This morning, my youngest finds the shed exoskeleton of a cicada. She can hardly believe it. She’s heard the news about the seventeen year wait for such insects to emerge. She’s heard their songs–haunting, loud, and strange–across the landscape. But she’s never seen one.
We examine the abandoned shell and marvel at the tiny hole by which the cicada exited. Such an interesting insect!
We talk about that distinct cicada sound (listen in this video), and I learn that it’s actually one of the loudest of insect-producing sounds. But how? We discover that the hollow inside of the cicada’s abdomen acts like a resonance chamber to amplify that song.
“What’s a resonance chamber?” she asks.
The very term delights me. It’s an enclosed space where sound waves combine, reinforce, and intensify one another. And it’s all happening inside that little insect. I begin to think about the space inside of me.
Just the other evening, a dear friend talked about her “mind space” and whether or not she makes room for lovely, noble, and pure thoughts. We talked about godly thinking that we allow to occupy our spacious minds.
It’s like my own resonance chamber up in here. In the enclosed space of this life, I want to allow the Good, the Noble, the Lovely, and the Pure to combine, reinforce, and intensify. And I want the resulting music to be as loud and invasive as the cicada’s song. Against a complacent and compromising culture, I let another song resonate, haunt, and confront.
