What we outgrow

And what we seek from the sky

The other night before bed, my husband spent quite some time listening to me reflect on the happenings of my day. A lot of hard things have been going on, so I talked for a while, and I wasn’t in a good place.

Suddenly, he said, unrelated and delicately, “It’s been a while since I’ve seen a libélula.” He spoke it in Spanish — a word I’d never heard before. I was pleasantly surprised when I looked it up, and the image search was the respite I needed after a hard day. Sometimes a small, beautiful thing is just what you need to get you out of your head.

My husband has a way of saying just the thing needed to ground me. This time, this gift turned into a colorful, nature full dream.

Rather than staying in a place of stress or worry, I spent the next morning on a deep dive into the biology and the history of dragonflies. I turned the synchronicity into a poem.

Bright crimson.

Metallic blue.

Neon orange bodies

with transparent wings

and rainbows in their veins

color my dreams.

I admire the beards on their spiny bodies,

their five bulbous eyes with a 360 degree view

a kaleidoscope that allows them

to see where the light comes from.


Did you know that dragonflies live for mere weeks

soaring over waters,

flitting onto leaves,

ripples,

and goosebumped skin?

Yet their young life under water 

lasts months, sometimes years.

At this stage, they are not cute

but are astonishing all the same –

practicing circular breathing out their backs,

growing as many as seventeen times their nymph-size

through instars.

The newness of this word

and the familiarity of the concept

revive me.

Instars –

the small violent bursts

of becoming.

The invertebrates become ghosts,

spineless for the seventeenth time,

as they mature again.

We, too, become ghostlike as we shed,

preferring stillness.

When the dragonfly decides to breathe air,

she emerges in the night

on a stalk near the waters’ edge,

to let the final instar of her child self go,

and set off to fly.

Did you know

that before dinosaurs,

the wings of a dragonfly

used to span over two feet wide?

I imagine…

if we had the oxygen

they had back then,

we would expand, too.

Considering dragonflies have been on earth for 300 million years, surely they have wisdom on how to survive hard things. I’ll be watching and taking notes.

How to be like the dragonfly:

• What would you do if you had only weeks to live?

• What would you choose to look at, reflect on, or do? (What three things come to mind first? Write them down as action items.)

• At what instar are you? How many instars (incomplete metamorphoses) have you been through?

• What have you shed lately, or what do you still want/need to shed?

For support, visit my offerings here. Then comment below what nature has been teaching you.

Love,

Brittany

In case you’d like to follow the rabbit hole, too:

1. Read this: www.nps.gov/articles/species-spotlight-dragonflies.htm

2. Watch this video:

3. And this:

Images from Canva and National Geographic.