From My Nature Journal: The Cycle

To my right, a brittle and monstrous-looking dragonfly exoskeleton clings to an alder sapling at water’s edge. Like an outgrown pair of overalls, a nymph left it behind weeks ago after climbing from the watery depths and emerging from its skin shell. We often see these lovely creatures fresh out of the lake, having climbed bush, tree trunk, even cabin walls, clinging to their outgrown suit for several hours while they unravel their wings, pump blood into their veins, and finally skitter off to do their barnstorming thing.

I’ve delighted this summer season in the helicopter antics of a particularly large adult that has graced the dock, vigilantly doing its part to relieve me from mosquito peskery. It seems to strike an occasional photogenic pose on the weathered wood while it surveys its hunting grounds, even lighting on me from time to time for a loftier view of its riparian domain. One time it landed on my forearm barely ten inches from my face, cocked its head several times, and stared at me with seeming inquisitiveness through its huge iridescent eyes. Is this the same one that left its used clothing hanging on its alder hook?

Yet now as I watch, a female does her little darner dance low over the water. She will die soon. But now she flits irregularly, dropping her abdomen’s backside quickly to the surface about once every second or two, depositing a fertilized egg with each dip, a seed that will sink to the bottom and, if it survives the weather and hungry fish, will ready itself for its own debut late next spring, perchance climbing this same alder.

The cycle.

Whether all the same insect or not, I see before my very eyes a generation rising and passing, a life cycle in full, miniature to my own. What’s the difference in the grand scheme of things between a summer season and the season of a human lifetime? What’s to say that the passing of time in God’s perspective, before Whose eyes a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day, is any different? This tiny one’s life cycle has its purpose and I mine. Its intention has played itself forward before my eyes, as mine does before God’s. In their proper time, both its biography and my own will be complete.

For the eyes of the LORD move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His. (2 Chronicles 16:9)

As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments. (Psalm 103:15-18)

~~ RGM, August 11 2017

P.S. I wrote once before on dragonflies, but from a bit more poetic of a perspective. Hit this link to check it out.

From My Nature Journal: River of Life

It appeared a bright orange streak across the hillside hiking trail, as if someone had spilled a can of orange soda on the uphill side of the path and it had run crossways downhill. But we stopped quickly in our tracks when we observed it to be a stream of thousands and thousands of ants heading uphill.

Brilliant in color, they were astonishing, stretching into the prairie grasses, wildflowers and brush on either side of the trail, a parade, not marching one-by-one or ten-by-ten as the song insists ants do, but a pulsing, coursing river of life, in places a half-inch wide. Twenty-by-twenty? Thirty-by-thirty? I could not tell. But they were all heading the same direction, from one place to another, even crawling over each other in places.

It gripped me. Overcoming my initial sensation of the creepiest insect scene in a classic Indiana Jones movie, or an old issue of National Geographic, I followed the downhill side of the procession, seeking their advancing source, picking carefully through thick growth, thinking it would lead quickly to an underground starting place. But it stretched into the pampas along mouse trails and rock edges, down, down, down. “Thousands? There must be millions,” I thought. I was a full twenty-five yards downhill before it all seemed to commence at one medium boulder. I heaved on it. It did not seem to budge. But I no sooner had my hand free than it was swarming with orange, the mother lode. I must have moved it enough to get their attention.

My own attention then switched back uphill to where they might be heading on the other side of the trail. Where were they bound, and to what end? But I was not successful in finding this; within a short distance I lost the convoy in impassible brush.

What an amazing river of life. I have never seen anything like it.

Lord, as I have thought about it, Your river of life is truly an astounding thing. Is this how Your beloved creation seems to You over the eons, an almost endless, yet much-loved marching band?

Is this how Your beloved creation

seems to You over the eons, an 

almost endless marching band?

Yet my mind is further boggled by God’s created variety, over 5,400 known species of mammals, 10,000 birds, 14,000 reptiles and amphibians, 30,000 fish, and a million of insects. And this is to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of species of plants and other life forms. Biologists sometimes even say there may be as many undiscovered species on earth as there are discovered, and that today’s diversity represents just a small portion of the species that have walked, swam, flown or sprouted the globe over time. What a procession it all must seem from the Master Designer’s perspective.

I’m undone again by the Creator’s majesty…

Oh, what a wonderful God we have! How great are his wisdom and knowledge and riches! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his methods! (Romans 11:33, TLB)

~~ RGM, from an earlier

entry in my nature journal

From My Journal: You are SO Insignificant...

Or at least that’s what some would have us think. But perhaps our significance is inestimable…

A faint movement catches my eye as I read outdoors: a tiny speck moves across the lower corner of my right hand leaf. An insect almost too insignificant to be seen crawls across my page, barely half the height of the text-printed comma over which it strides. I am stunned by its diminutive size as it meanders among print script as tall to it as a grove of old hemlock trees. Were it not for its contrast against the sheet’s whiteness, I doubt it would have been seen; a fruit fly seems a garbage truck in comparison.

Exclaiming upon it I show my daughter Sarah, who cautions that if I should try to pick it up I’d probably ‘smoosh’ it. So I observe for a while and strain to see any hint of detail, but find none. It is just a moving fleck, a mote in motion. Finally it makes for the spine and I think, “No, I don’t want this book infested with whatever it is,” so I rub it off onto a finger expecting its demise, then look at my finger and am amazed to see it there, crawling still, at which time, incredulously (and probably pretty ticked off), it raises infinitesimally small wings barely visible to my bespectacled eyes and flies off. Pardon the use of the word but my eyeballs literally bug out, and I shake my head with regret that I did not run for the magnifying glass the first chance I had to see the little beastie a bit more closely.

I wonder what is in me

that might judge it so

significant 'out there'

yet so insignificant

right here...

For a brief moment I unthinkingly ponder the creature’s insignificance in the grand scheme of biological life, but then it quickly occurs to me: if such a creature were found to inhabit or once have inhabited the moon, or Mars, or some unknown distant planet in another solar system, it would be one of the most spectacular finds in the history of science, life in another place, almost on another plane or in a different dimension. Its insignificance would evaporate in its new context, and it would likely be considered a candidate for the most important scientific news of the century. I chuckle at myself and wonder what it is in me that might judge it so significant ‘out there’ yet so insignificant right here. Then I chuckle again as I muse on my own seeming insignificance from the vantage point of the vastness of God’s created universe.

[All photography by Rick and Gail Mylander]

Human perspective is amazingly quick to place value on things by their relative size and impact. Though the tiny thing had at first startled me in its smallness, my next inclination was to entirely dismiss it. (Way to go, Mr. Naturalist…) And yet, it is significant, ineffably and sensationally so.

Glad I was for the reminder that life is an absolute miracle in every one of its manifestations. Yet I am also grateful to God for his creative and massive magnificence, and, in spite of it, somehow, for his sacrificial, outrageously significant consideration of you and me.

When I look at thy heavens… (I ask:) what is man that thou art mindful of him, or… that thou dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than God. [Psalm 8:3-5]

~~RGM, from an earlier journal entry,
Adapted for Blog January 8, 2013

[Psssst... Need further convincing? See also Proverbs 5:21, Isaiah43:1 and John 10:14]