Spirit in the World

I came to this article in the middle of a busy workday.

Dragonflies, Nature’s Deadly Drone

The miraculous video left me slack-jawed and stupefied. I moved to the article scarcely shifting in my chair, my mind wheeling back and forth between memories of watching dragonflies on a algae-clogged pond when I was six years old and the new worlds opened  for me by this glimpse into their bizarre and mind-bending habits and  life cycles.

How does one even attempt to jump from the overwhelming density and complexity of the revelations about these creatures’ reality into any kind of abstraction about what dragonflies “mean,” or to what “other reality” they might point?

Time stopped. I was elsewhere, but as a dragonfly: whirling over water with them, my mind all eye, my body infinitely subtle and strong, caressing a sprig of grass before alighting, the experience somehow, however faintly, reminding me of the way I used to feel when I could linger for a split second over the decision about just how soon–or late– to clip a tennis ball spinning up off the court, fat and obvious, to my forehand .

Now, trying to collect thoughts and choose a word, I might say I felt “joy.” But that is a poor placeholder for the experience of these few minutes of vanishing into the fierce exuberance of physicality.

Photo James Burton