Frog Songs

a devotional for late winter

Photo by Samuel Giacomelli on Unsplash

we are easily fooled:
 
one glance from the sun
(pale, yet, and womb-fresh)
and we shake ourselves awake, 

singing!
singing!

we court and we creak,
a chorus of angels clinging to the trees,
witness to a miracle; 

we hymn and we hum,
webbed toes wide like wings
and wide eyes watchful;

we sing, God's fools:
an invisible choir
who fills the silence between seasons
with revelation. 

February is the month of “hurry up and wait”, of false starts and teases and sunny days punctuated by bone-chilling gusts. But one thing that never fails, even when spring takes its time, is that the frogs always sing. Early, and often. 

These days, our nights—even the frigid ones—are filled with frog songs. The songs of the Pacific treefrog, to be more precise, who don’t “croak” so much as creak and squeak from their places all over our swamps and marshes and wetter woods.

It never fails: we always worry that the frogs will be fooled, and fatally. That a whole generation will be wiped out by their foolishness, creeping out of wherever they hide during the winter to sing their mating songs too soon, too soon! 

And yet, every year there are more and more frogs.

Clearly, they know something we don’t. 

I know I’m often guilty of overspiritualizing, but there’s something in the heat-seeking instinct of our humble little treefrog-neighbors that always moves me. They don’t need to be told when to come out and sing…they know in their strange, flexible little bones that it’s time. 

I wish, sometimes, I had such a bone-deep knowing. An against-the-grain knowing. A despite the evidence, still I will sing knowing. 

And maybe that’s something to strive for. To take the example of the tiniest lives around me, the ones we often miss, and learn from them.

Maybe—just maybe—the smaller we are, the more we understand.

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