Encountering Dragonfly

Following dragonflies into the territory between nature and the collective psyche

While napping years ago at a conference, naturalist and environmental writer Brooke Williams had a powerful dream about a dragonfly, a dream that cracked open his world by giving rise to a steady stream of dragonfly encounters in his waking life.

In the years since, he has delved deeply into the intricate and nuanced natural history of dragonflies and made pilgrimages to see them (he now has 38 species on his life list) while also exploring their symbolic meaning and cultural significance. Brooke has come to believe that seeing dragonflies both in and out of that dream marked his personal 're-enchantment'--the commingling of an inner dream world with his outer, everyday reality. Encountering Dragonfly is his account of becoming an "imaginal ecologist"--related in a series of odonate encounters.

Many scholars believe that for most of human history, we lived in an enchanted world in which myth and magic, ritual and stories and spirits informed every aspect of our lives. The enchantment ended with the Enlightenment and modernity, when reason and scientific discovery explained away the magic, commencing a commodification of nature that has flourished ever since. In the absence of tree spirits, we were freed to cut down entire forests to build temples and forts. Commodifying and burning carbon now alters our climate and threatens the future of life on earth.

Is it possible that our disenchantment represented the cutting of our evolutionary, previously integrated lives in two: outer material reality and the inner dream world-our conscious and unconscious selves? That a modern materialist society required the exile of our unconscious evolutionary selves? If disenchantment/enchantment represent the two pieces into which modernity cut the world, then could 're-enchantment' heal that cut?

For Williams, re-enchanting life requires more trust in the reality and practicality of symbols and archetypes as remnants passed down from our earliest ancestors, which may--as perhaps they always have--play a role in our long-term survival. In an enchanted world, we are surrounded by the one, elemental ongoing truth of the natural world--where the 'awe' of experiencing a wild event can be ripe with information of evolutionary significance.

In many cultures, the dragonfly carries messages between the inner and outer world. For Brooke Williams the message of the dragonfly is to ask questions about synchronicity, awe and the collective unconscious. What are the implications of following a path toward greater enchantment? In a time where engagement with the political and social realities of climate change and environmental degradation can't possibly be valued highly enough, can we afford to choose such a path? Perhaps more to the point, can we afford not to?