Dragonflies, framed.

At some point, I will probably revisit last week's post on giftedness. It did get a conversation going on Facebook, which I'm glad of. I think a lot of us smart folks learn to hide our light under a bushel basket to appear "normal", so that we aren't subjected to bullying, jealousy, and so on.

I do want to apologize for some of my terminology, though. I did not mean to denigrate people who have ADHD or are on the autism spectrum. My beef is with those who would lump everybody who's not "normal" into the same basket and offer all of them the same sorts of solutions for their "problems", when it's clear that our situations are wildly different.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

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I am hoping to be in a position to reveal the new and improved laundry closet in next week's post. There have been some setbacks over the past couple of weeks, so I'm not promising anything. But I want to focus this week on small bits of progress -- like this picture. 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

It's not actually a picture. It's a piece of Italian wrapping paper that I found at Barnes & Noble. I put it in the frame yesterday. (I also covered some in clear contact paper and glued it to a small wooden crate.) I thought the colors would go really well with the yellow walls. But the dragonflies are symbolic, too.

If you ask Mama Google "dragonfly meaning", you'll get a whole bunch of hits, most of them centering around the idea of transformation. Dragonflies start out as larvae and eventually transform into the four-winged creatures we're familiar with. When you extend that idea symbolically, you get the idea of maturing -- from a childhood state into a more evolved, more mature form. So dragonflies represent not just transformation, but also the gaining of wisdom that comes with maturity.

I've written about dragonflies before, in July of 2016. Back then, I talked about how I think of them liminal creatures because they live on land but must stay near water to lay their eggs. That connection to water also connects them to the emotions, and gods know this has been an emotional time for me. Besides all the complications with renovating a literal closet in my home (more on that next week, assuming all goes well this week), I've also been dealing with the thing in my head that I mentioned briefly in July.

What I have is an acoustic neuroma -- a benign tumor on the auditory nerve of my left ear. It's also called a vestibular schwannanoma. This type of tumor is slow growing; I first realized I had a problem in February 2021, when I was sitting at my dinette table one day, minding my own business, and suddenly the hearing in my left ear cut out and tinnitus replaced it. It tooks months to see an ENT here in Santa Fe. An MRI confirmed that the thing was in there. The protocol then was "watch and wait", plus another MRI in a year's time. After the second MRI, I was referred to an ENT specialist in Rio Rancho.

There are two treatment options besides "watch and wait": surgery, in which the surgeon literally cuts into your skull and fetches the thing out; and gamma knife radiation or gamma knife radiosurgery, in which the doctors and technicians put you in a machine and focus a whole bunch of gamma rays on the tumor. That wrecks its DNA, so that eventually it dies off and hopefully shrinks. My docs said I was a good candidate for gamma knife, so that's what I had done on October 3rd. 

The worst part was having the metal frame attached to my head. It has pins that go through your skin and anchor it to your skull in four places. The frame is then clipped into an MRI machine so they can map your brain and figure out how to target the tumor; then it's clipped into the gamma knife machine for the actual procedure. We got there at 6:30 a.m. and were done before noon.

For a couple of days after, I had a mild headache and swollen eyes. Plus the pin above my right eye hit a blood vessel, and I still have a pretty good shiner from it. I've also been more tired than usual. But that's pretty much it for side effects.

Because the tumor grows slowly, it'll take a couple of years before we know whether the procedure worked. If not, then the option of last resort is surgery. But gamma knife has a success rate above 95%, so I'm hoping this will be it. Some patients get their hearing back, but my docs say it's not gonna happen in my case. Which sucks, because I can only understand 12% of the words I hear in my left ear. 

So yeah, it's been a crazy time here. 

But coming back to the surface: Dragonflies live near water. Laundry rooms are a place where water comes into your home. And a transformation happens there: the machines remove dirt and stains from your clothes and linens, fluff them up, and dry them. Right? So if you're looking to put some symbolism in your laundry area, dragonflies are perfect. 

Plus this wrapping paper goes really well with the yellow walls. So I framed it.

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These moments of transformational blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Make sure you're registered to vote -- and then do it!

Adventure awaits.

Oh hey -- before I get any further, I should let you know that Treacherous Ground is now available in paperback.

And now, this week's post.

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We're wrapping up an extra-long holiday weekend here at hearth/myth; the day job shut down (as much as a law firm ever shuts down) on both Thursday and Friday for the Independence Day holiday. I was off so long that I was losing track of which day of the week it was. Pretty sure today is Sunday, which means I owe y'all a blog post.

I have to tell you that it's been really, really nice, having this string of days off -- which is either a preview of how great it will be when I retire in about a year, or a rotten tease because it's Not. Here. Yet.

To beat back the "rotten tease" part, I'm creating a sort of hybrid calendar/journal. You can buy these as blank books -- they're called planners. And as it turns out, planners are where the paper crafters went after scrapbooking went digital. All the pretty papers, stickers, diecut shapes, and so on work as well in a planner as they do on a scrapbook page (although everything needs to be downsized from 12" x 12" to 1.5 inches square, give or take). A number of companies have created blank journals, with Staples' Arc brand being perhaps the least twee.

My problem with a lot of the preprinted planner stuff is the same problem I had with a bunch of the scrapbooking stuff: It's not me. Anything with a Bible verse on it is a non-starter for this Pagan -- but that's not my only issue. A lot of the offerings are either aimed at young women (pastel narwhals! cute sushi!) or busy mothers (little stickers featuring washing machines, school buses, vacuum cleaners, coffee cups, and for the really bad days, martini glasses and suitcases). Then there are the words in various fonts that are supposed to be encouraging, but are basically nagging you: "Gym," "Laundry," and so on. (I saw one sticker that said, "Do your damn laundry." Even though I'd be the one putting it on the page, if I ran across that in the wrong mood, I'd throw the planner across the room.)

It just seems like all this stuff is aimed at people who are trying to keep up, when here I am, trying to wind down. Oh, I've seen some retirement-related stuff, but most of it looks like it's for a scrapbook page for a retirement party. Or it's meant for what comes after -- the Winnebago, the Adirondack chair, and the joke about what you call the person who's happy on Monday.

So I'm falling back on different images: dream catchers; dragonflies, which symbolize transformation at a mature, permanent level; and this Death Tarot card, which for me encapsulates the true meaning of what's often seen as a scary card: killing off that which has outlived its usefulness in order for new, healthy growth to occur.

Although there's room for fun stuff in my planner, too. I've laid in a supply of llama stickers. And if you're looking for stickers for the days when you just want to throw your computer out the window, here you go.

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These moments of affirmative blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Finding magic in the real world.

There's a dragonfly hanging around the parking lot of my apartment building. I've been seeing it every afternoon when I come home from work. Usually it simply crosses my field of vision, but sometimes it zips past me to really make sure it gets my attention.

I tend to think of dragonflies as liminal creatures, right on the border between reality and the fantastic. Part of it is their appearance: their bulbous heads, long, slender tails, and iridescent wings make them look less of this world and more of some unaccountable one. Part of it is the way they zip through the air, ducking and hovering in ways that we think we might be able to understand, if only we could read them as well as (or better than!) we read other humans.

Dragonflies need to stay near water, because that's where they lay their eggs. The element of water is linked with the emotions, which might make dragonflies suspect to the rational-minded. And in fact, many cultures have superstitions, most of them unflattering, about dragonflies. I wrote a story about them once -- or rather, I wrote a story in which dragonflies play a significant role. I made the main character a news reporter partly so I had an excuse to do a brain-dump of all the fascinating things I learned about them. (The story's called "Lulie." You can buy it for 99 cents at Amazon.)

But my story was strictly fantasy; the dragonflies in it were real, but they carried a magical message that my main character, Artie, resisted all the way. If "Lulie" had been magic realism, Artie would have been a very different character, and the dragonflies' message would have been less overt than Come down to the family farm and meet your cousin by the light of the moon. It would have been less insistent, more intriguing, and more of an answer to a deeper dilemma Artie himself was wrestling with.

Because magic realism works best, I think, with characters who are on the verge of something: a difficult transition from childhood to adolescence; an insistent need to escape an intolerable situation, whether domestic (physical or emotional abuse) or on a wider scale (war, racial hatred, etc.); or a cognitive dissonance that may be close to manifesting as mental illness (the movie Birdman comes to mind). The characters have to be open enough to magic to not shy away from it. They need to be in a liminal frame of mind.

I've been sufficiently intrigued by my dragonfly friend to investigate why he or she has been trying to get my attention (other than as a subject for this blog post, I mean). In Animal Speak, Ted Andrews says Dragonfly, as a totem, is about the power of light:

Dragonflies remind us that we are light and can reflect the light in powerful ways if we choose to do so. "Let there be light" is the divine prompting to use the creative imagination as a force within your life.

Tomorrow is Lughnasadh, the Pagan first harvest. For those of us in North America, the celebration comes at the height of summer. On this Lughnasadh eve, I'm going to try to remember to let my light shine. I hope you do the same.

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This post is part of the 2016 Magic Realism Blog Hop. In fact, it may be the final post, time-wise, in this year's hop -- which means you can click through the list below and catch them all at once! Big thanks again to Zoe Brooks for organizing another intriguing hop.






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These moments of hoppy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.