Saturday Haiku: Butterfly

    open field

    heavy with summer

    butterfly dreams

                          ~ CK

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Photo: a swallowtail butterfly drinking nectar from orange butterflyweed

from Avondale Park Rose & Habitat Garden

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The True Story of a Boy and a Dragonfly

This is an old poem of an even older event. For me, it is a reminder to be open to any invitation that life offers. Sometimes the wondrous unfolds out of the mundane, and sometimes the child is more open than the adult in accepting invitations to wonder.

 

Dragonfly

It’s a childhood memory,

Somehow vivid as trips to grandma’s house

And family dinners on Sunday.

A dragonfly --

That ancient creature of iridescent beauty

Precise as a finely tuned machine

Swift as any fairy --

Greeted me in the back yard.

She hovered for a moment

Then darted to the hillside.

Returning to me,

She hovered again

Then darted back to the hillside.

“I’ll follow that dragonfly,” I said.

She floated along just in front of me,

Allowing for my five-year-old steps,

She followed the path up the hill

And around the bend.

We reached a plateau

Just past the pine tree

Just beyond sight of our back porch.

There, to my surprise,

Was a host of dragonflies.

It looked like some important dragonfly meeting place.

They were flying about in a great circle

Like a living, vibrant wheel,

Like some shimmering vortex

Connecting this world and the next.

She flew on ahead of me and joined the circle.

I stood astounded.

I couldn’t stay long.

It was a dragonfly meeting, you know.

                                                      ~ CK

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Image: Illustration from "The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby" by Charles Kingsley,
           illustrated by Warwick Goble

          Public Domain

          Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Monday Music: Ventura Highway

A great hit from the 1970's! (Notes about the song are below)

Notes from Wikipedia:

Dewey Bunnell, the song's vocalist and writer, has said that the lyric "alligator lizards in the air" in the song is a reference to the shapes of clouds in the sky he saw in 1963 while his family was driving down the coast from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California where they had a flat tire. While his father changed the tire, he and his brother stood by the side of the road and watched the clouds and saw a road sign for "Ventura".

In the booklet for the boxed-set, Highway, he states that the song "reminds me of the time I lived in Omaha as a kid and how we'd walk through cornfields and chew on pieces of grass. There were cold winters, and I had images of going to California. So I think in the song I'm talking to myself, frankly: 'How long you gonna stay here, Joe?' I really believe that 'Ventura Highway' has the most lasting power of all my songs. It's not just the words — the song and the track have a certain fresh, vibrant, optimistic quality that I can still respond to". The song has a "Go West, young man" motif in the structure of a conversation between an old man named Joe and a young and hopeful kid. Joe was modeled after a "grumpy" old man he had met while his dad was stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi at Keesler Air Force Base.

"That's Gerry and Dan doing a harmony on two guitars on the intro. I remember us sitting in a hotel room, and I was playing the chords, and Gerry got that guitar line, and he and Dan worked out that harmony part. That's really the hook of the song."