One afternoon looking for bugs in her grandmother's backyard, my two-year-old niece did something peculiar.

She flipped over a rock, knelt down, and planted her face inches from the earth. She then spoke to each being squirming in the fresh soil like a close friend, pointing out their subtleties and giggling at their strange behaviors, scouring the yard to find the perfect gift to offer each one.

Driving home that evening through the winding backroads of rural Connecticut, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d witnessed something special, perhaps even important. Mila’s intuitive participation in the lives of those small creatures expressed a tenderness that shot straight to the heart, sensitizing me to their aliveness and their nuance.

Over the following days the memory replayed: our hands in damp soil, the high yellow sun, her small, buoyant voice chatting with the tiny beings as they crawled among the mycelial laceworks blooming beneath the inconspicuous rock in the overlooked corner of the yard.

Taking this as a cue, I recorded a voice memo detailing the experience and later wrote it down.

Its title: The Bug Ceremony.

Advance Praise for The Bug Ceremony

“Bosco’s stories reintroduce us to the natural world through the eyes of a child. Filled with wonder, heart, and a deep reverence, they transport us to a time when we could observe our world without adulthood blocking our view.”

—Anna Woodruff, Director of Academic Administration at Columbia University School of the Arts

“This is the language of awe and intuition.”

—Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize nominee

“In The Bug Ceremony, Bosco accomplishes something rare: he listens. By resisting the urge to interpret or correct, he allows his niece’s earth-minded awareness to speak for itself—a quiet invitation to recover a relational awareness that may be more fundamental than we suppose.”