade and a half - but no. They were eating, growing, and busily preparing to emerge, reproduce and die. Their carcasses seeped into the dirt that their holes had aerated, preparing their offspring to follow their legacy in 17 years.
The cicada is the loudest insect on the planet. The singing Brood packs a punch with its deafening mating call. The song of a male cicada runs at about 100 decibels. That's as loud as a lawnmower, and only slightly less boisterous than a Jack White concert.
We witnessed them belting out a tune, the dudes making their presence known as they sought a hookup. They bred, laid their eggs while clinging to the tree bark, then fluttered onto the earth as they expired, covering the street in the sweet stink of decay.
Lisa: “Is it a shell? Or is it dead?”
Theo: “I dunno” “It’s not alive.”
Lisa: “Oh my god, there are a million shells down here.”
Theo: “I wonder why they’re all...there...like…”
Lisa: “If you go to an area where there aren’t a lot of trees there aren’t a lot of cicadas because they crawl up the trees.”
Theo: “But why are they in this corner and not…”
Lisa: “I think Aunt Gloria may have just swept ‘em here.”
We found out that the cicadas surfaced from underground as nymphs, which is a juvenile stage in their life cycle. When the soil --about eight inches below ground-- reached 64 degrees, the cicadas from Brood X started to claw and climb their way towards the light. Because the exoskeleton is hard, it prevents insects from growing, so they have to molt that 'skin' to continue to develop. Would you believe it only takes half an hour for it to regenerate? Squirrels, raccoons, birds and dogs feasted on them until they were satiated - it was easy for the cicadas to be gobbled up or swallowed whole.
Coming out of pandemic hibernation, I popped my head out, pale and vulnerable as a cicada nymph. And like the milky white larva fresh from its shell, I kept looking over my shoulder to see if a predator was going to devour me.
The past two years have both crawled along and sped by. I’ve been cocooned in my house, safe and protected. Yet as the days became weeks became months of quarantine, I felt isolated, and the intimate connections I thrived upon had disappeared. I realized that as I became visible, I was manifesting my own exoskeleton.
I don’t much live in fear since surviving a rare illness, but I’m a little afraid my armor will return too quickly, and I’ll lose the beauty of vulnerability. I have to remind myself that there’s strength in being unguarded.
Sometimes when participants leave a silent meditation retreat, they get pulled over for driving too slowly. I’ve had to open my window and blast the Rolling Stones to keep myself alert. Like that fragile cicada, I felt splayed and naked. The thing to remember is that I don’t miss the casing that weighed me down and stunted my growth. I try to take things one breath at a time, to lean in and be present with what is, celebrating my imperfect humanity. I can shield myself from marauders and miss out on life, or like Brood X, I can take a leap of faith, rise up and say yes.