I recently learned through a gorgeous essay by Anisa George — whose wisdom this entire essay merely echoes — that periodical cicadas spend either 13 or 17 years (depending on which species) beneath the soil’s surface. 17 years! Just hanging out in the underground. Not hibernating. Not asleep. But awake and quietly munching on the sap of nearby tree roots. Growing, slowly, defenseless, in the dark.
13 or 17 years underground before emerging for a brief 4 to 6 weeks of above-ground life. What a timeline. When a brood (a collective of cicada kin) do finally set upwards of soil tops, they party like it’s 1999. It’s all songs and survival and sex before their death shortly after. But as it often goes, death begets life. Eggs left behind begin to hatch. And nymphs fall from trees back to the ground for their long immersion.
I have no reason to presume anything other than their content with this lifestyle. But as for me and my spirit, the timeline of their ‘below’ stretch is not appealing. This reaction stems, no doubt, from how the last few years have felt something like a spiritual submergence. One that has insisted on continuing far longer than I’d like. As some prior worldviews of mine began rotting, ending their cycle in my life, I was left feeling like a spiritual nymph in the dirt.
I’ve shed many a worldview since my fundamentalist beginnings. Each has come with inevitable pain, but also growth and joy and excitement. To me, this cycle is a valuable and inevitable outcome of learning and paying attention over time, of integrating new experiences, confronting deeper truths, listening to the witness of others, and observing the patterns of history. Prior views die off but from them, new life hatches. Yet again, I was confronted by a concept of ‘god’ and humanity and “change” that could no longer satisfy. But unlike my prior shedding, there was no immediate emergence into something new. It has felt like 17 years of just sitting, honestly, painfully, impatiently but as courageously as I could, in an absence of wisdoms that resonated with – as Grace Lee Boggs would put it – “what time it is on the clock of the world.”
The wonderings of Bayo Akomolafe were one of many forces ushering me into this reckoning. His good and challenging invitations to consider “questioning our questions.” To consider whether and how “the way we respond to crisis is part of the crisis.” And ultimately, the truth that “to find our way, we must get lost,” were all working on me.
Despite my best efforts at asserting my will against just how long the “lost” part is lasting, the timeline has proved beyond my control. Fervently search as I did, no new pathways were opened – and I wondered – are there kin out there stuck in the same place? Naked to the need for asking new questions but entirely unsure of what, exactly, they are? Just waiting in the uncomfortable absence of satisfying answers, ‘strategies,’ or gods?
George also shares in the essay that no one is totally sure how the cicadas know when to emerge – but they almost always do it together. What is the signal that 13 or 17 years have passed? A mystery of collective intuition? Very occasionally, a cicada emerges before the rest of their brood. They will be an easy snack for nearby prey. The only defense these creatures have as a species is their sheer numbers.
Ever more occasionally, more rarely, more surprisingly, every now and then there is an early emergence of a large enough number of cicadas that they are able to survive outside of prescribed patterns. Breaking from the 13 or 17 year generational cycles, they emerge together. They reproduce. And they officially become a whole new brood. A whole new family. Against the odds, they queer patterns of survival.
Following the last ten years of mass shootings and hate crimes, militarization of the police, escalation of overdoses and wealth gaps, climate crises and COVID, genocide and mass apathy – for an increasing many of us, the regurgitation of familiar lines is just no longer satisfying for this time. Spiritually. Politically. Relationally. And I’m not sure what the trigger was, or is, exactly, but as my own little journey finally, finally, finally feels like it’s turning toward a slow emergence, I sense I’m in the company of a whole new brood. Lonely sometimes but never alone. A legion of kin, not yet with a name of our own. Not yet above soil. But just bearing witness to student demonstrations across the country, I feel freshly the vibrations in the soil.
It is risky, of course. To break away from familiar patterns of collective life – even and maybe especially the ones that seem to ‘work’ (sometimes and in some ways and for some people). It is risky to experiment outside of predetermined pathways. To ask different questions. To seek unfamiliar divinities and engage strange wisdoms. But oh oh oh the possibilities! For all those who have been simmering in lonely dissatisfaction, lost in honest confrontation with pathways that – though perhaps useful for a time – are nearly at their dead ends: there is a trustworthiness in your labors of discontent. Our timelines unfold in mysterious ways but there is a sacred synchronicity unfolding.
A new brood is emerging. Smaller in number we may be, but still, legion enough. And the chorus of the whole groaning earth will welcome our song.
M Jade Kaiser is co-founder and co-director of enfleshed. M wonders, wrestles, and works in the places where spirituality, activism, culture(s), and creativity entangle. Over the last decade, they have had the pleasure of collaborating and working in spaces and movements of shared longing and action such as Texas Freedom Network, Faith in Harm Reduction, SURJ, UmForward, Reconciling Ministries Network, ONE Northside, and other collectives of organizers, religious communities, and creators.
In their spare time, M seeks out creaturely encounters and enjoys working with stained glass. They have recently begun volunteering in raptor rehabilitation where they are learning how to tend wings, love feathers, and respect the fierceness of talons.