Dragonflies

  This trip has required that I sit in various modes of ground transportation for many hours each day.  We are bounced and jolted through cities choked with traffic, and villages chock-a-block with carts and cattle.  The road surfaces vary from poorly maintained highways to one-lane, flooded tracks whose length sometimes seems endless.

  I spend most of this travel time with my nose pressed to the window taking in sights that are often difficult to understand as “reality”.  India has been like a cosmic can opener that has taken off the top of my head and rearranged my perspectives on life. 

One of the more mundane yet fascinating things that I’ve noticed is the swarms of dragonflies in the countryside.  Often, as the bus slows to a crawl to navigate a water-filled pot-hole of indeterminate depth, I can clearly see these delicate, gossamer insects with their flashing metallic-tinted wings, gliding over and hovering above the flowering vegetation that line the road.  Their wings vibrate with colors as they imperceptibly touch down on a flower for only an instant, as if it was too hot to light upon.  Hover, touch down, move on; this sequence is repeated a million times by the innumerable swarms.  Such a rhythm gives an appearance that they have no real interest or bond with the ground they fly over.

  At some point during my observation of this phenomenon, it suddenly struck me that I was very much like these insects.

  For the past few weeks I’ve been hovering and flashing over India in sanitized, air-conditioned (though often rickety) coaches and vans by day, and at night, looked down upon the sprawling chaos from my windows safely ensconced in the rarefied air of five-star hotels.  I’ve flown in pressurized comfort at icy altitudes over measureless kilometers of the steaming slums of the great cities of India in mere minutes.  I too have only imperceptibly touched down; but I have made contact.

  It only required one step out from my glass bubble of privilege and into the street.  It only took a moment; the length of time needed for my senses to process the onslaught of the paucity, the unfamiliar, the “unsavory”, and for my eyes to dare to meet those of the unfortunate.  

  

  Hover, touch down, move on.  My travels continue, but each moment of contact is a gift of the knowledge of God’s grace to me.  I understand and am so grateful for how much of heaven I’m already living in.