The Wing and the Bird
a Passage
During this season there is a show outside our window every night of dragonflies and the birds which feed on them. Naturally the dragonflies likewise feed on gnats and mosquitoes, who swarm for purposes of their own.
I have lately been enamored of the dragonfly’s wing. How strong, how invincible such an organ must feel to its bearer, how powerful! And yet how delicate, how tentative to us! It seems constantly on the verge of breaking. What looks to us with the same solicitous anxiety, as that with which we examine the dragonfly’s wing?
And yet we, too, dart hither and thither, as though death were a mere fable; and all the while ravenous birds wheel overhead.
Yet I do not think this is morbid or a melancholy observation. Rather, I marvel at the tenacity and bravery of all living things. What is more, it strikes me that the best life is lived as though the birds of prey were absent. I do not mean to say we should believe them to be absent, or run through our lives in willful ignorance of their presence. Rather, like the dragonfly who goes out night after August night, we should act as though there passed no shadow between our wings and the sun.