Last Monday I posted an image of a Green Darner Dragonfly mating wheel in a Blue Spruce tree, under the Christmas in September heading. This is even more Christmassy. It is a mating pair of either White-faced, Cherry-faced, or Ruby Meadowhawks. These three, with bright red males, are all here right now and all so similar that I can not tell from the photo, and I did not see the pair from any other angle. You need to see the face, and even then, it is a chancy thing. We also have the Autumn Meadowhawk right now, in great abundance, which is another one easily confused with this trio, but the Autumn would show lighter colored legs. Close as I can get.

Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.

And for the Sunday thought: I am rapidly coming to the end of dragonfly season. The last Odonata fly in Maine in October. Already the pond, which was alive with dragons and damsels a few weeks ago, is very quiet. You have mating Meadowhawks and Bluets in some numbers, a few Common Darners still flying on warm afternoons, and a solitary Black Saddlebags. There is only one pair of Pondhawks still there, and all the Blue Dashers are gone. I expect one day soon to find the pond and the air above it empty, at least of Odonata.

And, since dragon and damselfly hunting has been such a big part of my summer, both personally and photographically, I am faced with more than the usual fall “what next?” Oh, I know, we will have foliage in a few weeks, and just yesterday my daughter was remarking that the “September skies” are back. By the end of September my travel schedule kicks in, with trips to Oregon, New Jersey, Texas, and New Mexico before Thanksgiving. So I will be busy, and there will be lots to photograph. (And dragon and damselflies still flying in the southern reaches of the journey!)

Still, today, I am caught with that “seasons passing too quickly” feeling. My soul is singing “Where have all the dragons and damsels of summer gone?”  The wheel of time is threatening to run me over.

And I was thinking about time and eternity in another context this week, thinking that too often we think of eternity as an “unimaginable and unending stretch of time” when in fact, eternity is the absence of time altogether. Time and eternity are two alternate views of reality, and they exist side by side, or, better, intertwined…not as we picture them, one after the other, sequentially. Especially NOT “time while we live, and eternity after we die.” And every religion worth the name has offered some way out…some way to transform the temporal view to the eternal. The temporal is, well, temporary at best, and often seen as illusion. Only the eternal is divine. Every religion values eternity and devalues time.

Strange that.

Because, of course, rightly seen, time is just the way we humans experience eternity. We see the passing seasons, and we know, especially as we age, that we have a limited number of them. We see people born and we see people die. Here and not here. And because of that we begin to count the moments…to see each moment as one more or one less, rather than as the moving point, the living point, where we touch eternity…the moving point, the living point, where eternity touches the world of matter in each of us. The only true way out is to learn to see the eternal in every moment, to be the eternal in every moment…to live in time as though there were no time.

Now don’t think I am devaluing time here again. What I mean is that we should each bring the full rich living experience of eternity to bear on every passing moment, so that every moment becomes as valuable to us as all eternity. I mean that we, each of us, should become the moving, the living, point were the eternal divine touches the world.

Seasons come and seasons go. The dragons and damsels of this year are almost gone. And the question is not really “what’s next?” It is always “what’s now?”…an eternity of what’s now…a now that is eternal.

And in saying it, I can almost grasp it. I can almost see it, taste it, feel it. It is almost my reality. And maybe that is as close as we can get…the rest…in this as in everything…must be faith.

A moment filled with meadowhawks in a Blue Spruce tree is, by faith, eternal.