The air, like all else in late May, is brittle, dry, and dusty. The tormenting heat of the afternoon sun has caused all motion to cease and all to be quiet. Then out of this stillness the shrill serenade of the rainbirds herald the change that’s to come.

Rainbirds, the local name for cicadas, are cousins of the locust that faithfully appear each year at this time, brilliant green with enormous red eyes, the colors of the Mexican flag. According to local lore the rainy season will begin here in the high country of Jalisco, Mexico exactly 42 days after the cicada's song is first heard. When the cicadas arrive they are not accompanied, like their biblical counterparts, by plagues and destruction but they do bring prophecies, rekindle memories, and herald the beginning of summer.

It begins as a rapid clicking sound like a car trying to start or like trying to recall some nearly forgotten memory. The tiny tymbals of the cicada echo in their thorax several hundred times a second like mallets on a kettledrum, and the sound quickly builds in volume and intensity as it morphs into a powerful, high-pitched hum, almost a whistle; like a warning buzzer or a buzz saw. When one starts singing others join the chorus and the volume is deafening, rolling in waves across the landscape like a tsunami.

The magnificent blue skies will soon give way to towering thunderheads rising off the lake and violent slashes of lightning will crease the night sky. Torrents of water will descend. Rivers will rise, streets will flood, and the surrounding mountains will turn from dull brown to brilliant green to rival the rainbird's colors. Everywhere new life will spring from the earth. All things will be washed clean of their layers of the fine grit of the dry season, and life will be renewed. For all, that is, except the cicada. The cicada, having laid its eggs in the bark of the Guamùchl tree, will singing its song and then it will die.

Poets and philosophers have been cataloguing the summer song of the cicada for thousands of years. One version can be found in Plato’s “Phaedrus.” When Socrates runs into one of his students walking outside the Athenian city walls, the two settle by a shaded stream to talk. Socrates notices that their conversation is competing with the shrill sound of cicadas as he and his student debate the virtues of friendship over erotic love, the blessings of madness, the immortality of the soul, reincarnation, the art of rhetoric, and the superiority of speech to written text.

Socrates likens the cicadas to sirens, telling a story about how these creatures were once men who were so enchanted by the Muses that they began singing and dancing to the point where they stopped eating and sleeping, and then died without noticing. The Muses bestowed upon them the gift of never needing food or sleep, and of singing from birth to death. In return, the task of the cicadas is to watch humans and make note of who honors the Muses and who does not. The Greeks kept cicadas in cages, and gave them pet names, such as “Sweet Prophet of Summer” and “The Love of the Muses”, because they seemed to convey the idea of a perfectly happy being.

It is perhaps this sentiment that caused John Berger, English novelist, painter, and poet, to write, “Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.” So perhaps the chorus of cicadas is simply the embodiment of the Dead Poets Society. We listen for that small sound, like the strike of a match that rekindles a memory of some utopia we can no longer remember, or the memory of a poem about the quiet contentment of a warm summer's day, of summers past, and the refreshing life giving rains to come.

Our tragedy, as John Blair reminds us in his poem "Cicada", is that, like the cicada, we live in a world that does not invite us back. We sing our song full of enchantment and wonder, and then we die. The fables of Aesop, the stories of Socrates, and the myths from Mexico are all testament to our need for stories to explain the world around us and our relationship to it. They testify to our need to look for morals everywhere, to accept life on its own terms, and that the song of the cicada is perhaps simply a reminder that from death comes life. As the Buddha reminds us; every ending is also a beginning.

There is an old Mexican song called La Canción de la Cigarra that begins; "Don't sing to me cicada, let your sing-song end. Your song is like a dagger in my heart, knowing that when you sing you proclaim your own death", but after many long verses, and much reflection, ends with the verse; "Under the shade of the tree, and to the rhythm of my guitar, I happily sing this huapango because if my life must be over, I want to die singing, the way the cicada dies."