All these cicadas have got me thinking of the counsel offered by an anonymous monk of Mount Athos in his book The Watchful Mind. The manuscript is dated to 1851 and only came into public view in 1978, when it was discovered at the Xenophontos Monastery on Mount Athos. It was published in several Greek editions, and in Romanian and Russian, but was only translated into English in 2014. The subject of the manuscript is the prayer of the heart, also called contemplative or noetic prayer, because in this form of prayer the intellect (nous in Greek) is watchful and alert.

If you want to learn this kind of prayer yourself, the monk explains, cicadas will show you how.