There is a fallen tree beside the path, softened by weather and rain, its bark loosening in places and the wood itself beginning the slow, patient work of becoming earth again, and it is there, against this quiet world of moss and old timber, that I notice a sudden flash of colour so vivid that it seems, for a moment, almost impossible.
It is a cardinal beetle, its wing cases the colour of sealing wax or a small ember newly stirred, lying upon the weathered wood with such stillness that the brightness of its red seems all the more extraordinary, as though a tiny flame has chosen to rest for a while among the greys and greens of the forest floor.
As I lean a little closer, I realise that it is the stillness I notice before anything else, for the beetle is making no attempt to hide and no effort to draw attention to itself, but is simply inhabiting this warm morning exactly as it is, wholly present to its own brief existence, and there is something in that complete and untroubled presence that gently asks me to become still as well.
I think of Ruskin, who believed that attention itself was a form of love and who could spend an entire afternoon with a feather or a fragment of moss because he understood that the world gives up its riches slowly and only to those willing to remain in its presence a little longer than habit requires. I imagine him delighted by this small creature, by this impossible scarlet resting upon old wood, because he knew that beauty often arrives in forms so modest that we might easily pass them by if we are in too much of a hurry.
And so I remain beside the fallen tree, noticing the faint gloss of the black head, the delicate antennae reaching forwards as though still tasting the air, and the curious fact that this small and vivid creature owes its existence entirely to the quiet decay beneath it.
For somewhere within this tree, hidden beneath bark and soft rot, this beetle has spent years in another form altogether, living a life I will never witness and can only imagine, moving through darkness and transformation until this brief season of crimson and sunlight finally arrived, so that what lies before me now is only the visible end of a much longer and almost entirely secret story.
The colour that catches my eye is merely the final note of a music that has been playing out of sight for years.
There is something deeply comforting in that thought, because so much of life happens beyond our noticing. Rivers shape valleys grain by grain, roots travel through the darkness beneath our feet, and creatures pass through astonishing transformations entirely unseen, carrying on their intricate lives without the slightest need for our awareness.
Perhaps we are not so different, for much of our own becoming also takes place in hidden seasons, in long periods of waiting whose meaning we do not yet understand, and we are often too quick to judge ourselves by what is visible, forgetting the years of unseen labour that lie beneath every flowering and every emergence.
I had not come looking for this beetle. Few of the things most worth noticing are ever found by searching for them directly. They appear instead while we are walking slowly, or pausing beside a fallen tree, or allowing our attention to rest upon something that at first seems entirely unremarkable, until suddenly the ordinary world opens a little wider and reveals a depth we had not suspected was there.
Later, when I placed the image of the beetle upon an old page of music, there seemed only one line that could accompany it, the nearest I could come to what this small creature had already said without words:
The earth has music for those who listen.
