Frogs. Such innocuous creatures.
These guys start their lives as tadpoles, a rather strange life that takes about 12 weeks to make the transition from tadpole to frog. Somewhere between six and nine weeks, the tadpole starts sprouting little legs, the head becomes more distinct, the body elongates. Around nine weeks the tadpole looks like a tiny frog.
Understand, though, that a frog emerges from one of 4,000 eggs laid by the mother in a jellylike substance where it develops into a tadpole. Most tadpoles are consumed by predators before they’ve fully metamorphosed into frogs at 12 to 14 weeks of age. The half-dozen or so of the tadpoles from the original 4,000 eggs that survive to adulthood might live 5 to 8 years in the wild.
Esoterically, frogs – like butterflies – are considered to messengers of transformation. And for us over the years, they have proven to be symbols of dire transformation or of incredibly fortunate transformation, depending on the health of the frog and where it’s found.
In 1997, for instance, we returned from a trip and in our family room, found a dead Cuban tree frog. Our daughter, Megan, who was only eight at the time, saw it, and murmured,
“Uh-oh, this can’t be good.”
Dead frog, family room: it was obvious. The next day, Rob’s mother called to tell him his father had died.
In 2003, Trish came across a beautiful Cuban tree frog in the kitchen, caught it, and released it outside. Two days later, she was told her novel, Out of Sight, had been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Kitchen: sustenance. Good health: excellent prognosis. Several months later, she won the award.
Over the years, many animals have acted as messengers in just this way. We look at their life cycles for hints about timing, where they’re found for hints about their meaning, and their health (or lack of) for a hint about whether the message is positive, negative, or somewhere in between. Although we have a lot of frogs that are drawn to the windows of our offices because the lights are on, which attract insects, it’s been awhile since a frog has been found inside the house.
Around June 12-13 in 2017, I found a dead frog in the house at the entrance to the family room from the porch. I didn’t mention it to Rob or anyone else. The frog had been dead for awhile, its body as flat as a postage stamp. Two days later, we learned that Rob’s mother had died and shortly afterward, we left for Minnesota to help settle her affairs.
This evening, November 1, 2022, I was working on a new synchronicity book, Mind-Blowing Synchronicities and fretting about the elections in just 8 days. Megan and I were on the phone, talking about an Abraham-Hicks Cruise leaving from Fort Lauderdale in March 2023. We’ve long talked about taking one of these cruises – the only kind of cruise I would ever bother to take, and decided we could afford it. When we hung up, I got up from my desk and turned around and spotted a baby frog hopping through my office.
I didn’t have any idea where it came from. I followed it into the kitchen, scooped it up and released it. I think Megan and I will be taking that Hicks cruise.
I’m also hopeful that the frog bodes well for these midterm elections…that the election deniers tapped by trump fail miserably and democracy survives. We’ll see…
