For several nights, there were huge numbers of
dragonflies up here in Northern New York.
They didn’t seem like average dragonflies – they were huge, at least
five inches across, and there were swarms of them. And yet suddenly yesterday they were
gone. A quick search of the internet
tells me that this happened earlier in the summer in Chicago and
elsewhere.
Of course, I wanted to remind myself of the meaning of
dragonflies, and consulted my book Medicine Cards, by Jamie Sams and
David Carson (1988.) They say that
“Dragonfly Medicine is of the dreamtime and the illusionary façade we accept as
physical reality…Dragonfly is the essence of the winds of change, the messages
of wisdom and enlightenment, and the communications from the elemental world.” There
was this very quality to these swarms, kind of a sense that these animal beings
were rising up from the river of life to bring us a message, and then move
on. Their deep green/blue/black color
was magical, mystical. They made literal
magic of an already beautiful landscape, and yet they also made you wonder what
is beyond that landscape, if this is
all illusion. Could there be something even more beautiful, more profound?
Each of us seeing these creatures had an opportunity to
discern what individual message they were bringing. For me, it was simply, “there is something
more going on here than meets the eye.”
And now that the dragonflies are gone, I miss them!
