Harbingers 🐞

When ancient instincts meet a changing world

Every late fall when the weather turns colder, small orange beetles begin to gather in the corners of our house.

They slip in through cracks around the windows and cluster along the ceiling beams, moving slowly, as if following a map only they can sense. Their arrival marks the first real sign of winter here, long before the temperatures drop. A quiet announcement that the season is shifting.

These beetles look like ladybugs, but they are something different. Asian lady beetles are guided by an ancient wintering instinct shaped in a world that no longer exists. Their ancestors once settled into cool stone crevices, protected from wind and predators. That instinct is still inside them, unchanged. What has changed is the landscape they move through.

The sun warms the side of a modern house and they read it as a cliff face. A narrow gap in the siding feels like the mouth of a safe winter den. They enter because their bodies tell them to. But once inside, the heat and brightness confuse their biology. Their instinct says “hibernate,” but the environment says “wake up.” They are following the right script in the wrong world.

This is the part that feels close to home.

I think a lot about what it means to be a human animal whose instincts were shaped for conditions that no longer surround us. We have seasonal rhythms inside us that evolved long before electricity and before a twelve-month productivity cycle. Our bodies know how to respond to darkness and cold. They know how to slow, how to gather, how to prepare for a quieter inner world.

But the world we live in pushes against that deep knowing. Everything is brightly lit and busy. The cues that should guide us toward rest are dulled or overwritten. We feel the old pull toward stillness, but the environment around us urges acceleration. We tell ourselves we should keep up. We try to match a world that does not match us.

No wonder winter feels disorienting. No wonder so many of us enter the season feeling stretched thin or strangely unsettled. Our instincts aren’t wrong. They’re simply calibrated to a world transformed beyond recognition.

The lady beetles remind me of this every year. They aren’t foolish or misguided. They’re doing exactly what they were shaped to do. Their bodies are wise. Their instincts are intact. It’s the landscape that has changed too quickly.

And maybe the same is true for us. Maybe winter can feel hard because the systems we live in no longer honor the script our bodies still hold. Maybe the aches, the fatigue, the longing to draw inward are not personal failures but biological truth.

What if the task is not to override those instincts but to listen for them? To notice the seasonal cues that remain and t respond to the world that lives inside our bodies rather than the one built around us.

The beetles, clustered quietly in the corners, are one of the first messengers of winter here. They tell me that the season has turned, and that the old rhythms are still trying to speak, even in conditions that confuse them. They remind me that instinct can be trustworthy even when the environment is not. And they invite me to find the places in my own life where the ancient script is still humming beneath everything else, asking to be followed.

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