Late this afternoon, I was sitting in our backyard, reading, while Nika and Noah played tug of war with a toy. I happened to look up and realized the bougainvillea bush was in full bloom. I decided to test the camera on my iPhone 6s to see how it performed for a close up.
Just as I approached the bougainvillea, a dragonfly touched down on a branch and stayed there while I snapped the photo and didn’t fly away from five or ten minutes afterward.
What’s interesting about this little incident, other than the beauty of it, is that less than an hour before, I was in Megan’s room, trying to decide what to tackle first. Our neighbor recently gave us a great bed that we put in her room and now stuff has to be moved or discarded. What decorates her walls? Dragonflies that she painted when she was in high school. This little guy is just one of a dozen or so.
After I decided I didn’t have the energy to tackle her room yet, I was reading about animals as messengers and thinking about the first time I heard of dragonflies as symbolic of news. I was picking Megan up from middle school and a Peruvian psychic, Maya, who lived across the street, was with me. When a dragonfly flitted across the windshield, she exclaimed, “Oh, Trish beautiful! Good news is on the way.”
“It is?”
“That’s what dragonflies mean.”
At the time, I was waiting to hear about whether my contract with a publisher would be renewed. “Is there a time frame?”
“The adult dragonfly lives for just a few months if the weather is warm. But in cooler periods, it may not live longer than a few weeks.”
I liked the few weeks scenario better than I did the few months. Sure enough a few weeks later my contract was renewed.
I don’t wish this dragonfly a short life, but I do hope his appearance means a few weeks rather than months. Regardless, it was one of those synchros that made me feel I was back in the flow.
So good news to come. That’s good news in itself! Hadn’t heard of the ‘meaning’ of dragonflies before.
Are there dragonflies in the UK? I should google that question rather than showing my ignorance!
When Trish’s dragonfly tale was posted we were staying in Cedar Key, Florida, an old fishing village not many – even in Florida – know about, because it’s pretty isolated – a 60-mile drive through heavy forest from Gainesville. I happened to check the trash file of my gmail, and discovered a letter from my literary agent, written three days earlier, that she loved my new novel that I’d sent her a couple weeks earlier. When we came home, I looked at the April calendar in my office to check dates and noticed that April featured a dragonfly! Along with it was this poem by William Blake: He who binds to himself a joy/ does the winged life destroy./ He who kisses the joy as it flies/ lives in eternity’s sunrise.