GOD WHO DWELLS IN DARKNESS ENTOMOLOGICAL HYMNODY DIO LOĜANTA EN TENEBRO ENTOMOLOGIAJ HIMNOJ (en angla lingvo)

Potato bug, potato bug
The Potato Bug Hymn

Leland Bryant ROSS, October 21, 2000

Source : the author

Potato bug, potato bug,
     you seek the dark where God is found,
Potato bug, potato bug,
     the dark where God's love's all around.
          Like you, I yearn to shade my eyes,
          to gaze in awe on darkened skies:
I long to crawl beneath a Rock —
     the Rock of my salvation!

I attended a Baptist Men's Conference at Camp Burton, Vashon Island, Washington, on October 20-21, 2000. One of the spiritual exercises recommended was that, during the hour preceding breakfast on the 21st, we should, by ones or twos, read and meditate on Psalm 42 (As the hart panteth...) and try to think of something we had seen in nature that could give us a psalm or a song about a similar longing for God. This "hymn" is what I came up with. The "potato bug" referred to in the hymn is the terrestrial isopod Armadillidium vulgare also known as a pill bug, the sort of wood louse that rolls itself up into a tiny ball when threatened. (Wood lice also include a variety of other crustaceans, including the similar but less flexible sow bug (genus Porcellio.) Late the previous evening, my friend Marc Walter and I took a walk on the beach, beneath a Milky Way not entirely obscured by the aura of downtown Seattle across the Sound, and at one point we sat and talked on a bench, and noticed a potato bug crawling along the back of the bench. The next morning, when I cast about for a natural metaphor, the text of the potato bug hymn came to me almost effortlessly. The original text had "rest" where I now have "shade", and the positions of "long" and "yearn" were reversed.

Tune: O TANNENBAUM
ANONYMOUS German Melody, Traditional
MIDI RH

estas filia TTTejo de
Eldonejo Cigneto