Tag: light

The Magic of Dragonfly Shadows

By Dana Stovern
Written July, 26, 2022
Moxee, Washington

If you traced the lines of river water and irrigation water flowing out of the mountains in all the places I’ve lived, you’d be able to infer much more about my life than most. I believe I’ve spent more time beside this flowing water than I have with people, learning about the sounds, the smells, the sights of the seasonal flow of water and all that goes with it. It takes time to come into the fold of this knowledge, but once you have it, it never leaves your skin, your nostrils, your ears, your line of sight. This is a knowing that comes of practiced walking in these places over decades. And on one summer day, all the walks of my life along these water lines met in one nostalgic tide-pool of time, held up for me to see in the dance of the dragonfly.

In the face of all the change, I am nothing
until the sun shines on dragonflies in flight
above watery canals and sun-burnished grasses.
Tiger. Gold. Emerald. Blue.
They are flitting. Full darts. Probing air and water.

And below the dragon’s flight
the banks of green canal leaves lisp whispers
tracing lines in wetness, telling secrets.

I’ve walked this place a thousand times and more
through dozens of fields
where water shed from mountains
canters through canals and feeds the fields with the magic of moisture.
I am home here. Always. Even when I have no home.

My soul is this pulse of mountain water
given to chamber lines of earth
filled with glistening watery diamonds
to the braids of rows, raising plants.

Yet, as well as I know this in my being,
today is different. I’m suspended.
I’m held in the cast of the dragonfly
flying in front of the sun and shrugging off
fleeting shadows unlike any other:
Dragonfly shadows shattering into the grasses below.

How can that be because
dragonflies are the light shiners in darkness.
How can they cast a shadow from the sun?
But they do. They do. Special shadows
that weave time, turning warps
like water eternally braiding in the fields,
sinking into earth.

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A Christmas with No Bells or Whistles

By Dana Stovern
Christmas Day 2021
Rogers Mesa, North Fork of the Gunnison

I feared Christmas this year because I knew the holiday was totally stripped down for me. I’d have no family or gathering to be with because of the divorce and the Omicron variant of COVID, limiting connection. There was no room to decorate a tree in my tiny space. I was also feeling the blah-humbug of the formality of gifting, which wasn’t a requirement for me this year. And trying to formulate how I’d cook for myself for Christmas, a special meal? Hmm. It felt like I was living in an involuntary boycott of Christmas, which did give me a certain kind of relief, even while a hollow feeling settled in the center of me.

The hollowness eventually developed into a wad of fear that rolled around inside of me like a wild pool ball having no edges to keep it caged on a table. I did not know how I’d walk through this landscape and negotiate with the layers of emotions that the holiday always brings. Alone.

The closer the holiday weekend came, the more I realized, “Dana, walk your talk with this. Do for yourself what you encourage others to do. Just be present and breathe through it. Don’t ignore, avoid, fight, or hide. Just stay with it.” And that’s what I’ve been doing – breathing through and being with where things “should” be but aren’t. Grieving when I need to and, of all the surprising holy holies, finding redemption, independence and freedom where I’d always had to lean into the yoked harness of the holidays.

And it was this morning, as I cooked scrambled eggs, topping them with a bit of a mess of raspberry sauce while enjoying a side of a chocolate-filled croissant, that Scott Simon’s NPR voice took me to a place I hadn’t expected.

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