The following excerpt is from Brooke Williams’s new book Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-Enchantment (Uphill Books, April 2025) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

featured image | by Delia Giandeini 

I’ve been sitting at this pond for ten minutes and have seen only eight dragonflies: my young male, six other meadowhawks, and two great mossy darners. According to my journal, I observed eight different species here exactly a year ago. Although one hummingbird and two violet-green swallows are here hunting them, insects seem scarce.

Connie, who lives across the valley, reported seeing no collared lizards this summer, reminding me that I hadn’t either. This compared to two young last year and many of all ages the year before that. Of all the evident climatic changes here and in news from across the world, the rapid disappearance of insects affects me most. I’ve seen no gnat clouds rising from the hot desert floor, few mosquitos, and only three of the dozen different bee species we’ve heard can be found here.

Dragonflies, according to recent studies, although threatened by both climate change and disappearing wetlands, seem to be holding their own. Their absence here, whether part of this general human-caused chaos or something more local, depresses me.

Scientists announced that last week’s weather was the hottest on earth in at least 125,000 and possibly a million years. According to fossil evidence, dragonflies have been around for 300 million years, or a hundred times as long as humans. (Australopithecus, considered our earliest ancestors, first appeared between 2.85 and 3.25 million years ago.) Knowing this calms me. If dragonflies have achieved this level of evolutionary success, I can imagine our own. What do dragonflies have to teach us about evolution, about adaptation?

This pond is actually a reservoir, built to store irrigation water for the farm down valley. Each spring it fills with water diverted from the wild stream running down the southeast cliffs. Late each fall, the stream is restored, and the pond empties for the winter.

This year, after filling in March, the water level in the pond dropped severely in June. I’m not sure why. This may be the reason I’ve witnessed fewer dragonflies this year: none of the widow skimmers or black saddlebags, common in the past. No eight- or twelve-spotted skimmers. No flame skimmers flying laps along the line where water and land meet, taking advantage of the richness of prey species occupying that edge. The absence of their shocking red beauty is itself a presence.

And although they were here earlier this summer, the electric-blue damselflies have disappeared—the tiny bluets, and the larger but still small dancers. This makes no sense, especially after such a wet winter and spring. Cottonwoods and willows drape the pond in spectacular green.

I pick up my chair and move toward the opening at the northwest side of the pond. While looking for the slight blue needle-like damselflies, my young meadowhawk friend crosses in front of me, circling to my right. He perches four feet above the water’s surface on a dead twig that bends under his weight. I almost touch him. He has something for me.

This young meadowhawk is the latest of hundreds of dragonflies I’ve encountered since having a dream during an afternoon nap, two decades ago. In that dream I received a gift: a light-grey stone engraved with a perfect dragonfly. This has become the most important dream of my life; within minutes of me waking from it, dragonflies began appearing to me. I’d seen dragonflies before, of course, but not in the same way, or as frequently. Somehow, during that dream, dragonflies penetrated whatever veil exists between my inner world that I thought only existed during sleep, and my outer, everyday world. Since that dream, these two worlds seem to have joined into one, my inner/outer worlds. Non-ordinary with ordinary reality.

Questions of how that dragonfly got into my dream, and why, aggravated me constantly and for a long time. Years after my dream I was at a lecture when I learned that the word enchantment refers not only to those “feelings of pleasure and delight” that we are grateful to experience, but also to the state of being in which our ancestors lived prior to what we call modernity. For thousands of years, many gods guided our lives, communicating with us through our dreams and subtle and not-so-subtle clues from the wild world into which we were integrally enmeshed. With modernity came rationalization, reason, distrust of the unknown or unproven; the de-deification of life. Disenchantment. I relaxed, hearing this. Perhaps my dream and that dragonfly marked the re-enchantment of my life.

As an amateur naturalist, I’m constantly in awe, observing and learning about the wild world. Since the dream and its blending of worlds, I consider the mythology and psychology of a natural organism to be on equal footing with its biology. I would call these new dimensions, but they’re actually very, very old.

A biological organism (or natural object or landscape feature) is symbolic because humans across all time have had experience with it—its physical presence and its behavior—and its image is now branded onto what Jung referred to as our collective unconscious. This may be as evolutionarily important to us as its naturally selected physical characteristics are to it.1

My dragonfly encounters have been important at different points along the full spectrum of life, which is purely biological at one end and purely esoteric and mystical at the other.

Reference

1. Jung, C. G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd Edn. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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