05/16/2026
The Family in the Wood
Pick up a rotting log sometime. Not a punky one, not one that crumbles to powder when you lift it. Look for the solid kind, the one that still holds its shape but gives a little when you press your thumb in. There is a world inside it.
If you are lucky, you will find bess beetles. They are big for beetles, shiny and black and deliberate. They do not scatter when you expose them the way most insects do. They pause. They seem, for a moment, to consider you.
What is happening inside that log is something we do not usually expect from beetles. There is a family there. A mother and a father, and if the season is right, larvae curled in chambers of chewed wood, pale and soft, waiting. The adults have already done the difficult task. They chew the rotting wood into a fine, moist pulp and the larvae consume its cellulose fibers and the fungi woven through them. A bess beetle larva cannot manage raw wood on its own. It needs what its parents have already transformed.
Rachel Carson wrote that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe around us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. I think she would have loved this log. She would have seen past the rot to the industry inside it, to the economy of care that holds the whole small civilization together.
The beetles also speak to each other. They stridulate, rub their wings against their bodies, and the sounds are different depending on who is making them and why. The larvae call to the adults. The adults answer. Fourteen distinct signals, some say. It is a language we are only beginning to hear.
If you press your ear close to the log, you can hear the chewing. It is a small, steady sound. It does not stop.
The older offspring stay too. Adult sons and daughters that have already completed their own metamorphosis remain in the colony, helping to feed the newer larvae and to construct the protective cases where the next generation will transform.
When the time comes to pupate, the larva does not simply curl up and wait. It builds. Working with the adult beside it, it packs chewed wood and frass, digested wood passed through a body and transformed, into a tight case around itself. The material is fibrous and dense, faintly damp, smelling of the log's deep interior. The adult piles debris against the outside until the pupa is sealed in something snug and wrought, a small room made of what the forest has already used and given back.
Mary Oliver would have knelt down. She would have gotten her knees dirty. She would have asked the question she always asked, the one that cuts right through: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? The bess beetle does not hesitate. It tends the young. It chews the wood. It answers when called. It builds the case around the pupa with its own body and its own labor.
My childhood mentor, Lola would have knelt down beside you. She would have said: what do you notice? She would have waited, really waited, while you looked. She would have asked you what questions were rising up in you, and she would have treated every one of them as worthy. She would have found in this beetle, this brilliantly black, deliberate, shining creature going about its subtle work, something worth honoring. Not because it was rare. Not because it was beautiful in any obvious way. But because it was alive, and doing what it was made to do, and doing it with what can only be called devotion.
That would have been her gift to you. Not the answer. The looking.
