Wild Thing: a bit of dragonfly good luck + playing with my new doodle pad :).
Thinking about dragonfly encounters, cultivating story versus projecting, a generative start to spring, and reading poems of fantastical revolution.
It was nearly one in the morning CIT. I chugged a bottle of water and called my family, who was eating lunch, to let them know I’d safely arrived, then stripped my airplane clothes and seared my skin in the shower.
I was drowsy, stuffed with the series of vegan dinner rolls that were set before me in five hour intervals over the past 26 hours. I’d been lucky—on my flight from Seoul to I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport, I found myself in a row of empty seats which I quickly turned into a bed and slept a solid few hours for the first time since I left New York.
It was the longest flight I’d ever taken, and I was equally excited as I was nervous. Since the end of last year, I’ve felt like I’ve been in a waiting room, poking my head into the hallway every now and then to make sure I’m in the right place. The answer I often receive is yes, just keep sitting. It’ll only be a moment more.
I don’t mean this is a passive way. If you know me, you know not doing is not a habit I need to break. I have multiple projects going, and if I’m not creating I don’t feel like I’m me. I’ve stopped framing this like it’s a personality trait that needs improving and now embrace this as, simply, my creativity.
But quiet, empty time is essential to that very process.
I looked to the other side of my hotel room in a hazy state, having asked to receive a symbol to guide me on my time abroad. When I got close enough to see what it was that was drawing me over, I found a dragonfly. Hello, I said, mourning the creature while also being grateful for their arrival. Thank you for guiding me.
Over the next few days, the dragonfly kept coming to me in unexpected places. From treats shared with friends to tarot pulls after meditation sessions, I felt the flutter of dragonfly at my side.
Whether it’s the Norse goddess Freyja to Irish myths of the small creature being helpful fairies in disguise to those native to the Southeast Asian terrain I was traveling who see dragonflies as symbols of a blessed rice field, I’m not the first to encounter the insect and feel a sense of transformation, luck, and possibility.
Is it so bad to believe everything in life has meaning? That we are as in conversation with the universe as we allow ourselves to be?
A childhood friend—my first playdate—was staying with me the past few days and after dinner, over tea, we acknowledged the loudness of the unknown before us. But the next day, returning to the idea, we raised the question: What if it’s better than we can even imagine? How good could it get?
There are reasons to believe the future might be worse than what we have now—the existential threat of the climate crisis not being the only global threat confronting us, or the recent arrests of students and colleagues for peaceful demonstrations, or the many other ways it feels like an impenetrable REALLY? looms over much of life, but I can’t help to lean into the bit of lightness I feel when I begin to imagine, or notice, or attend to, the fantastical moments of collaboration already underway.
This week in my writing class at one of the many universities calling for a rightful divestment from genocide, we studied Danez Smith’s “dream where every black person is standing by the ocean” and Traci Brimhall’s “A Prelude to a Revolution.” We spoke together about the way fantasy and the surreal constructs both literal and metaphorical portals in these poems, and so in our psyche, and so in our life. When the boy rises from the ocean from spit in Smith’s poem, a restoration occurs. When the guards are on fire in Brimhall’s piece, a revolution begins.
But fledging from a dream incubated into full realization takes care, protection, and…resources.
During my final days in Bali, I walked with a friend through a rainstorm in Ubud. We hadn’t brought umbrellas, and she hadn’t packed a poncho like me, so we ducked into the first open structure we saw which turned out to be a small hostel. One of the workers offered her his poncho, and we continued down the road to our destination: the Eco Petulu Bird Sanctuary and Cafe. Here fallen baby egrets are taken in to recover during the spring and summer mating season until they can be released in the fall.
Dragonflies spend most of their life as a nymph underwater—they exist here without wings and go unseen as they move through this stage, familiar only to fellow underwater creatures. When they emerge, usually after about four years of living in this way, they scale a plant to emerge to the surface. Their skin sheds. They live a few months of life like this—in flight, often looking for a mate (which, I learned, can occur mid-flight, forming the shape of a heart).
But that whole time spent in the murk, did they sense what was coming? How do they know when it’s time to break free?