Undulating Ululations

Reflections on Brood XIV and my humanity.

Around the time one of our kids turn two, I’ll start to have him or her join me for weekly lawn mowing ritual. This summer, Blaise is two. So he’s the one now perched on my lap. I realize in our sterile, sanitized suburban neighborhood, I’m sure the neighbors see this as risky and dangerous. But we do it anyway.

As we snake about the yard, Dom glares at us, huffing and stomping and screaming. Dom is the four-year-old who has now grown such that mowing with him has become a clumsy affair. He is too big and tries to take the wheel. So, he graduated from his lap seat to watching from the deck and throwing the occasional tantrum — his rebellion against growing up.

I appreciate Blaise’s company. I like sitting in silence with my boy week after week. But this week was different. A chorus of cicadas joined in the steady hum of the mower’s engine. As we coursed about the yard, interested cicadas of Brood XIV, a seventeen-year periodical variety, torpedoed us. “The females are attracted to the vibrations of machinery,” my older boy tells me. One dive-bombed at Blaise’s head and hooked onto his hair. He reached and grabbed the red-eyed crazy bug and held it in his hand. He looked up at me with a big smile.

Seventeen years. These insects won’t appear again, above ground, on this land, for seventeen years. Who knows where Blaise will be then? Who knows where I will be? But right here, riding through the yard, the boy on my lap is happy to hold a bug that carries inside itself a story seventeen years in the making. And I am happy to be holding him.

I have tried to immerse myself in the Brood XIV experience of 2025. It’s been interesting to watch the bugs and to observe my children’s fascination with them — and my own. My kids pluck them off trees and bushes and put them in buckets. They toss them to the chickens for a once-in-a-lifetime feast. They sneak them in the house or try to see how many they can hold in their hands. For my part, I’ve gone on more frequent jogs through the area to see the difference in cicada density from one neighborhood to the next. I’ve taken time away from the office (where the brood is barely present), so I could work from my back porch and feel the mystery of this thing. I’m not a bug enthusiast of any sort, just a curious human being. As I have spent time with these creatures, I’ve found myself reflecting on my own life and the drama of human experience. They have taken on a kind of symbolic, sacramental quality for me. By this, I mean the cicadas, God’s creatures, are capable of pointing beyond a buggy season in early summer — if we let them — to show us something of who we are, as God’s creatures, and who the Creator is.

For seventeen years these bugs lived under the earth as nymphs burrowing and sucking on the sap of tree roots. The tree was their source of life, till the spring of the seventeenth year — late May, when the soil reaches the right temperature and signals time to be birthed from the earth. They come out in droves and start their ascent up the tree that provided their sustenance while they hid underground. They are slow, and they have to pause to molt, leaving the old self behind. Many don’t make it. They become the food of squirrels and birds, or something goes wrong while molting and they die there as if frozen while undressing. But many do make it, reaching the luscious leaves and growing in smarts and speed. They are as numerous as they are erratic, flying here and there and landing on anything that looks good.

But it’s the undeniable volume of the loudest bugs on earth that I find most interesting. I am fascinated by the noise from the nearby bugs — or the one I hold in my hand as I watch the sound box in its midsection vibrate — but more intrigued by the din I hear coming from distant pockets of woods. It provides a backdrop to my day, a humming from sunup to sundown. The volume all around me intensifies in the afternoon heat. It is one of undulating ululations. A cacophony of shrills. Waves of electrified chirping. An incessant buzz riffling from the male abdomen, as they call out for a mate. Their time is running short. After seventeen years underground, they only have a few weeks to mate and live on in nymphs that hatch, fall to the ground, and burrow into the soil. There they will stay till its time to carry out the mating ritual once again.

As I consider these creatures, I can’t help but think of my own origins. Origins that lie in deep pockets of God’s mind, and, in their own way, in the depths of the earth. Psalm 139:13–16 captures this beautifully:

You formed my inmost being;

you knit me in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, because I am wonderfully made;

wonderful are your works!

My very self you know.

My bones are not hidden from you,

When I was being made in secret,

fashioned in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw me unformed;

in your book all are written down;

my days were shaped, before one came to be.

I think of the cicada nymphs drawing the sustenance of life from the roots of the tree in which they hatched. This is Eucharistic imagery. The Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist accessible to me. The Eucharist is the bread of life, the fruit of the new tree of life (see Gen 2–3; Jn 19:31–37). The Eucharist, Jesus, made me and sustains me. He gives of himself to give me life. God provides. Jesus is the giving tree and so long as the sap of his life, the Holy Spirit, courses through my being, so long as I am grafted onto him, I can live, and move, and have my being (see Jn 15:1–5; Acts 17:28).

The cicadas emerging and molting, calls to mind Christian conversion, which allows us, if we cooperate with God’s grace, to soar to the heights of sanctity. “You should put away the old self of your former way of life,” St. Paul says, “corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph 4:22–24).

When the cicadas take flight, they seem to have no flight pattern besides erratic. They’re unpredictable. Human beings, with our freedom, can be rather erratic as well. Despite contemporary attempts to track buying habits, analyze market data, and so forth, no data analyst (today’s interpreters of human behavior and contemporary myth-makers) will ever fully figure things out. We are too unpredictable ourselves, even as we establish a general direction for our lives.

Finally, the undulating ululations. As the cicadas cry out in incessant waves, I get the sense of a kind of throbbing for existence. At this point in their life cycle, the end is near and mating is the only hope for living on. As their shrill sound encapsulates their ache for life, and communion. I think of God’s constant cry for his people, a voice in the desert crying out, calling for a repentant return to him. And I think of my own longings for the infinite, for the eternal, for a communion capable of overpowering the death that seems so immanent we can’t help but try to distract it away.

A few weeks. That’s how long the cicadas live after clawing their way through the soil, up the tree, and into to the sky. A rather short span given the length of time underground. “Teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart,” the Psalmist cries out (Ps 90:12). The cicadas drive this home. Momento Mori. Remember thy death. Live well. Live fully. Cry out for the God who calls out for you. Live a life of communion and you will live.

Yes. As Blaise looked at me holding seventeen years in his two-year-old hand, as he looked in wonder at the red-eyed bug, and smiled with delight at the whole experience — looking at me, the co-creator of his own existence — all these thoughts of life and death and love and communion crawled through my head. There, on that mower, the mystery of life and the goodness of creation cried out to me full-force. I could hear it.