Frog Stuff, Again

I’m not sure when my thing with frogs started. Maybe it was always there, a motif in my life that didn’t really make sense until I began to notice repetitive patterns with these little critters.

One year for instance, we returned from a trip and found one of our ceramic frogs in bits and pieces on the floor. Two days later Rob’s father died. Another year, we found a baby tree frog in our kitchen and Rob won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best YA fiction. In 2003, a tree frog appeared at the back of the house and I quickly scooped it up and set it outside. That afternoon, I found out I’d been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. 

Time after time, the frog has accurately depicted the patterns that were prevalent in our lives.

I was reminded of this when our blogging friend Daz wrote a recent post about red-eyed green tree frogs . We met these little beauties during our trip to Costa Rica in 2011. They are exquisite, lovely in the extreme, and small. But  for me, they portended big things major changes,  transformation of some kind.

When animals are messengers – and they often are, particularly when our lives are in the throes of transition – synchronicity is inevitably involved. Over the last three plus years, we’ve done a number of posts on animals as messengers. In addition to frogs, we’ve covered owls as messengers between the living and the dead, as camouflage or shape shifters in UFO encounters, and as a kind of precognitive message about something that’s surfacing.

We’ve covered other types of birds – crows, geese, hummingbirds. And numerous types of animals: caterpillars, flies, mice, dragonflies, butterflies, grasshoppers, snakes, wolves, Paul the precog octopus, geese, dogs, cats, dolphins, whales, goats and even anteaters. I’m sure there are more that I didn’t tag. But I think we’ve been all over the animal kingdom. The point is that any animal can be a messenger for you and an agent of synchronicity.

When deciphering the message an animal brings, I usually start with the animal’s life cycle – how long does it live? That may hold clues about the timing. How many young does it typically have? Where did your encounter with the animal happen? What was going on in your life at the time of the experience? How did you feel when the encounter was happening – a sense of wonder or revulsion or something in between these extremes? Has this animal appeared in your life before at important junctures?

When I was 12 and living in Venezuela, the American newspaper, in conjunction with a local rum company,  ran a contest: caption a cartoon that depicted an alien holding a bottle of rum. The prize? A trip for four to the island of Barbados. So my dad entered. His caption read: Yes, we do deliver.  He won and off we went to Barbados for a week. It was 1959.

Every  afternoon at tea time, when a waiter from the hotel appeared with a tray of tea and crumpets, a hummingbird would show up. It would perch at the edge of the sugar bowl and alternately nibble granules of sugar and steal bits of our crumpets. At that time, I was clueless  about animal symbolism, synchronicity, or what any of it might mean. Now it’s 53 years later and I can still see the colors of that hummingbird’s feathers, can still see its delicate beak, and its eyes, its intelligence.

Fast forward many years, a trip to Ecuador. We stayed at a place in the mountains, where hummingbird feeders hung outside the dining room windows. The country has at least 27 different types of hummingbirds, and every evening, I swear we saw every type. Dozens of these gorgeous birds descended on the feeders, their wings moving so fast there seemed to be a perpetual hum in the air.

I flashed back on the Barbados hummingbird and suddenly realized that for me, hummingbirds symbolize joy, luck, and the most profound of mysteries.

As I have been writing this post, a frog suddenly appeared on my window, a tree frog.  That’s him (or her) in the photo above. See the suckers on its feet? There’s a moth on the glass, too, and that’s the frog’s target.  He has now been sitting here for about 20 minutes, slowly and patiently angling his body so it’s aimed at that moth just past the decorative bar in the window. I think patience is part of frog’s message.

We don’t see many tree frogs at this time of year. They tend to be spring and summer critters. But today, it was 85 here. In fact, it’s been in the 80s since our brief cool spell a few weeks back. However the rest of the winter unfolds weather wise,   I’m primed for the appearance of frogs, hummingbirds, owls, dragonflies, dolphins…