As I returned to "civilization" after a few days in the wilderness, taking in the traffic, lights, bustle, and noise, I chanced, last night, to see a firefly.  The firefly's time is short.  It appears in late June or early July and is gone by the end of August.  Yet what wonder it brings us!  To look into the night and, without any warning, see a tiny light dancing around in the darkness, flitting here and there, turning on and off and on again, is to be astonished, once more, at the unending surprise of existence.  There is always something new to find.
     Though the wilderness is now far from me, I can still marvel at this little slice of wildness before me.  I cannot cause the firefly to light up, and I cannot control when it lights up.  I can only watch it do so.  While we can control many things in our lives, it is often the littlest things, little things like the light of a firefly that we cannot.  Without all our technological prowess, we cannot dictate the twinkle of those little insects that lilt about for a few weeks come summer.  Maybe, at least for now, humanity is the dominant species on the planet.  Yet as any dictator will tell us, we will never control absolutely everything.  We'll always be contingent.  We're wondrous, but insignificant; beautiful yet as raw as everything else.
     Perhaps we can say that just as the tiny light of a helpless baby birthed Christianity, now the most populous religion in the world, thousands of years ago, so does the even tinier light of a firefly remind us that there are truths that will always be greater than we can create.
     Welcome to life.