Wednesday Words
- I wrote the following words for my friends in the band called Dragonfly Grove and they will be part of their upcoming release.
I am headed out to take a little ramble down to a secret place that I know. It’s the kind of place where you step into the area and you feel that hush, the stillness, the magic of the place. I know you’ve felt it before. It’s a magic that has existed since the beginning of time. It’s not flashy. There are no sparks, booms, or bangs. But you can feel the energy that’s been lingering, hanging out, waiting for a good reason to wake up. Here in this secret place, you can feel that magic snore. It’s a gentle rumble, a growl. No, it’s more like a hum. It’s a magical hum that you can almost hear but not quite. It’s a feeling, a feeling that is comfortable and warm.
If you are headed down to this secret place, to get in you gotta push your way through the pine boughs hanging low with apprehensions. They are dark and heavy, almost like your very fears themselves sprouted up from the ground in the form of a ring of pine trees that completely encircle the grove. Getting through is kind of a smothering, overwhelming feeling. But the trees don’t mean any harm. They just sprouted from the anxiety that surrounds anything that is important. It’s an urgency weighing down because something is about to happen.
When you push through, there is a gentle little bubbling trickle of water coming down across the rocks. You can’t have a magical, secret place like this without a water feature. It is a hope that trickles up from the depths. It gurgles along the thick mossy ground.
If you stand in the middle of this grove long enough you will see it happen. Up from a marshy puddle of water, you will see a prehistoric wonder. Almost completely unchanged for the past 300 million years. It molts out of its old skin and comes up from the water ready to do what it was born to do.
This magical grove is the place where dragonflies are born. They stew in these marshes, little puddles fueled by that bubbling trickle of hope. Then they emerge and enter the world ready to fly. Did you know these magical prehistoric beasts are incredible fliers? They have powerful wings that are also super fragile. So delicate, like paper only thinner. And they beat the air into a frenzy with delicate wings and their powerful flying.
I’m headed down to this secret place, the dragonfly grove. If I wait long enough, maybe a whole herd or a group… I don’t know what a batch of dragonflies is called. Let’s just call them a band. If I wait long enough, maybe a whole band of dragonflies will emerge from that bubble of hope at the exact same moment. They will stretch their wings and start to throttle the air. They will find a synchronous rhythm together and create a noise, a buzz. It will resonate with that magical snore, the hum that lies sleeping in the grove. Then, there will be a single wing beat when it happens. Is this powerful buzz emitting from that band of dragonflies fighting with the magical hum or joining together? If I were a betting man, I would wager that the mystical dragonflies would find their groove and create an all-new sound that neither fought the hum nor joined it. They would create their own music. The beating of their wings would ring true throughout that entire dragonfly grove and the whole valley would hear the music made by the wings beating together of this band of dragonflies.
All things come to an end. Dragonflies fly away. But the sound that they made becomes part of that magical snore resting in that grove, waiting, and humming in the stillness.