God in the Noticing
There’s a little chapel, near a lake, at a summer camp in the Adirondack mountains. It is evening and the campers have all gone back to their cabins. The staff, as usual, has trickled away toward whatever evening activities call for them. A few of us have stayed behind on the slate stone patio to the chapel, held here by the quiet mood which tends to settle over the chapel at this time of day. The sun is down now behind the mountains on the far side of the lake but it is not yet fully dark. There is still color in the trees and the grass, still depth when I look into the woods. A dragonfly buzzes by and I notice. I notice because we are quite a ways from the water. I notice because it is late to see dragonflies. And I notice because I’ve trained myself to notice dragonflies over the years.
The dragonfly arcs around and dips down over the grassy chapel lawn. And then over the grass I see that there are more dragonflies. I take a step down off the deck toward the lawn. The dragonflies buzz around, showing off their aerobatics.
I’ve watched a lot of dragonflies. Often while sitting in a canoe or standing near the edge of a lake or river. I’ve always been impressed by them. It’s not uncommon to see dozens of dragonflies at once but they always seem to take their own space, even fight each other off.. But here there must be hundreds of dragonflies and they are all flying in the same small space. I cannot fathom how they could fly such wild patterns and never crash. There are birds that fly in huge packs, starlings and others, all reacting to one another’s movements. And there are fish that swim in giant schools, as if one organism. But in those cases, each individual seems to follow the individual next to it, the group becoming a single whole. There is a kind of synchrony to it, which is beautiful and also awe inspiring. But this is something different. There is no synchrony here. Each individual zips and darts, changing speeds, forward, backward, up and down.
As I watch, my eyes focus to be able to see the dragonflies better, like getting used to the dark, but even as I watch them I am unable to see what must also be there, a hatch of some smaller insect, the prey which drew this swarm. They must be in the air all around me, some tiny flying thing which the dragonflies are scooping up and shoveling into their mouths in mid air. Some research suggests that dragonflies are successful in 95% of their attempts to catch prey, making them some of the most efficient predators of the animal world. But their efficiency and their viciousness is invisible to me. I can only see their speed and their maneuverability.
I stay and watch them for a long time. Or maybe it is not so long. I am transported while I watch them. I’ve heard that dragonflies experience time differently than we do. Not just dragonflies, but any creature with a different neurophysiology. Dragonflies have much smaller brains than we do, that’s no surprise. But what that means is that signals can move much faster through their bodies and through their neural network. Every photon of light that enters a dragonfly’s giant eye can reach its brain, be processed, and result in some physiological change — a shift of a wing for example — in a fraction of the time it would take that same photon of light to go from my eye to my brain and result in some reaction. Because of this, the smallest moment a dragonfly is able to experience, is much much smaller than anything I can realize. For me, for all humans, time can only be broken down so far. The smallest segment of time we can experience is constrained by how long it takes to actually process something in the world, for some signal to move from the boundary of our body to our brain and back out. In that same amount of time, a dragonfly has processed many images, made decisions about them, changed a flight pattern and eaten dinner.
While I watch them, the world beyond that lawn blurs for a while and I see only the flitting and darting of a hundred dragonflies. And then, without my seeing any one dragonfly leave, the swarm thins and then it is only a few dragonflies hunting over the grass.
It would have been easy to miss it, to leave quickly into the night like most everyone else. It might even have been easy to be uninterested, or at least to have been more interested in what was calling me to leave. Would I have stayed if someone somewhere were waiting for me or if I had a chore? If my phone rang would I have picked it up and left? I’ve passed by so many extraordinary things because I was expected to be somewhere or had some plan that seemed unchangeable. I have felt the pull before. Sometimes, while driving I’ve seen an amazing sky, filled with color or a rainbow reaching from one end of earth to the other, and I have though, this deserves to be watched. And still I drive on, feeling guilty that I don’t have the courage to stop by the side of the road, make someone wait. On this night the dragonflies found me ready to be taken.
Jesus asked his disciples to leave everything. He asked them while they were going about their daily tasks. Many of them must have felt the pull but they could not detach themselves from their routines, their families, their jobs. A few he found in a place where they could give full attention and it changed their lives. I’ve put myself often in the place of those who were called and it is much easier for me to relate to the ones who said, “my wife is waiting back at home,” “my business needs tending,” “my children are expecting me.”
To be called at all, to notice what calls over everything else, is not a given.
I have a hard time thinking God sent the dragonflies to me as some sort of message. The dragonflies came to feed on some hatching insects over the grass in front of the chapel in the low light. Was God there? Maybe God was there in the noticing, there in between the dragonflies and me. The dragonflies were fed there on the lawn and filled, and so was I. So maybe there was God in that. But the hatching insects, whatever their species, were mostly devoured. And some of those dragonflies were most likely picked off by birds as they flew back to cover of the woods.
It is easy to see God in something that benefits me or maybe that benefits some external creature in my vision, but the world isn’t nearly as simple as that. In that little patch of lawn, in the time of the dragonfly swarm, a billion interactions took place between creatures and plants and fungi and bacteria, between mites attached to the legs of the dragonflies and the microbiota that live inside the mites, between the mycorrhizal fungus in the ground, intertwined with the roots of the grass which together affected the chemical release, which affected which insects came and went. All of it came together in that moment that I took part in. What does it mean about God? Maybe it means that God is not some humanoid pulling levers or looking down from the sky and controlling the world around each human so that he or she might be blessed or punished. Maybe it means that God is something wider and less human, and who, like the mycorrhizal fungus, has become intertwined with all things, not in a way that controls, but in a way that binds one thing to another, the tiny unidentified insect to the dragonfly to me and out into the trees and the birds watching and waiting for a dragonfly meal, and to the fisher cat stalking in the shadows, still with the cockleburs stuck in her fur waiting to be dropped in some fertile soil, and to the worms and centipedes and millipedes, the poly poly bugs and beetles and spiders and all the other creatures that live always beneath our feet, churning the soil, turning the dead — which are also connected — into the basic elements which will feed the living.
