A meditation on facing fear, transformation and living fully.
I am in the garden, going about gardening things. This kind of work has a way of bringing me into the now. Of honing my awareness and hoodwinking me into a type of worship. Sunlight sets the pistils of the pansies aglow, miniature altars nestled in an apse of stained glass petals. The smoldering earth makes me heady with adoration. I am witness to the birth of seedlings. I am at once midwife and godparent, coaxing tender shoots from the soil and baptizing their sweet little heads with the exhale of their ancestors. Do I believe in the communion of songbirds, the resurrection of the buried and green everlasting?
“I do. I do. I do.”
An iridescent flash suddenly appears to greet my profession of faith. The dragonfly hovers near with a mouthful of opalescent flutter. What is this she holds? A velvety bud of rose? A late-waking bloom of the Japanese Dogwood? She catches my curiosity and carries it too. I am a disciple to this mystery, leaving my watering can to follow until she comes to rest in the folded hands of a shrub. Inching close, I understand.
Downy body crucified on the hooks and spines of her labium.
Chalky wings collapsed.
This is a feast.
The dragonfly bows in thanksgiving over this summer offering. A steady breeze makes a swinging thurible of the ritual. There is no urgency. This is deliberate. Methodical. A reverent act that ushers in a blessed consecration. Holy, holy, holy! And bit by bit by bit, the moth ceases to be moth. I am the penitent censed with white ash. I am the faithful opening wide my eyes to swallow this sacrifice whole.
It is finished.
The dragonfly lifts, rising from the wispy remains and I am but a blink in its 30,000 facets.
“Joy to thee, O Queen of Heaven, Alleluia!”
A day has passed and I find myself journaling about what it would mean to truly live. To inhabit life so fully as to merge with something greater. I am startled as a tiny moth alights on my blank page. After a beat, I trace a heart around it and instinctively pen a warning.
“Beware of dragonflies!”
It does not move. It stays. It waits, patiently, paying vigil to my slow-dawning revelation.
This instinct to warn, this fear that has me sketching boundaries, is exactly what keeps me from living fully. From pressing forward into a greater beyond. Do I sincerely yearn to be so elegantly consumed by something as to be completely absorbed, to die to self and rise again anew?
“I do. I do. I do.”
At this, the tiny insect ascends into the brightening day.
The page is empty.
My heart is full.