Why the Beetle and the Rain?

People often ask me where the name came from.

The answer takes me back to Oaxaca.

I was there during the rainy season, when it seemed the sky had forgotten how to do anything but rain. For nearly a week, it poured day and night. Everything was soaked. The earth breathed differently.

And then came the beetles.

They appeared after every rainfall, crawling purposefully across the ground as if answering a call only they could hear. By morning, many of them lay on their backs, their tiny legs moving more slowly with each passing hour as the sun finally dried the earth.

I remember watching them with a heavy heart.

I turned to the medicine woman I was spending the week with and asked, "Do you think they're suffering?"

She looked at me with the quiet certainty that only comes from someone deeply rooted in the natural world.

"No," she said. "They do not know suffering the way we do. This is simply the course of their existence."

She explained that they came with the rain because that was their purpose. They did the work they were meant to do, quietly and without question. And when that work was complete, they returned to the earth.

I have thought about that conversation more times than I can count.

It reminds me that not every difficult season needs to be resisted. Not every ending is something to mourn. Sometimes life is simply asking us to trust the process, even when we can't yet see the reason for it.

The beetles never questioned the rain.

Perhaps there was something in that for me too.

That conversation became the heartbeat of this blog.

Because every journey leaves something behind.

And if we are paying attention, every journey leaves something within us too.

Eagle wings held over the Valley in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca - Mexico