Last summer I had breakfast with a dragonfly. I was drinking tea in the morning sun outside my cottage in Sweden when the dragonfly parked itself on my shoulder. It was sitting there for several minutes, totally motionless, looking like a brooch. All of a sudden, it took off, but returned just as fast, now with a fly or whatever bug it had caught. And so we where sitting there together again, me drinking my tea and eating my toast, the dragonfly crunching its prey. The sun was shining, birds where singing, and it all felt very peaceful. I didn’t want to interrupt our meeting, but I really had a lot of things I needed to do, so after a while I stood up to get going. Just before entering the house, the dragonfly reluctantly left my shoulder
At the time, my sister was very much into a book called “The language of the animals”. It’s kind of a shamanic dictionary, claiming that when one’s having a special experience with an animal (in real life or in a dream) the animal brings you a message. There are hundreds of animals in the book, for each explained with a few sentences what they’re “saying”. I asked my sister what the dragonfly wanted to tell me, and she said the message was that I have a great spiritual gift that I should use, and that I have a strong intuition. I never considered myself being “spiritual” – in fact, I find the word kind of scary – but my intuition often does speak strongly to me. Most of my life I’ve been trying not to listen to it, but after that breakfast I decided to try not to turn it down again.
