Or maybe the sassafras, chinkapins, and willows, the hollys, rushes, and wild wheat, once every thousand years put forth at midnight small buds of light lifting and blinking like their own hearts in time to the beat of the solstice. And we were their witnesses. Or perhaps it was a fleet of tiny invisible ships, a multitude bearing flickering lanterns on their masts, vessels launched by beings searching the night’s deep current for their missing gods. Or it might have been the black-winged beetles of the order coleoptera, those fireflies gliding slowly, almost floating, through every space in the forest, above the dank debris and murk of the earth, into the upper canopies, igniting their wild bioluminescences, each one throbbing with passion, drawing us like spirits into the insect art of their being. Yet, maybe those pulsing lights—drifting low over the cow ponds and empty clearings, pausing in among the forest corridors— were the chantings of a peculiar prayer.
