DRAGONFLY

The dragonfly’s insight:

 The dragonfly is the most delicate and the most common of seers.

Hear it. The small creature that hovers, that never seems to land anywhere, that darts and vanishes. And then one afternoon comes and settles on your hand or your shoulder or your knee as you sit by the water and stays.

The old ones held the dragonfly as the creature of true seeing. Hear this for a reason you can verify with your own eyes. Look at a dragonfly’s eyes. They are enormous. They see in nearly every direction at once. And the old one said that “the dragonfly sees through illusion. That it cannot be fooled by any surface. that it reads what is underneath a thing and that this is why it will land on almost nothing. It hovers forever over a world full of two-layered surfaces and lands only when it finds the rare thing, the surface with nothing under it, the one layered person, the clean heart, and then it settles and rests.”

And the old one said, “Watch who the dragonflies land on, and you will know who is not hiding anything. I have seen a dragonfly hover over a whole group of people at a river’s edge, back and forth, unsettled for many minutes, and then descend to one child’s hand, and stay. And that child grew into a woman that the whole community trusted with its secrets, because she could not hold a hidden thing. It was not in her, and the dragonfly had known it when she was six.”

So, the dragonfly who sees under every surface rests only where there is nothing to see through.