The Cicadas Are Singing the Sun to Sleep
My wife Becca and I were sitting outside recently, watching the sun set. Normally we’re walking. Talking. Engaged in conversation. But that night we were just sitting. Present with it. Not doing anything at all.
And just before the sun dipped below the horizon, maybe two minutes before, the cicadas came on. Not after it set. Before. Right at the edge.
Becca said, “The cicadas are singing the sun to sleep.”
I looked at her. She said she’d noticed it before. I hadn’t.
That line has been living in me ever since. Not because it’s poetic, although it is. Because of what it opened.
We stayed out there. Started talking about the sun and how it connects everything. Not in a general, greeting-card way. In a way that got specific fast.
You can’t have shade without the sun. A tree can help the sun make shade, but a tree can’t exist without the sun. The sun also doesn’t need a tree to make shade. It can use a mountain, a rock, anything. But nothing works without the sun. And we just kept pulling the thread.
At some point I had this vision. The sun as the center of this web. Not the center in a linear way, like a diagram in a textbook. More like a lattice. Everything connected to everything else through it. The sun as a kind of connective tissue running through all of existence.
Then we started talking about something that might be the most important part. Humans are the one species that figured out how to live without the sun.
Artificial light. Night shifts. Screens. We can go entire days without seeing it rise or set. We’ve modified our existence so completely that the sun doesn’t drive us the way it drives every other living thing. The cicadas know when to sing. The birds know when to call. We’ve lost that. Or more honestly, we’ve engineered our way out of it.
That’s not just a nature observation. That’s a love-and-fear observation. We’ve armored ourselves against the most fundamental connection on the planet.
A few days later, I finally read an essay that my friend Jonathan had sent me weeks earlier. Jonathan is a retired minister who’s been following this adventure closely. The essay had been sitting in my stack for a while. I just happened to pick it up right after that conversation with Becca.
The essay was called “The Tune of Things” by Christian Wiman, published in Harper’s Magazine.1 It’s a long, dense, beautiful piece about consciousness. Whether it’s produced by the brain or whether it’s something more fundamental, woven into the fabric of the universe itself.
I won’t try to summarize the whole thing. But a few ideas hit me right where Becca’s cicada observation had already cracked something open.
Wiman traces how, starting with Descartes in the 1600s, Western culture split mind from matter. We decided we were the only conscious beings in a world of objects. Everything else, animals, trees, the natural world, got downgraded to machinery. That split is what let us disconnect from nature in the first place. The mental separation made the physical one possible.
He writes about the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, whose work on the brain’s hemispheres argues that we’ve let the analytical, systems-oriented left brain take over. The right brain, the one that sees wholes, understands metaphor, and is comfortable with mystery, was supposed to be the master. We’ve reversed it. And the consequences are everywhere.
And then there’s quantum physics. Experiments showing that particles are connected across distances in ways that defy our understanding of time. That the act of observing something in the present can apparently alter what happened in the past. I won’t pretend I fully understand it. But the implication is wild. The relationship between things is more real than the things themselves.
That last idea is the one I keep coming back to.
Because it connects directly to what I am exploring with the children’s books. Yes, Becca and I are working on 3 children’s books. But that is a story for another time.
The whole premise of two of the books is that you can go back and look at the story you were given, the armor you put on, and rewrite it. Not just reframe it psychologically. Actually change your relationship to it in a way that changes you going forward.
The books are in a weird dual audience space. Stories that give kids the language to stay whole before the cultural boxes telling them what they can and can’t be close around them. And stories that give adults the keys to unlock the boxes they might be trapped inside. Not just the boxes we put on men or women or boys or girls. All of the boxes. Every label and rule that keeps people living from fear instead of wholeness.
Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/12/the-tune-of-things-christian-wiman-consciousness-god/