The Truth About Frogs and Toads

Birdsong is a nearly universal symbol for springtime, joy and love.  But the earliest sign of change from the damp gray chill of winter in my home state…coinciding with Imbolc in south Georgia and in full throat everywhere by Ostara…is the piping call of spring peepers.  I have childhood memories of opening my window in early spring so I could hear them as I fell asleep, calling out for love down along Peavine Creek.

The beautiful, warm, and humid Southeast is a good place for reptiles and amphibians, aka herpetofauna, aka “herps” if you run with the wildlife biology crowd.  Growing up in the wilds of southern Appalachia, foraging for blackberries, paw paws and muscadines in the woods and fields across the road from my house, I encountered quite a few of them, along with deer, rabbits, wild turkeys, and bobwhite quail.  Even in suburban Atlanta, my son found a spotted salamander in the back yard; my current yard is a thoroughfare for several species of frog (including a green tree frog which took up residence on my garbage can) and the occasional reptile.  Yesterday I opened my door to find a box turtle on the stoop.

Toads, snakes, newts and all their kin have something of a mythic connection with witchcraft…granted, sometimes as ingredients, but also as familiars, spirit helpers who make magic and are guides into a larger world.  They transform, they travel between realms, metamorphosizing from fishling tadpole in the water to landed frog, shedding snakey skin. For us, those might be metaphors; for a frog or snake, it’s just life.  That is worth paying attention to:  I think that concrete knowledge about real live wildlife, including the lesser and humble sorts as well as the “charismatic megafauna,”  leads to a stronger connection with the real world around us which is our most profound and powerful teacher.  I’ve found this to be true my entire life; reading the work of people like David Abram, Janisse Ray and Annie Dillard has only confirmed it for me.

Currently I am learning frog calls so I can be assigned a route for the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program.  I value the scientific knowledge the program will produce, and the opportunity for service, and I admit I’m the kind of nerd who enjoys reeling off the names of the various species as I hear them. I’m also fascinated to learn that different species call at different temperatures and times of year as well as from different habitats, and they have special intruder calls as well as the come-up-and-see-me kind.  More than all that, I’ve stopped frequently to listen…in a restaurant parking lot, I paused to hear bullfrogs sounding in a low marshy spot near a busy road.  I’ve sat on my back deck, turning my ear to background noise become suddenly rich and complex, overheard conversations in a language I am learning to interpret.

I practice meditation of the inwardly-focused kind, and I value knowledge.  But this is something more, what you might call a practice of immanence, an expression of the quintessentially Pagan idea that our spiritual home is always here and now. This is the root and axis of all of my spiritual practice; when I come back to the center I come back to this:  We live in a speaking world, and our most profound connection to it is simply our senses and our full presence.  When I stop to listen to the resonant bourm bourm bourm of bullfrogs, or the metallic chik chik of cricket frogs, I am hearing the voice of the world.

Listen, and it will talk to you.