Cicada Symbolism: Seventeen Years Underground, and Then Everything at Once

Artie Wu — Fifteen years guiding inner work, 100,000+ people

The Short Answer

You heard it before you saw it — that loud, sawing sound coming from everywhere and nowhere at once — and then you saw the shell, or the thing itself, and something in you went quiet for a second in a way that is hard to explain to someone who wasn't there. Nothing was sent to you. Nothing is being forecast. But the moment happened, and it was specific to you, and the useful question isn't what a cicada means to anyone else. It's what in you already knew what it felt like to wait that long.

What It Means When You See One

Here is what the animal actually does. It spends most of its life underground — years of it, in some cases close to two decades — feeding on roots in the dark, invisible, doing something that from the outside looks exactly like nothing. Then it comes up. It sheds the shell it lived in. It makes the loudest sound of any insect on earth. And then, in a few weeks, it's gone.

That is not a metaphor yet. That is just what you watched happen, or what you know happened before you arrived at the husk on the fence post.

When you see a cicada, or find its abandoned shell, the thing that stops you is usually the scale of the timing. Years underground. Weeks above. The disproportion is so extreme it almost seems wrong. And if something in you flinched at that — if you felt the flinch before you knew why — it is because some part of you understands that arithmetic from the inside. Something in you has been underground for a long time, and isn't sure the surface is coming, or isn't sure it deserves to be loud when it gets there.

The shell is the other thing. People pick it up. It's hollow, intact, perfect — it held the shape of the creature exactly and then it was left behind without ceremony. That detail lands somewhere specific in a person who has been holding a version of themselves together that no longer fits, and suspects the holding is the only thing keeping them recognizable.

What You Actually Felt in That Second

It probably wasn't simple. Awe is too clean a word for it.

There's something slightly eerie about the sound when there are enough of them — it's too loud, too coordinated, and it has no obvious source you can look at and account for. That unease is worth more than dismissing. It means you were present for something that didn't fit neatly into ordinary time.

Underneath the eerie part, for a lot of people, there's something closer to longing. Not for the cicada. For what it represents without having been told to represent it: the moment when everything that was happening invisibly finally becomes undeniable. You can feel the wanting in yourself even before you've named what you want to happen.

And sometimes there's grief, or something sitting right next to it. The shell on the fence post is so complete and so empty. Whatever was in there has already moved. If you stood there longer than made sense, that's the thing you were standing next to.

When the Same One Keeps Turning Up

Cicadas don't turn up constantly the way a bird outside your window might. When they come, they come in quantity and they're loud. If you find yourself noticing them again and again during a season when they're out, something subtler is happening than the world repeating itself.

You didn't start seeing cicadas. You started being ready to see them — which means something in you that has been underground got close enough to the surface that your attention now catches on anything shaped like emergence. The shell on the sidewalk that you used to walk past. The sound you used to tune out. They were always there. You are the variable that changed.

That's not a small thing to notice. A part of you is paying attention to that image for a reason it has not yet said out loud.

What It Is Not

What you have been told it means and what actually happened are two different things, and it's worth keeping them separate. The animal came up from underground, made noise, shed its shell. Those are the facts. Everything else — every significance anyone has ever layered onto it — grew from those same observable facts, including whatever it pressed on when you saw it. The meaning isn't handed down from somewhere. It rose up from what the thing actually does, the same way the thing itself rises up.

It is not a prediction. It does not tell you when your moment is coming, and anyone confident enough to put a timeline on your emergence is working from nothing. The cicada's timing is written into its biology. Yours isn't readable from the outside.

It is not a message from someone you've lost, and it is not proof that it isn't one either. If someone came to mind when you saw it, that arrival is yours, and nothing here takes it or names it for you. This page won't settle what a website has no business settling.

What it is, entirely, is you: one thing out of everything in your field of vision that your attention chose. That choosing is the whole event. It belongs to you.

How to Read It on Yourself

Don't start by asking what the cicada means. That sends you outward, and everything worth finding is already in the direction of inward.

Instead, put the cicada in front of you — or the shell, if that's the image that stopped you. Let it take whatever form it takes. Some people get the sound more than the image. Some see the shell very clearly and the living thing not at all. Whatever comes is the right one, and you don't need to adjust it.

Then ask it, out loud if you can, as though it is a part of you that has been underground for a long time and finally has your attention:

What have you been doing down there all this time?

What were you waiting for before you came up?

Is it the surface you're afraid of, or the sound you'll make when you get there?

What would you leave behind — what shell — if you actually came up?

Don't answer on its behalf. Sit in the question until something arrives that you didn't compose. The answer that comes faster than you can construct it is the real one, and it is almost always simpler and more honest than the one you were building toward. You are not trying to rush it. You are only letting a part of you know that someone finally asked.

The question to sit with: what has been ready longer than you've been willing to admit, and what have you been calling patience that might actually be fear?

About the Author

Artie Wu is the founder of Preside Meditation and Ariadne. With degrees from Harvard and Stanford, he has spent fifteen years guiding over 100,000 people through inner work — dream interpretation, shadow work, parts work, and somatic healing.

He has been featured in the Gaia.com feature film Transcendence 2, and on Fox, CBS, and CNN.

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