The Dragonfly Messengers

Change is coming, but I'm not frightened.

The dragonflies did not appear until I arrived at my thin place.

It was a long, steady, hot walk, broken up only by gauzy veils of fresh spider webs and scratchy raspberry canes and decaying piles of horse poop. The path through the woods is nearly obliterated now by the overgrown understory, but my feet know where the trip-you-up roots are and where the poison ivy creeps. These I can sidestep, but the unseen is still the unknown and I can count on a tick or two riding home with me every time, hitchhiking without my permission or knowledge.

I see so much more on my walks now than I ever did before, but what I don’t see, can’t see, interests me almost as much.

Past the clearing where the shack once stood and the wild perennial sweet peas are still blooming and the rhododendron relic has toppled, I turned the corner and walked into the open field. Here the trail widened and listed sideways, hugging the shoreline to weather. Salt-burned junipers with new silver berries conspired to obscure the view of the cove, as steely gray and rippled as an etch-a-sketch screen. On the high, leeward side of the trail, a rusty cattle fence backlit by the hazy afternoon sun ran down to the horizon.

I stopped just before the place where the trail takes a sudden, steep dip down to sea level (and then back up), a sort of grassy valley where the temperature drops a degree or two and the air goes still and quiet. This is the thin place, my thin place. I cannot explain it precisely, but I always feel an otherworldly aura here, as if a spirit is close. I’m filled with a sense of calm. In Celtic tradition, a thin place is one where heaven and earth are nearly touching, where one senses a divine presence and feels at peace.

I stood very still and turned my face towards the cove to feel the gentle breeze coming off the water. It felt so good that I decided to sit down right there in the middle of the path and simply enjoy the sun on my back and the wind on my face. It was then that the two dragonflies flew up from the dip and danced around me, advancing and retreating, advancing and retreating, three or four times I think. And then they flew away.

Who were these dragonfly messengers and what were they trying to tell me? 

It has been the summer of dragonflies for me, as I keep finding them in the hoop house, confused and unable to get out. I finally found a way to shoo one out the other day with a plant saucer. In the mornings, I see them skimming over the gravel path in the perennial garden right outside our back door.

(In case you’re wondering, there are 67 species of dragonflies on Martha’s Vineyard and nearly 5000 species worldwide. The ancient insect with the beautiful wings evolved 300 million years ago and once had a wingspan of two feet.)

The dragonfly is most commonly thought to be a symbol of transformation – of change, rebirth, reawakening, self-actualization and hope. (If you watch this video of the transformation they undergo from water nymph to flying insect, you’ll understand why.) But in some indigenous peoples’ traditions, dragonflies also represent the souls of those who have passed on to another world.

Both of these ideas intrigue me.

All summer I’ve felt a distinct current of change. I don’t know what the change is yet, but to me, it is a palpable energy – not a blunt-force object but a nudging presence nonetheless, one that for better or worse, I am unable to ignore.

I also cannot ignore the significance of the dragonfly “souls.” I do not know who they were. If I had to guess, I’d peg my mother and my grandmother Honey. But I wouldn’t rule out my (first) mother in law, Cacky, or my friend and mentor Judy.

Regardless of who they were, their actions seemed designed to reassure me that there is joy on the other side – that I am not to worry about those I love who may be traveling there before me. Though of course the dragonflies, with the way they beckoned me towards the dip, could have been trying to reassure me about my own fate. If I chose to interpret their message that way, it could be frightening. 

But I’m not frightened.  

I’m just intensely curious about what the natural world knows that humans don’t.  

I’ll admit, my curiosity has spiked now that I’m reading Maria Rodale’s Love Nature Magic: Shamanic Journeys Into The Heart of My Garden. I know very little about shamanic journeying, though I have a friend who has described some of her journeys to me. I understand it to be a form of meditation accompanied by a drum beat that shifts your consciousness into a different state. That state is somewhat like a dream, though you can come and go from it. While you are journeying, you are able to communicate and learn from nature – plants, animals, insects, water. In Maria’s case, everything from bats and lanternflies to dandelions and mugwort offer wisdom and advice. From Thistle she learns to “dig deep.” From Aspen: “Always use your power for good.”

Maria’s book is reinvigorating my belief that nature has a leg up on humans, especially when it comes to collaboration and symbiotic relationships. So many things that we think of as pests or weeds play vital roles in ecosystems. During the Cultural Revolution in China, Maria reminds us, Chairman Mao decided it would be a good idea to eliminate all sparrows from China. He thought the birds were grain-stealing pests, but in fact they ate insects. When he managed to kill them all off, the locust population exploded and devastated the rice crop. Twenty million Chinese died of famine as a result.

Even if we give humans in general the benefit of the doubt, that particular human definitely brings to mind John Prine’s song, Some Humans Ain’t Human. Unbelievable.

Since we are in the middle of the hottest summer on record, I feel more and more driven to look to nature for solutions, not just to my own concerns – How to handle change? How to handle aging? How to handle loss? – but to the big stuff that humans have managed to mess up, most especially the environment. If I thought I was moving away from the mess when I gravitated to this rural Island 15 years ago, I was being naïve. Ego is everywhere.

But you know me, I don’t like to be a downer and I always have hope. Trusty Friend the owl is hooting right outside my window as I write. When we came home tonight from a lovely wedding party on the beach (and by lovely I mean pizza and potluck and sandy kids and beach chairs and coolers and the prettiest summer sky, not tents and caterers and DJs and generators), there were literally hundreds of bees and wasps and moths buzzing in the lavender and coneflowers, and the rabbits were out for their evening grass munchies. A pink dahlia opened in the few hours we were gone. This morning two hummingbirds visited the flowering scented geraniums on the deck. Later, I went to dig up what I thought was a rotted dahlia tuber but it had a different plan for me – new green shoots.

I know that change is coming; I know there is truth and knowledge in nature that is just outside the realm of my consciousness. I also know that nature doesn’t have all the answers. But when I see a dozen different kinds of mushrooms pop up in our backyard practically overnight (sometimes in the space of hours), I know there is a level of intelligence and communication and symbiosis in nature that is far greater than any capabilities I have. Humans are highly evolved – and our capacity to feel love is perhaps worth everything — but I wonder if we’d be better off if we hadn’t left some other traits behind during our evolution.