Birth or Death
I headed for my favorite debriefing place. My lake. Everybody needs a place to go to be alone when times get tough. And this had been one tough day. A piece had been busted out of the circle of life. The lake was working its magic. I sat enjoying the way the wooden dock stretched out before me into the blue of the water and the blue of the sky with nothing but green of trees to break the blue.
As I sat contemplating nothing but the blue and green, an ugly black bug crawled up from the water and attached itself to the dock by its picky feet. I knew it was a Dragonfly bug. I had read that they live in the water for about five years before coming out on land and morphing into large blue-green Dragonflies to mate and lay eggs. I watched the back of the bug split open like something from a horror movie. Iridescent colors started out of the black. I was amazed at the size of the Dragonfly that unfolded its body from the ugly bug. It has to be three times the length of the bug, which was now only a bug shell. It looked like a wet newborn baby. For hours I sat and watched as its body filled with life giving blood, it's wings the last to dry and open.
As I watched, my mind drifted back through my day. Life and death. I wondered if the black bug knew that by crawling out of the water he was going to a new life; a life with wings, trees, blue sky and a mate. Did the bugs left below know that he went to a new life or did they just know he was gone? Which is the true life? The one crawling around underwater or the one flying in the sunshine?
What is this new blue? A flash out of the tree beside me. A Blue Jay swooping down.
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You do nice things with colors--hammering right away. And irony too--thanks for not going any further than you do; the reader will work it out! And, just generally Nature, blue, green, and red in tooth and claw...we do get that irony, no worries about that!
ReplyDeleteAnd, what if you dropped this: "I headed for my favorite debriefing place. My lake. Everybody needs a place to go to be alone when times get tough. And this had been one tough day. A piece had been busted out of the circle of life."
Or did it this way: "Everybody needs a place to go to be alone. I sat enjoying the way the wooden dock stretched out before me into the blue of the water and the blue of the sky with nothing but green of trees to break the blue."
Would the reader have gotten the symbolism of the funeral and a family member dying too soon? That's what's hard. Trusting the reader to figure it out.
ReplyDeleteThe important thing is the story of the dragonfly and blue jay. The reader gets that.
ReplyDeleteThe writer's job is not to make it clear enough for the reader to be able to take and pass a multiple choice quiz later. The reader can be challenged by mysterious hard-to-grasp things but still read on because of the writer's viewpoint and art. The fable of the insect and the bird do that.