Summer's Nature

The locusts are all in chorus this evening. It sure is a ying-yang song: I love it, I abhor it. The time I love it most is in midwinter.  I think back to the hot sweltering days of summer (not yearningly, to be sure), and I take that memory of the sound, coupled with the heat and the glaring sun, and it makes me smile at the complete opposites of our seasons herein rural Kansas.

Here's a creepy photo of what is burrowing in our gardens and my lavenders:

That is a cicada killer.  I call them locust killers, because I grew up in Oklahoma, where people call cicadas locusts. 

Here's some creepy notes about these LARGE creepy cicada killers: they sting the locusts (cicadas) which renders them paralyzed yet very much alive.  Then they take the locust down into the root system of my lavender (OK, MY version), where they lay their eggs in the locust, and when the larvae develops, it eats away at the still-living, yet-still-paralyzed locust.  UGH.

I was reading an article today about wasps, and how they are valuable to the delicate balance of our nature (this is true, true...) and how we would suffer Biblical proportions of all sorts of pests if not for the wasps, as nearly every pest insect on Earth is preyed upon by a wasp species, either for food or as mentioned above, as host for its parasitic larvae.  Blech.

I really do believe that God created the heavens and the earth.  I don't think any of us have the absolute answers on His creation; why try to pinpoint absolutes?  I also believe that God instilled rules of nature which allow for lives and deaths and wasps and gila monsters.  And evolutions.  And miracles.  I think too many people do not acknowledge "rules of nature" as a God-given plan.  But then, that's my faith.  Others' faith is often different...

Wow.  So I went from cicada killer to faith in creation and evolution.  All in five paragraphs.