Dragonflies and Monarchs

Bad pagan confession time; I don’t know that I believe in signs, and yet…

Lately I have been seeing a ton of dragonflies. That’s not really remarkable. It’s dragonfly season here in Minnesota. It coincides with mosquito swarms, so I always love to see dragonflies as harbingers of death to the bloodsuckers. Also, they just look really bad-ass. Sexy little helicopters, or fairies? Sexy helicopter fairies? Did I just invent something new here?

 The biggest draw to paganism for me is the connection to nature. In fact, that is what has started me on this current spiritual path. I’m not even sure I am a pagan so much as an amateur naturalist with an interest in storytelling. You see, I don’t know what I believe. I was raised in a pretty fundamentalist Christian faith. I always had questions as a kid about that faith and then outright rejected it in my early twenties. It’s been a real rollercoaster spiritually.  Now the bonus to this faith was that it taught that all religions are garbage, except their own. So when I rejected that religion, I was already on the short cut path to be done with religion as a whole. You see if all the others were garbage, and they were the only “good one”, and I cracked the code that, “nah, you kind of suck too.” It was easy to walk straight into agnosticism and atheism.

Atheism looks really good on paper. My fundamentalist upbringing prepped me for this too. They taught that when you die, you’re dead. It’s like going to sleep. Now they don’t leave it there, too much of a bummer. So they teach that you will eventually be resurrected by God. It’s like you get your peak body back with all your memories and you get to live forever on Earth and it’s like when Earth was at her peak, so like it’s basically everyone living their best lives. It’s a good MLM pitch, but eventually it crumbled for me. But I held on to the whole, when we die, we’re done. We go back to the earth. Our life energy goes back into the dirt. And I am honestly ok with that. But Atheism is also kinda absolutist. I’ve met too many smug atheists. Having been raised a fundamentalist Christian who knew with the utmost of certainty that when I died I was going to be resurrected into an idyllic Earth, I was once smug and certain too. Until I wasn’t. I never wanted to be so absolute on something again. To blind me to the possibility that what if I was wrong?

So that left me as an agnostic, but that feels like such a fence-sitter position.

So here I was. Left with not much. Religion is all junk. Maybe there is a God? Signs don’t look great.  So what am I left with?

Well, there is what I can observe to be true. I know there are seasons. I know that things are born, they live, they die. The Earth rotates around the sun and we have visible seasons that mark the passage of time. That’s where I was. That’s where I am. Nature is my church. That’s pretty much all I can commit to right now spiritually.

But in observing nature you can’t help but notice synchronicities. Patterns. Like when the dragonflies come back. My dad mentioned to me one day, “When the Lilacs are done, the first dragonfly hatch will happen.” By the way, he said that out of the goddamn blue like he’s a freaking level 20 Druid, not some retired guy who is caretaking a Prairie and semi-observant, but you know what? He was absolutely right. The lilacs were done and the dragonflies appeared.

So here is why I turned to nature as a religion. I like storytelling. I like traditions and connecting with people. Agnosticism is lonely. I like to look to stories for what ancestors noted about certain things. Like Dragonflies. Dragonflies are in pretty much every continent on the planet so everyone has their own stories and mythologies about them. One of my favorites are that they are fairies. That’s a fun image that appeals to my inner five-year-old. Fairies are real and they bloom right after the lilacs do.

Another is that they are symbols for change. I like this one too. Their metamorphosis is so cool. They are the ultimate image of transformation and change. Other traditions hold that they can be a sign of a lost loved one coming back to visit, letting us know we’re on the right path. That’s comforting too. Maybe it’s both? Maybe a sign of a loved one letting us know we’ve all been through change, and we can do it again. I’ve been seeing so many dragonflies lately. It’s their season. I know that’s why, but a little part of me likes to think about being open to the change that feels to be so close and vibrating in the universe right now.

Also in my yard, the monarda, a.k.a. bee balm is going nuts. We’ve also got some lovely swamp milkweed. Both plants are drawing in bumble bees, hummingbirds and monarch butterflies.

 

My grandma loved monarch butterflies. She was very proud of her little patch of prairie. She grew to have an appreciation for it later in life and was a little conservationist to her core. She was very brand loyal to Dawn dish soap because that was the brand they used to scrub the animals after the oil spills, or so their commercials would lead you to believe. Her bucket list wish was to be called into active duty to go scrub oil soiled aquatic animals. Before she got very ill we took her to the Science Museum to see a movie about Monarchs in the Omnitheater. She loved it. It was a special outing because she was pretty much an agoraphobe so for her to go out, INTO THE CITIES NO LESS! Was quite an achievement, but went she did and she talked about that movie endlessly. Towards the end of her life, when she was in the hospital, her weak and damaged heart failing her at last, she was still talking to me about that movie and how lovely it was.

I have been thinking about her a lot lately. Today while I was making her potato salad, it felt like she was with me in the kitchen. I remember being at her kitchen table helping her make it. Tasting it, and her trusting my child judgement on what it “needed”.  It felt like she was with me, smiling, knowing the trick is sugar.

She was one of my biggest fans for my writing. While I write in my garden today I notice several monarchs dancing on the breezes in my yard, and it feels like those monarchs are here to check in on me, see what’s going on and read over my shoulder. While I know the monarchs in my yard are here for the swamp milkweed, and butterfly milkweed, and zinnias I planted, it’s nice to think maybe it’s my grandma visiting me. Approving of me sitting in my garden I am trying to turn into a meadow. Calling in the finches with promises of seeds and cup plants. Feeding the cardinals and red-wing blackbirds, and any other critters that happen across my path. She’d be smiling. She is smiling because I am smiling.

While I know the logical explanations for all of these signs all around me, it’s nice to at least be reminded of my grandma, and feeling like I am on the right path with what I am doing with my life and who I am becoming.