Lessons Learned from an Olive-Winged Drake Mayfly

Hmmm, is the delayed arrival of summer meant to teach me more than just patience?

I’m bubbling over with impatience as I wait out this cool and wet start to the season. Delving into my store of nature photos helps to pass the time. Forced to live variously through them for now, I find greater depths of beauty in them than I might otherwise have discovered.

Horace's Duskywing

I learn from this photo that it’s not always the beauty inherent in the creature itself that is so striking. Sometimes it is the chance intersection in time and the layers of fine detail that paint the picture. This unspectacular Horace’s Duskywing had the good sense to perch on a bright yellow sunflower.

I notice now the mirrored, arrowhead shaped leaves pointing north-south like the needle of a compass. Next, the east-west facing leaves that balance the subtle symmetry. Finally, the ten golden yellow petals lovingly cradling the mottled brown skipper butterfly as it feeds and cross-pollinates in the process.

Great Blue Skimmer

The lesson in this photo – fortune often has a role to play. The blurred, three-sided frame of marsh reeds focuses the eyes attention on this Great Blue Skimmer posing oh so patiently as if it knows the exquisiteness of the moment.

The detail is all by chance. The spiky spines of the legs grasping the reed. The bulging turquoise eyes. The lacework of black veins in the wings accentuated by dark streaks at the base and curving at the wing tips. The smoky blue segments of abdomen. I’d like to say I waited twenty minutes to capture it all. But the truth is it happened by chance in the moment.

Olive-winged Drake Mayfly

Here I learn that sometimes it is all about shapes.  This Olive-winged Drake Mayfly photo is all about curves, angles and textures against the understated chaos of shades of green.

The Mayfly, with its almost impossibly long scissor tail, seems to have contorted itself to match the curve of the leaf on which it perches upside down. The branch angling to the left and the arching leaves, with the arcing veins within them, all seem to be pointing and beckoning to the Mayfly which is itself a perfection of curves and arches and too easily overlooked symmetry.

I can’t shake off the impatience for summer to finally take hold. But as I wait, I learn that each creature is a metaphor for beauty in a different form – the interplay of colours, the exquisite details, the symmetry of contours and profiles. Lessons learned that will make me appreciate summer all the more once it finally arrives.

~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel” – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog . Visit www.smashwords.com to download a free preview of the e-book version.

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