Eva, age three, and I smiled at each other in delight and then looked again at the firefly poised at the end of her finger. Where is a camera when you need one? But it flew off before that thought even made it to consciousness.  

As a child I spent a lot of evenings catching fireflies, but I never had one land on me, much less pose. We had jars with holes carefully poked in them and ran through the yard after the winking lights.  And we actually caught three or five and looked with awe as they winked on and off before we let them fly free. I don’t think we ever tried to keep them overnight. A couple of weeks ago, while house and dog sitting, I sat in velvety dark with “my” (for a week or so) black lab watching the lights dart through the tree tops and glow in the grass and lamented just a bit that I really didn’t feel up to running after them. But my heart could still be glad. And a few days later could share delight with Eva, who tried for awhile to coax another onto her hand.

It’s summer. We drink lemonade, water, and wine – and beer. We seek out air conditioning, at least in the United States. If we play it right, we get tomatoes that taste like tomatoes and corn still sweet from the field. Some of us have gardens or visit farmers’ markets. We talk seriously of the chemicals in our food and how whole wheat has been engineered so it’s no longer healthy and promotes celiac disease. We seldom run laughing through the grass after bugs.

One of the ways to change the world, make it work just a little better, is to at least wish we were running after fireflies or, as they are also called, lightning bugs. Consider. This offers a time of complete silliness. When was the last time you were simply silly?

Chasing fireflies offers innocence and awe in their simple unlikeliness.

And feeds curiosity. Lightening bugs are, simply, and literally, cool. How marvelous to have something that produces light without heat. That blinks on and off in some pattern of communication — sometimes apparently in courtship, sometimes in commonality, sometimes, I guess, just to say “hi.” Apparently there are lots of different kinds that do this in lots of different ways.

Light without fire or electricity or solar power or …. Hmmmm. Possibilities? What would you add? How do silliness, joy, innocence, curiosity, and awe change things? How do fireflies?

Earlier this summer I was sitting outside with one of my more cynical friends. “Look!” he said, “the first fireflies of the season!” They were high in the trees so out of chasing range. Maybe next time.

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Photo credits from the top:
Firefly — Mike Lewinski
fireflies in a jar — jamelah e.
Fireflies – The Morning After: Be Free Little Lightning Bug. Be Free.— Jeff Turner