Sitting on the shaded bench on my allotment in my time honoured ‘sit spot’, my thoughts had turned to my upcoming 75th birthday party the next day; one of those milestones of human ageing. I was looking forward to being with some old friends, and was thinking about the passing of time and life. Thoughts felt like they were arising within the mellow autumnal scene around me and I wasn’t separating myself out from my surroundings. I was enjoying seeing the plants around me, refreshed by recent rain following a long drought, having a last spurt of growth as the tree leaves turned yellow.
Something caught my attention, a strange movement a few feet away on the other side of my little wildlife pond. I couldn’t see what it was, since it was behind my wooden cold frame; yet again and again I was drawn to something moving up and down vertically in that spot, and it seemed like it was beckoning to me.
I got up to investigate. And there was a bright red dragonfly, flying upwards and then downwards and then hovering, all while remaining fairly close to the ground above my lush parsley patch. If it had been above the pond, I would have understood, but this dragonfly showed no interest in my pond, which has remained a rare oasis of open water following the summer’s severe drought. So this activity was unusual to say the least, and this bright shining being showed none of the wariness I associate with dragonflies.
I intuitively felt it was bringing a message for me though I wasn’t initially sure what that might be, though it felt auspicious. I stood nearby and listened into whatever might be being communicated. I was somehow sure this was related to my meditation on life, ageing and purpose I had just been engaged with.
Across the world, dragonflies have always been regarded as auspicious messengers. In the Chinese tradition, they symbolise good luck and fresh new beginnings. The colour red is universally tied to vitality, courage and primal strength. Dragonflies live in water as nymphs before taking to the air as luminous adults. This sudden appearance in front of me could point to a transitional stage, a letting go of the past and rising into a new version of oneself.
The next day, my birthday event was a great joy surrounded by friends, many of whom I’d shared the search for truth and meaning with for several decades, some even for over half a century. Their wishes and reflections, as well as a veritable dossier of virtual well-wishing messages from old friends across the world served both to set a loving seal on the past and also to propel me forward into this fourth quarter of a century on this earth.
After the event, I thought again about my dragonfly encounter the previous day and I realised in retrospect, the significance of the meanings I had previously looked up.
Somehow the dragonfly had served as a prescient messenger. It made me reflect on what a great joy it is to find myself coming into a deeper relation with the earth, with the cosmos.
The sceptic would say that this is just a coincidence with no significance, and that I had merely seen a male Common Darter dragonfly, and the male of this species happen to be red. I understand how from a strictly rational standpoint, where you consider the whole world as consisting of discrete objects and us the only truly conscious subjects, then of course it doesn’t compute.
Yet for myself, it confirmed how, when we open ourselves up to begin to encounter the world directly, there may well be a response, if we are sensitive enough to recognise it; it takes a heightening of our sensitivity to the energetic patterns in operation in our environment. And this is what I’ve been increasingly finding. I wasn’t wanting or asking for anything; it was just what emerged from my becoming increasingly more attuned to the eros of the cosmos, and experiencing the constant resonance between the One and the Many.
There’s of course, a parallel in Jungian psychology of synchronicity: meaning an acausal connecting principle, defined as the simultaneous occurrence of an inner psychic state (such as a dream, thought, or feeling) and an outer physical event that share a meaningful parallel without any direct causal link.
However, synchronicity in the Jungian sense, and ontopoetics (which is what I am referring to here) differ in that while synchronicity is an observational framework for acausal coincidences, ontopoetics is an active, communicative practice of reciprocal dialogue with the living cosmos. Ontopoetics is the kind of practice that calls reality into active presence and invites it to collaborate with us in the making of meaning. It’s in line with what philosopher Owen Barfield called ‘Final Participation’.
It’s quite different from practices of manifestation, where the aim is to get something for oneself. Also, it would be easy to narcissistically and erroneously take every occurrence in daily life as meaning something about ‘me’.
In contrast, ontopoetics is a serious practice which is not focussed on the separate self sense. The practice of engaging in dialogue with the world is simply for the sake of communion and the possibility of response; it’s in service to the eros of the cosmos and depends on consciousness of the subjectivity of both self and world and the possibility of their interactive communication.
Several days later I was back again on my sit spot on my allotment and I was greeted by a soft subsong whispering in my right ear. It revealed Robin sitting on a twig close by at the level of my head. It’s the kind of almost private song that you wouldn’t hear unless very close by.
We’re in the process of becoming friends and my allotment is clearly his home and territory. He’s not come for food, since I wait until the winter to start feeding the birds. He doesn’t want anything and seems to enjoy – just as I do – quiet companionship. I’ve written previously about an old robin friend who passed away after we’d been companions for about 6-7 years, (a very good age in robin years) so I’m very glad to be forming a new robin friendship.
We happened to look directly, eye to eye, at each other for a moment and something profound happened: suddenly it became a meeting between two subjects, which was powerful and emotionally impacting. In that instant, it felt as if dissolving any gap of millions of years of divergent evolution. To me, it was a deeper encounter and communicative exchange with the world itself, through this robin.
Having read this far, you might think that while these are charming little tales about dragonflies and robins, which I clearly derive meaning from, do they have any relevance at all to real life and the crises we face?
Well, to me, these kinds of experiences can actually be one part of the solution.
Because here’s the conundrum we face: in spite of all the indisputable scientific data about climate chaos, destruction of the biosphere and the knowledge of our slide into the Sixth Mass Extinction, the sad truth is that most of us don’t feel so emotionally connected to all this, except perhaps in fleeting moments. And I don’t mean just the climate deniers, I mean caring, intelligent people.
A taste of experiences like these feels primordial and astonishing, and tends to have further reaching effects than you might at first assume. Such experiences can actually shift and greatly enlarge the self sense so that you become intimately attached to the world; you’re no longer able to distance yourself from being included in this larger identity.
After this, there’s no longer any question of not caring, or being indifferent to our world’s fate. We’re inseparably, emotionally bonded.
