Tag: water

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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About Magpies, Ravens and Border Collies

By Dana Stovern
Written April 21, 2021
Pitkin Mesa, Paonia, Colorado

At the first-year anniversary mark of living with COVID-19, I was experiencing one of the most powerful and profound voids of my life. My existing business platform for The Magic of Somatic Money was dying a long death. Bob, my then-husband, and I were continuing to practice our quarantine, creating a continued deep lack of community connection. My Spirit Team (the lighted Divine counsel I work with), who usually gave me regular guiding updates, had gone MIA shortly after the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on our nation’s Capitol and was giving me very little informational guidance to work with. I had launched my book “Are You Present in Your Body with Your Money?” on sheer faith. It did not help that I was living through another financial low in my life. I was experiencing the least amount of income in over a decade. By spring of 2021, it was clear to me that I was being required to live through one of the greatest voids of my life and do nothing. It was one of the hardest realities to which I’ve ever had to surrender. This piece was one of my saving graces.

About a year ago at this time, COVID-19 let air into the network of humanity’s water pipes woven throughout the global house, and a new rhythm sounded, kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk. Our homes shook with air in the pipes, echoing the change.

Border Collie

As this rattling looseness happened in the greater world, our little neighborhood churned with its own spring changes of wildlife. Deep in one of the ravines leading up to our mesa, the birds made new decisions about pecking orders. Who knows why the congress of neighborhood ravens rumbled with the gang of magpies, but they did. Who knows why the vote tipped in favor of the ravens, but it did. And the ravens ousted the magpies from their hidden tangled mess of wild fruit trees, Virginia creeper, elm, wild sweet pea, and tamarisk. In one shell-shocked swoop, with black plumage shimmering iridescent emeralds in the sun, the ravens kicked out the tuxedo birds. The magpies, insulted by the takeover, exploded out of the ravine and raged into the neighborhood, looking for new homes.

Of course, the humans were clueless to this fowl drama because, you know, COVID was playing its air-pocketed jam session in humanity’s water lines, kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk.

It was a ripe day when the magpies arrived. The tonal quality of eerie light filtering from the sun tipped toward a different sky. This light change with a subtle new cliff edge was like a twilighted eclipse at noon. It leaned in, even though the sun, moon, and earth were not collectively hi-jinxed in light and shadow.

The magpies hovered in the air above our yard, a roiling tuxedo-plumaged bird gang, pillaging nests from other birds that homed in our great pine trees and the other nearly forty trees in our yard. They attacked, dumped, and cleared the nests of an entire generation of eggs and fledglings from the trees to the ground. They raucously exclaimed their horrid triumph, wreathed in beautiful plumage, as only magpies do. My husband, Bob, and I watched in horror, unable to do anything to stop the destruction.

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