World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

On campus, when I pass the giant catalpa tree, I think of that shy sixth grader who was so nervous when people stared. But then I remember the confident clickety-clack of my mother’s heels as she walked home from work with me and my sister—when people would stare at us but my mother didn’t seem to mind or notice. I remember her radiant smile when we burst through her office door, and then her laugh as she listened to our tales of the lunchroom and gym dramas of the day. I hear my own heels as I rush to meet my first class.

As I pass the enormous tree, I make note of which leaves could cover my face entire if I ever needed them again. If I ever needed to be anonymous and shield myself from questions of What are you? and Where are you from? I keep walking.

The bibliography of the firefly is a tender and electric dress, a small flame sputtering in the ditches along a highway, and the elytra covering the hind wings of the firefly lift like a light leather, suppler than any other beetle’s. In flight, it is like a loud laugh, the kind that only appears in summer, with the stink of meats sizzling somewhere down the street, and the mouths of neighborhood children stained with popsicle juice and hinging open with the excitement of a ball game or tag.

When we see these beacons flashing their lights, they usually have only one or two weeks left to live. Learning this as a child—I could often be found walking slowly around untrimmed lawns, stalling and not quite ready to go inside for dinner—made me melancholy, even in the face of their brilliance. I couldn’t believe something so full of light would be gone so soon.

They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. Perhaps I can will it to be true. Perhaps I can keep those summer nights with my family inside an empty jam jar, with holes poked in the lid, a twig and a few strands of grass tucked inside. And for those unimaginable nights in the future, when I know I’ll miss my mother the most, I will let that jar’s sweet glow serve as a night-light to cool and cut the air for me.

In 1986, the tallest saguaro ever recorded—at seventy-eight feet—was blown over by a mighty desert wind in Cave Creek, Arizona.

The cactus wren, the largest wren in North America at a whopping seven inches long, is one of the only birds that doesn’t require standing water to drink—it gets all of its water from juicy insects and fruit.

If a white girl tries to tell you what your brown skin can and cannot wear for makeup, just remember the smile of an axolotl. The best thing to do in that moment is to just smile and smile, even if your smile is thin. The tighter your smile, the tougher you become.

not for that year where no one talked to me on the school bus, where I had no Valentines, no dates, I wouldn’t know what to say to my student with the greasy backpack, who sits in the corner by herself and doesn’t make eye contact.

The one who tells me after I come back from being out sick with the flu for a whole week: I missed you, I am so, so glad you were here today. Me too, I say. And I mean it. I wouldn’t know how wide and how radiant a student like that could make me smile.

If you could smell the wind off the wings of an ecstatic, teeny bat—if you could smell banana leaves drooping low and modest into the ruddy soil—if you could inhale clouds whirring so fast across the sky—that is what monsoon rain smells like.

I was simply unprepared to submit myself so completely to nature. Or rather, humans’ interpretation and preservation of nature, by adding 1.8 million pounds of sea salt to a giant tank of water so all these creatures could live and swim together. For science. For entertainment. For spectacle. Perhaps for a little of all three.

I felt most seen in my childhood not by any television shows or movies but rather when I was in the outdoors, in forests or fields, by lake or ocean. I learned how to be still from watching birds. If I wanted to see them, I had to mimic their stillness, to move slow in a world that wishes us brown girls to be fast.

The neon pink of a dragon fruit screams summertime, pop music, sunglasses balanced on the top of my head, weather too warm for socks. It means vintage MTV and stretchy spheres of Bubble Yum popped and snapped in the back rows of a school bus. It’s electrocution. It’s the shade of lipstick I was never allowed to wear,

But I wonder if it takes a zoo or aquarium for us to feel empathy toward a creature whose habitat is shrinking due to humans, toward a creature most have us have never seen or heard?

It is this way with wonder: it takes a bit of patience, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time. It requires that we be curious enough to forgo our small distractions in order to find the world.

Maybe what we can do when we feel overwhelmed is to start small. Start with what we have loved as kids and see where that leads us.

For me, what a single firefly can do is this: it can light a memory I thought was long lost in roadsides overrun with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, a peach pie cooling in the window of a distant house. It might make me feel like I’m traveling again to a gathering of loved ones dining seaside on a Greek island, listening to cicada song and a light wind rustling the mimosa trees. A single firefly might be the spark that sends us back to our grandmother’s backyard to listen for whip-poor-wills; the spark that sends us back to splashing in an ice-cold creek bed, with our jeans rolled up to our knees, until we shudder and gasp, our toes fully wrinkled. In that spark is a slowdown and tenderness.