I Wasn’t Always a Dragon
I was recently up visiting my brother Tom, and we took the boat out on the Columbia River, somewhere between Oregon and Vancouver, Washington.
It was midweek, so we had a lot of quiet on the river.
We pulled up to a little island in the middle of the Columbia, set out a couple of camp chairs and just sat.
Tom and I.
Hanging out.
Being quiet.
And if you know either Tom or me, you know that’s a rare state for us.
But it felt so good.
It was probably the closest thing to being completely unplugged that I’d experienced on the whole trip.
Eventually, Tom drifted off into a shallow, peaceful nap, and I wandered off for a little walk along the shore.
That’s where I witnessed nature doing its thing.
Surprising.
A little shocking.
And ultimately, inspiring.
As I walked along the water, I noticed what looked like some little creature that had crawled up out of the river, and sitting right on top of its head was another creature.
Attacking it.
At least that’s what I thought.
It looked like some sort of parasite had attached itself to this poor thing and was sucking the life right out of it.
I was grotesquely enthralled. I’ve always liked macabre.
And naturally, because apparently I can’t watch a bizarre river creature being eaten alive without making it about myself, I started thinking:
I know that feeling.
Sometimes it feels like my own head is sucking the life out of me.
Taking perfectly good resources—calm, ease, energy—and turning them into a tempest of uncertainty, imagination, suffering, thoughts and stories.
How do I escape the succubus of my own making?
Maybe this poor little river creature had a strategy or two.
So I watched.
────── 𓆦 ──────
I didn’t have my glasses or my phone.
I had only time and imagination.
And fuzzy vision.
I felt a little like Sir David Attenborough.
Maybe a dry-land Jacques Cousteau.
Dare I say, Marlin Perkins.
The kingdom was wild out there.
Eventually curiosity got the better of me. I needed to know what I was actually looking at.
So I hurried back to our little camp, grabbed my glasses and my phone.
I considered grabbing Tom, but the man had achieved golden slumber—let sleeping brothers lie.
I couldn’t have been gone more than a few minutes.
But when I returned, the scene had already changed.
Now, with my glasses on and the zoom lens of my phone, I could finally see what was happening.
The thing I thought was a parasite was getting bigger.
It was emerging.
Growing.
Changing right in front of me.
This wasn’t an attack.
It was a transformation.
Where was Nat Geo?
This was epic.
Eventually, with a little help from Google—because David Attenborough was off on his own adventures—I figured it out.
I was watching the metamorphosis of a dragonfly.
And this was no little dragonfly.
She was enormous and a deep bottle-glass green.
What I had thought was some unfortunate creature being consumed was actually a dragonfly pulling herself from the hard shell of the life she had known.
And suddenly the whole scene looked different.
That’s the strange thing about change.
Sometimes transformation looks terrifying when we don’t yet understand what we’re looking at.
Something ends.
A relationship changes.
A child grows up.
A career shifts.
A familiar routine disappears.
The outer shell starts cracking before we have any idea what we’re becoming.
And from the outside—or especially from the inside—it can look like everything is falling apart.
There has been a lot of that kind of change around me lately.
Sarah has been watching her daughters move into entirely new stages of their lives.
High school is over for Ceci and college is beginning. Catalina is entering her second year. They have jobs, schedules and responsibilities of their own.
Although somehow there are still dishes in the sink.
Apparently some stages of metamorphosis take longer than others.
But the rhythms Sarah shared with her girls for years are changing.
And because I’m standing just slightly outside of it, I get to watch something remarkable.
I see pieces of Sarah appearing in each of her daughters while they simultaneously become entirely themselves.
And I can also feel the uncomfortable part of it.
The old ways don’t quite fit anymore.
The new ones haven’t completely formed.
That’s a vulnerable place to be.
────── 𓆦 ──────
Back on the shore, the dragonfly was in exactly that place.
She finally pulled herself completely free from the old shell.
Her long body extended behind her.
Her wings were still folded, not yet fully extended.
And then she just sat there.
The gentle breeze moved across the Columbia while Madame Dragonfly dried her new body and wings.
Watching her, it almost seemed as though a new program was being downloaded.
For most of her life, she had known how to live underwater.
Now all of that was over.
Different body.
Different environment.
Different rules.
She was going to have to fly.
And somehow, she knew how.
Flight school in about thirty minutes.
Watching her reminded me of something else.
Sometimes along our own path, we don’t realize how much we’ve changed.
Progress can feel like watching grass grow.
Or, in my case, watching my hairline recede.
Day to day, you don’t see much happening.
Then you go away for a while, come home and think:
Good Lord. Look at that.
────── 𓆦 ──────
Sometimes it takes a friend, teacher or someone who hasn’t seen us in a while to recognize the transformation before we do.
I’ve been experiencing some of that myself.
Recently, I lost a long-term client.
It wasn’t a surprise. We both knew our relationship was coming to an end.
But knowing change is coming doesn’t necessarily make the change comfortable.
Suddenly, routines that had shaped my days and my life for years were gone.
And for a little while, I felt a lot like that creature crawling onto the shore.
Extricating myself from old habits and patterns.
Waiting for the new program to download.
Trying to trust myself in an environment that feels different from the one I knew.
Maybe that’s why I needed to see that dragonfly.
Because nature doesn’t seem nearly as concerned about transformation as we are.
Nature doesn’t look at the empty shell and say:
Well, this has gone terribly wrong.
The shell served its purpose.
And then it was time to leave it behind.
The ancient practitioners of Yoga understood something about this.
They watched nature.
Animals.
Plants.
The movement of bodies.
The rhythms of breath.
And they discovered that by paying attention to nature, we could learn something about our own nature.
Maybe that little island on the Columbia was offering the same lesson.
There are periods in our lives when we are breaking free from a shell that once protected us.
And that’s often when we’re most vulnerable.
We haven’t quite figured out what the next version of ourselves looks like.
The old life doesn’t fit.
The new wings aren’t dry yet.
And we haven’t learned how to use them.
So we wait.
We trust.
We let the new program download.
I watched that dragonfly for more than half an hour.
I watched her break free from the shell of the life she had known.
I watched her wings unfold.
I watched her become still.
And then—
she flew.
Off across the Columbia to continue the circle of her life.
Leaving that empty shell behind on the shore.
And I thought:
If the dragonfly can do it,
so can I.
────── 𓆦 ──────
Maybe that’s true for all of us.
There will be moments when we don’t recognize ourselves.
Moments when change looks more like destruction than transformation.
Moments when all we can see and feel is the shell breaking apart.
But the shell isn’t always the end of something.
Sometimes it’s evidence that something else is ready to emerge.
We just haven’t taken flight yet.
────── 𓆦 ──────
ROAR with Love,
Danny
The Emotional Driver
“Emotion Is the Note. You Are the Song.”
