are you a dragonfly?

A dragonfly is not an ornament of summer ponds.

It is balance and hunger refined into beauty. Its wings trace the mathematics of air, keeping stillness intact. Without it, mosquitoes swarm, water turns fevered. To see a dragonfly is to glimpse a system still holding.

In a room of immaculate corporate white, you remembered this. Teeth gleamed across the pill shaped table, making you squint at the noon glare. The backdrop architecture did too. They spoke of investing in the new world.

You wanted to believe. You wanted to think you were watching wings above the water. You wish you could tell you this room had happened to me only once, recently.

But, none of the ideas are new. They are old containers, lacquered until the surface blinds the eye. New wine in old wineskins. Fragrance over decay. Profiteers of the old world, feeling better about themselves—superior while acting humble, making a joke of how only the arrogant speak of humility. Investing in more gleamers, while guts spray in Gaza.

You offered perspective. In an instant, you became the problem.

You imagined what you saw.

You left. The room stayed gleaming, and you were an easy shadow. One day you’ll see them tearfully celebrating the new world with an award in hand, probably 17, profiting for generations to come. Again.

You carry the tremor, even right now. You see the history books. The joke will be on them.

You wonder how many dragonflies have been silenced this way. Wings cut not by storm, but by denial. Told the toxins were not there. Told their sight was flawed. Told they had invented the fever rising in the pond.

The dragonfly knows before the water becomes unbearable. It hovers, traces imbalance, beats its wings in warning. But when its vision is called too sharp, too inconvenient, the dragonfly dies. The sickness blooms without witness. They are the first to suffer imbalance. Do we?

Fukuoka once wrote:

“I look forward to the day when there is no need for sacred scriptures or sutras. The dragonfly will be the messiah.”

What is lost is not the insect alone, but the balance it sustained. Silence falls across the water. Beautiful, perhaps. But absence gleams differently than life. You will not mistake the two again.

And if you are a dragonfly: listen to yourself.