Dragonflies in Summer

by Kate Stockman

A few years ago, I decided to create an altered book depicting the things I love about summer: the ripeness, the abundance of scents and flowers, the birds and the bees. I found a wonderful book at a thrift store published by the Smithsonian and entitled The Fire of Life. I re-titled it “Summer Solstice.” Some of the pages I left as they were because they were about the summer solstice. Other pages, I altered by covering them with decorative papers, rubber stamp impressions, photos, postcards, calendar art, etc. I even took multi-page articles from magazines (such as article on the Monarch butterfly from an old National Geographic) and made them into booklets so that I created books within the books. It was a labor of love, and made the heat more tolerable.

The book contained many images of dragonflies since I associate them with summertime and warm weather. When I was young, my mother and I went to the cemetery where her mother was buried once a month on Saturday morning. While she trimmed around the gravestone (and I’m sure “talked” with her beloved mother), I walked, skipped and ran around, reading the grave markers and admiring the statues. I remember always seeing dragonflies hovering and flying around a large statue of an open bible. They were so beautiful and iridescent in the richest colors imaginable! They could hover, zip forward, glisten in the sun, and dart wherever they wanted.

As an adult, I remember being led by dragonflies down a country road in Tennessee. Andrew and I were looking for mountain land to buy where we could live when we retired. This was outside of Nashville and dragonflies literally led us down the road to the entrance to the property. While we didn’t buy that property, it was a procession to remember!

A few years ago, I was enjoying an afternoon swim in a nearby lake. Dogpaddling, I watched at eye level the dragonflies skimming above the water on their various missions. After my swim, I sat on the side of the dock and looked into the water. There, suspended beneath the surface were carp languidly watching me. Shifting my focus, I watched dragonflies busily zipping from cattail to tall grasses and through the air above the water’s surface. Shifting again, I saw my own reflection mirrored in the tranquil water’s surface. It was an aquatic epiphany:  deep below the surface was calm, above the surface was furiously active, and in between was me, watching it all.

In Native American medicine, Dragonfly symbolizes “Illusion”. According to the Jamie Sams and David Caron, the authors of Medicine Cards, “some legends say that Dragonfly was once Dragon, and that Dragon had scales like Dragonfly’s wings.” They advise you to call on Dragonfly if you need to make a change as Dragonfly will “guide you through the mists of illusion to the pathway of transformation.”

Dragonflies have been around for 300 million years. One prehistoric fossil had a wingspan of 2 1/2 feet, making it the largest flying insect ever recorded. Today, the largest dragonfly is found in Costa Rica with a wingspan of 7 1/2 inches.

Dragonflies and damselflies are similar. Both belong to the order of Odonata (the toothed ones). Dragonflies belong to the suborder of Anisoptera (uneven winged) and damselflies to the suborder Zygoptera (even winged). One way to tell them apart: dragonflies hold their wings out to the side when at rest, but damselflies usually fold their wings up over their back when resting.

As with other species of insects, the dragonfly has six legs but it is unable to walk on solid ground. Their large compound eyes contain up to 30,000 individual lenses. (Human eyes only have one.)  Because of this, the adult dragonfly can see nearly 360 degrees at all times.

It is their lucent wings that give them such amazing flight abilities. Dragonflies have two sets of wings. They don’t beat their wings in unison like other insects do. Their front wings can be going up while their backs ones are going down, giving them the ability to move up, down, forwards, backwards, side to side, and hover.  They flap their wings at about 30 beats per second (bps) (compared to a bee’s 300 bps) and can attain speeds of over 30 mph.

When you see two dragonflies flying through the air attached to one another, it is almost always a male and female mating. Male dragonflies can be very territorial, staking claim to a particular area alongside a pond or stream. When you see two adults chasing each other through the air, it is often one male chasing another from its territory.

Female dragonflies lay their eggs in or near water, often on floating or emergent plants. The dragonfly eggs hatch into nymphs (or larvae). The nymphs live beneath the water’s surface, from a few months up to five years. When the larva is ready to metamorphose into an adult, it climbs up a reed or other emergent plant.

Exposure to air causes the larva to begin breathing. The skin splits at a weak spot behind the head and the adult dragonfly crawls out of its old larval skin, pumps up its wings, and flies off to feed on midges and flies. After leaving the water and becoming flying insects, they only live for about a month during which they mate. Their phenomenally quick and accurate flight makes them well suited to eat other insects right out of the air. Fortunately, mosquitoes are one of their primary food sources.

One more dragonfly story: the week I was writing this piece [in July 2009], I was in the car with my son Allen when a dragonfly bounced into the windshield and slid down into the wipers. Allen asked if he should turn on the wipers to help set it free. I said I thought that might injure it more. So we pulled into a parking lot and Allen got out and gently untangled the dragonfly from the wiper. We thought it was injured so Allen intended to place the dragonfly on the ground in the shade of a bush. But as Allen lifted the dragonfly from its entrapment, it lifted up out of his hands, hovered a bit, then flew off. The look of wonder and joy on Allen’s face was a beautiful sight.

Kate Stockman is a multi-media 3-D artist living in Western North Carolina. She writes a column, The Hand-Crafted Life, for her local newspaper, and offers playshops under the name The Cre8tive Flow. This article is adapted and expanded from an article she wrote on her blog, Wanderings of a Wondering Mind, which was inspired by a crop circle showing a dragonfly design. You can read the original post here.

Late Summer

Another great essay from Bill Felker’s lovely essays about his seasonal observations in Yellow Springs, Ohio, taken from Poor Will’s Almanack. This is from August 2004:

When I get up before five these mornings, I sit by my window and I feel the fall moving toward me. Outside, there is no wind; the yard is quiet. The trees and flowers are motionless. The early summer chorus of birds has almost ended. Only a cardinal and a bullfrog sing off and on. Sometimes, the jays are nervous and whine in the trees. Sometimes, I hear crows across town. The katydids stopped calling in the middle of the night. It is too early in the day for cicadas and bees. The August crickets are still growing up; they won’t chant for a few days.

I can’t decide whether the shift in the season has followed the silence or preceded it. I don’t know if my perceptions are real or imaginary. Maybe I’m just restless. It’s been hot since the end of May. The heat wears me down like it wears down the plants and animals, draws life from the garden, the pond, and the brain.

Of course the varieties of flowering plants are different now from what they were a few weeks ago, and the tint of the leaves has deepened in some places, faded in others. There is a haze to the sky; it builds up through the sluggish fronts of middle summer. Maybe that lack of purity is what tells me the earth has shifted on its axis, that it is turning back toward the sun for winter, that I have run out of summer one more time without having kept the promises I made to myself in April.

I have often tried to list the births and deaths of plants, insects and animals that define the shift to autumn. But I have never looked closely enough, have not watched or listened or thought carefully enough, and so the emotions of late summer can comer over me quickly and hard, and I listen to the stillness, trying to understand what has happened, wishing I had paid closer attention, thinking maybe if I really understood the process better, then I wouldn’t feel so bereft at the end.

But no matter how many notes I take, I know that when the birds are quiet in the morning and the wind stops blowing, I am at the end of one more cycle of planning and longing and then I can’t help repeating the same questions I asked a season ago. What next? What should I do now? Will there be enough time? Where do I go from here? How can I make amends for what I haven’t done? Whom should I still love? What does it matter?

The beautiful photo of a haybale on a hazy day was taken by Cate Kerr of Beyond the Fields We Know.

Bon Odori Dances

For years, my holiday calendar contained a reference to the silent, gliding dances of the Bon Odori perfomed during the O-Bon festival in Japan. The image always seemed marvelous to me, and even more so, when I read this fantastic description of the dances written by Lafcadio Hearn, in 1894:

And at another tap of the drum begins a performance impossible to picture in words, something unimaginable, phantasmal—a dance, an astonishment.

All together glide the right foot forward one pace, without lifting the sandal from the ground, and extend both hands to the right, with a strange, floating motion and a smiling, mysterious obeisance. Then the right foot is drawn back with a repetition of the waving of hands and the mysterious bow. Then all advance the left foot and repeat the previous movements, half-turning to the left. Then all take two gliding paces forward, with a single simultaneous soft clap of the hands, and the first performance is reiterated, alternately to right and left; all the sandaled feet gliding together, all the supple hands waving together, all the pliant bodies bowing and swaying together. And so slowly, weirdly, the processional movement changes into a great round, circling about the moonlit court and around the voiceless crowd of spectators.

The Bon Odori dances are part of the O-Bon festival honoring the dead, who return to visit their families at this time of the year. The festival is celebrated on the 15^th day of the 7^th month in Japan (July 15; although in some parts of Japan it’s celebrated on August 15), but it used to be celebrated on the full moon of the seventh lunation in the Chinese calendar, which would be the full moon of July 25, which is also the Moon of the Hungry Ghosts. Like our Western festival of the dead, Halloween, this holiday mingles several elements: the traditional end of the summer retreat for Buddhist monks, the Full Moon of the Hungry Ghosts, and a midsummer lantern festival. The dances were designed to welcome and honor the spirits of the ancestors; one can see that reverent and otherworldly aspect of the dances in Hearn’s description.

A few years ago, my friend, Susan told me about the O-Bon festival held at the Betusin Buddhist Temple in Seattle. And I finally got a chance to see the dances. My first impression was that they were not particularly gliding. And they are not silent: each is accompanied by recorded music, which is played on a loudspeaker, accompanied by a drummer. The crowd gathers in the street and makes a long shuffling circle around the yagura, a temporary stage set in the middle of the street, from which the dances are announced and where the drum is placed. In Seattle, everyone is invited to participate, even if you don’t know the dances, and so the crowd is diverse, with people dressed in traditional summer kimonos and people in jeans and flipflops, some who perform the dance elegantly, others who look lost and are always off the beat.

Some of the dances are quite playful and whimsical. The Wikipedia article on Bon Odori describes some the various dances, some of which are quite old and others which come from popular culture, for instsance, the Pokemon ondo. Another website, which calls the Bon Odori dances, the spiritual dance in the midsummer night (I love that phrase), describes and provides videos of several types of bon odori dances.

I was a little disappointed in my first Bon Odori, although I enjoyed the friendly crowd, the camaraderie of the dancers, and the generosity of the Buddhist temple which opens its doors to make this festival possible. It has the atmosphere of any small community event, complete with princesses (beautiful young women wearing tiaras and kimonos), food booths, a beer garden, a display of crafts (including ikebana arrangements and bonsai trees), and little kids sitting on the curb to watch the dancers lining the street.

But this year, I attended the festival again with my niece, Shayla, and this time I really did see the gliding dances of my fantasy. Perhaps this was because the temple sponsored practice sessions during the weeks before the event (you can see one in this You Tube video) and more of the dancers knew what they were doing ahead of time. Perhaps it was because of the elegant grace of the dance leaders, women in pink kimonos who walked alongside the dancers, demonstrating the movements.

But suddenly, I could see how the gestures were intended to welcome and honor the spirits. I watched the dancers move slowly along the street, in a gliding, undulating line. And I saw all the elements Hearn saw in 1895: the swaying, the supple hands, and most of all, that sense of otherworldliness. No silence, but the beat of the drum and the repetition of the movements that began to have a trance-like, hypnotic effect. I even got up and danced to one song and felt I had truly honored the ancestors.

This video was not taken in Seattle but at the Bon Odori at the Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles. I think it gives you the feel of the dancing. In LA, they were dancing in concentric circles, which creates an interesting effect. Several of the dancers are very elegant and attentive to what they are doing; others have that dazed look of people just trying to keep up. And from time to time, passers by, oblivious to the camera wander by, making you feel like you are there.

Lotus Moon

To honor the sixth new moon in the Chinese calendar, the Lotus Moon, I’m posting a photo I took of the water lilies in a pond at Volunteer Park.

I had just been to see “Fleeting Beauties,” an exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints (including the famous Hokusai “The Wave” which I sometimes claim as my logo because of my name) at the nearby Seattle Asian Art Museum. I imagine I was influenced by those designs when I composed this photo.

I always spend at least one day during the month of the Lotus Moon, on the lake, in a rowboat or kayak, admiring the water lilies that thrive in Lake Washington.

If you want to learn more about water lilies and lotuses and the distinctions between them, read the article I wrote on the lotus as the flower of July.

Blackberries in TN

Fourth of July as Midsummer

I like to think of Fourth of July as a secular version of pagan Midsummer festivals.

Like many historical holidays, Fourth of July seems to have co-opted many of the symbols of the earlier celebrations at this time of year. For centuries at Summer Solstice, people stayed up all night, dancing around bonfires and rolling burning wheels down the hillsides, to honor the sun. On Fourth of July, we set off pinwheels in the street (evoking the circle, the symbol of the sun), wave sparklers around in the darkness (they look like the embers dancing up from a bonfire) and gaze at fireworks blazing overhead late into the night.

Many families spend the daytime hours on Fourth of July, at parks and lakes, enjoying a picnic lunch and eagerly waiting for the sun to set on the longest day of the year. We worship the sun and may pay for our devotion with sunburns.

Both Midsummer and Fourth of July are associated with heavy drinking. In fact, Fourth of July is one of the deadliest holidays in America due to alcohol-related traffic accidents. The traditional Fourth of July BBQ combines many of these elements: drinking and fire and spending hours outdoors with friends and family.

Midsummer has always been a time of revelry and romance. A Swedish proverb says “Midsummer’s night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking.” The Fourth of July places a little more emphasis on family than on coupling, but there’s no denying the romance involved in lying in your lover’s arms in a grassy park while watching fireworks burst overhead.

Of course, there are many differences between Fourth of July and Midsummer. Midsummer festivals also celebrate flowers and herbs, and often include the element of water (which we acknowledge here in Seattle by setting our fireworks off over Lake Union). Still, when I’m annoyed by the drunken crowds or frightened by the sound of firecrackers exploding, I remind myself this is just the traditional way to celebrate the height of Summer and the glory of the Sun.