Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-enchantment

By Brooke Wiliams

"A glittering gem of a book!"—Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

Following dragonflies into the territory between nature and the human psyche

Two decades ago, 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 fascinating biology and 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 cross-cultural significance.

Encountering Dragonfly is his account—related in a series of odonate encounters—of being drawn into a different kind of relationship with the natural world.  By opening himself to the personal and mytho-poetic meanings of dragonfly, and patiently courting an understanding of these creatures that is built upon, but also transcends, a naturalist’s observation, Brooke has come to believe in the importance of ‘re-enchantment.’

Throughout much of human history, we lived in an enchanted world in which myth and magic, ritual, stories, and spirits informed every aspect of our lives, defining the relationships between psyche, Earth and cosmos. The enchantment ended with the Enlightenment and modernity, when reason and scientific discovery explained away the magic, commencing a commodification of nature that has only intensified ever since.

Brooke’s personal re-enchantment has required of him a faith that material, biological reality isn’t the only reality; it recognizes symbols and archetypes as remnants of a different understanding, which may—as perhaps they always have—play a role in our long-term survival.

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, and how to engage with a world increasingly out of balance. What are the implications of following a path toward greater enchantment? In a time where the stakes have never been higher, nor the political and biological imperatives of climate change and environmental degradation more urgent, can we afford to choose such a path? Perhaps more to the point, can we afford not to?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uphill Books
• Release date: Apr 8, 2025
• ISBN: 9781943370306

Brooke Wiliams

Brooke Williams has spent the last forty years advocating for wilderness and has served on the board of multiple environmental organizations including Western Environmental Legal Center, Center for Humans and Nature, and Utah Rivers Council. His writing about evolution, consciousness, and his own adventures exploring both the inner and outer wilderness has appeared in Orion, Outside, Huffington Post, and numerous other publications, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays. Brooke’s books include Open Midnight: Where Wilderness and Ancestors Meet (Trinity University Press, 2017), Mary Jane Wild: Two Walks and a Rant (Homebound Publications, 2020), and Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-Enchantment (Uphill Books, 2025). He lives with the writer, Terry Tempest Williams, and two cats near Moab, Utah, where they watch light and wait for rain.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

MEADOWHAWK, TOWN POND, CASTLE VALLEY, UTAH

Last evening, a dozen dragonflies hunted at Town Pond. I arrived a bit late, the low light turning the water dark green just before black, the sky grey just before indigo. Variegated meadowhawks hunted nearly invisible gnats, whose existence was evidenced only by the quarter-sized ripple each time one touched the surface. The meadowhawks patrolled in curving horizontal routes rising no higher than a meter above the pond’s surface. One meadowhawk had just connected two long figure eights when she jerked left toward possible prey registered in her third eye. The great mossy darners hunted different prey at a higher level. I named them myself, on discovering that the field guides had disrespected this magnificent creature by calling it the common green darner. Where the meadowhawks moved in horizontal, two-dimensional space, the great mossy darners cut vertical sine curves over the pond. When a great mossy darner entered the meadowhawk space, acrobatics ensued. Confronting each other, they defended and charged, orbiting in spectacular instantaneous infinities. Dance or battle? Then, as if by pre-arranged truce, they launched simultaneously from opposite sides of their contested zone.

A young meadowhawk perched on a leafless cottonwood twig, possibly a day-old male given his more graphic white abdominal contrasts, temporarily less red, more careful in flight than his parents. Testing new wings, he practiced maneuvers, amazed at flight itself, nearly playful. No darting for prey, not yet. Four tight circles left, three right, staying close to the twigged edge for emergency landings.

As a nymph just days before, he’d looked like a submerged plant part decaying on the stream bottom. His larval skin, his carapace, tightened as it had numerous times in the years he’d lived in this depth. He’d expanded and grown, thriving on mosquito larvae and minnows he skewered with the killer lip he launched from the front of his face.¹ Since hatching three years ago, he’d molted eight times, each larger self emerging through the slit in his back. This pressure was different—growth, yes, but also transformation. Ignoring all prey, he lay breathing, his gills pulling oxygen from water he sucked into his rectum. Then, as if signaled, he released his internal pressurized water, which propelled him in short, sustained bursts toward the pond’s edge. He lay there in water-filtered light. As darkness fell, he climbed from his inner water world, the only world he had known, into the outer world. Breathing air for the first time, he crawled slowly across dry ground. As if by ancient map, he moved toward the nearest vertical surface—not a reed, a tree trunk, or a stone wall, but a stiff sedge—and climbed. At some predetermined height, he stopped, clung, and waited.

The next morning the nymph did not notice the new green world throbbing. Or the grasses moving in the imperceptible breeze, choreographed. Or the giant cottonwoods, vivid against the red cliff backdrop, the sun pushing their zagging reflections across the surface of the pond.

After hours of hanging motionless from the sedge as if dead, the meadowhawk nymph vibrated, then pulsed, and then its abdomen waved with new life. No longer able to withstand the growing pressure, his back split open, his still-forming body oozing through the slit. Bowing his back, he pulled from his neck, extracting his new dragonfly eyes from behind the shell-like protection of his nymph eyes. Bending more, he popped his head from its case, and he stared skyward. Then two legs flicked free, rising as if in prayer, pawing the air. Then two more and two more. Next, wing nubs like tiny leaves came through the opening, stuck to his new sides. Like a yogi, he bent back, his abdomen slowly slipping wet from its casing. There he hung, upside down, faint, between worlds. Angelic. An hour had passed when he lunged forward, grabbing his empty casing with his new legs as the tip of his abdomen flicked free. Perched on the casing, his wing nubs grew, inflating and unfolding as internal fluids flowed through the veins, networked throughout his wings. His abdomen lengthened, straightened, then firmed. His colors deepened, wings stiffened. Then he rested, complete. After ten minutes, he tested his firm, dry wings, quivered, and flew.

I’ve been sitting 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 dragon-flies 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.²

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. Those I’ve chosen to include here are important only in that the stories they’ve become are stories I need now.

Let’s begin with the dream.

---

1 Büsse, S., H.-l. Tröger, and S. N. Gorb. The Toolkit of a Hunter—Functional Morphology of Larval Mouthparts in a Dragonfly. Journal of Zoology 315, no. 4 (August 11, 2021): 247–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/jzo.12923.

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

1

RANDOM SKIMMER, DREAM, NAPPING ON CORTES ISLAND, BRITISH COLUMBIA

Hearing a motor idle behind me, I turned toward it from where I perched against a perfect boulder. Beneath me, a few meters from the stone slabs forming the edge of this island, a small boat bobbed. In that boat, a woman about my age looked at me over the top of her sunglasses. As our eyes met, she picked up an army surplus ammo can and placed it on the gunwale. Steadying it with one hand, she reached down with the other and grabbed a rope, which she clipped onto one of the can’s handles.

She eased the can into the water, the rope slowly playing out as it sank. With the ammo can on the bottom of the bay, she threw the remaining rope and the red buoy attached to it into the water. Then she sat back in her seat, shifted gears, and headed back out to sea.

I climbed down the steep bank to the stone slabs and stripped. Carefully, I moved down the slick surface and slid into the sea. Shocked by the cold, I lunged toward the buoy, grabbed the rope, and swam back to shore. I pulled the ammo can onto the rock, tilted it upright, and pulled open the latches sealing it. I reached in and pulled out a small smooth grey stone. I rubbed off the gel it had been suspended in and turned it over. Engraved into the stone was a perfect black dragonfly.

I had this dream during an unintended nap between sessions of a seminar I was attending. After I sat down, my back against a large boulder, my consciousness began flickering, my head nodding. Trying hard to stay awake. Giving in.

Then awake. Where was I? Engulfed in nap-fog, I leaned against the solid boulder perched on the edge of both a dream island and a real island. The dream had softened everything around me. The world seemed gel-like, still forming. The color green was more powerful than gravity. And the next seminar session: Was I late for it? Had it ended?

Although my nap was inadvertent, it made sense. At one level, we’d been up late for the third night in a row. We’d eaten dinner and then listened trance-like while one guest played his didgeridoo and another her drum. As some of us talked and others danced, one of my mates rushed in from outside, yelling, The tide is phosphorescent! We all jumped up and followed her out the door, down the boardwalk, through the forest to the beach. There, as if lit from within, each small wave glowed blue-green as it rose from its dark source. We stripped and jumped in and swam with the magic. The tiny phytoplankton responsible for the light clung to our wet bodies later as we stood shivering in the slight breeze. Our skin sparked blue until it dried, a few hours before dawn.

At another level, the nap and the dream exposed a deep void I’d had that needed filling.

Like most modern humans, I was raised to believe only in what I could see. Or in what I was told to believe by those wanting to control me. The scrutiny and judgement of that white-bearded god who didn’t miss a thing. Those golden plates. Trickledown economics. The nap and the dragonfly dream had cracked the fragile surface I’d assumed was bedrock, exposing beneath it a vast, intricate inner world I will spend the rest of my life exploring.

Confused, I struggled to my feet, startled that I’d dozed off—for how long, I didn’t know. I gathered my bearings and sorted them for clues, worried about missing the next workshop session. I looked down from my perch and noticed the rock slab was half the size it had been in my dream, diminished by the rising tide.

The dream played like a film inside my forehead as I pushed up the trail through air as thick as water. My post-dream world was all brand new, although I’d been down that same trail hours before, pre-dream. Post-dream, boulders vibrated. Air currents took on bodies which danced through tall grasses. Colors struck and stabbed. Insects called to one another in a language I almost knew. I’m not late, I said out loud, looking ahead, seeing people milling about waiting for the session to begin.

Pre-dragonfly dream, I’d paid only fleeting attention to my dreams, and then on my own terms and schedule. I kept them to myself. And so I locked the dragonfly in my dark box where I keep all my dreams, to be opened by choice, when necessary, often as a last resort. I have the only key.

But that dragonfly would not be contained.

As if invisible, I floated among the other participants, not ready to interact, the world soft, in slow motion. I felt new, wet, between skins. Moving to the edge, I stopped next to the small stream that flowed through the campus, and I saw a miracle.

Dragonflies, I said, surprised by the sound of my own voice. Ten fluorescent-blue winged needles hovered among the reeds growing at the water’s edge. How beautiful, I said.

My new friend Aly overheard me. What? she said. You haven’t noticed? They’ve been around all week.

I may have noticed them, but I hadn’t really seen them until now, after the dream.

My second dragonfly encounter. The one in my dream, carved in stone, was the first.

Over the next two decades, I would have dozens of significant encounters with dragonflies, my messengers.

2

BLUET (EITHER TAIGA, NORTHERN, OR BOREAL), CORTES ISLAND, BRITISH COLUMBIA

Those small blue swarming dragonflies at the conference center were actually damselflies. The order Odonata consists of both dragonflies and damselflies, suborder Anisoptera and Zygoptera, respectively. Even with the help of my field guides and my journal notes, I can’t identify them precisely. Needle-like abdomen, striped thorax, and alternating blue and black abdominal bands suggest that my Canadian damselflies could have been any number of different species. Considering geographic distribution narrowed the possibilities to bluets—either taiga, northern, or boreal. If I ever go back to Cortes Island I will have made a list of those often seen in the area and know their flight season. I’ll pay attention to any damselflies that appear, especially to the markings on their eyes and their S10 segment, at the end of their abdomen, and I’ll know for sure they are bluets and not dancers. Their abdominal stripes will indicate whether they are taiga bluets (which have wider black than blue) or boreal (wider blue than black).

3

CHERRY-FACED MEADOWHAWK, CASTLE VALLEY, UTAH