Searching For Dragons

Searching for "Dragons"... a world of wonder

Published September 21, 2009 by Grant | E-mail this post

I receive weekly science news emails from the David Suzuki Foundation. Just last week I got a great one: a scanned pdf file from a magazine in 1956 of an article by Rachel Carson. It is called, "Help your child to wonder", and its message is just as pertinent today as it was 53 years ago.

Here it is: carsonwonder2.pdf

This article got me thinking again about a blog I wanted to write for some time now... about the little things you can find in nature if you just look closely enough. Now, we tend to think of "nature" like we do for "environment", just somewhere, out there, intangible. But, we are as much a part of the natural world as is "nature", it's just that we have surrounded ourselves with so much technology and electronics that we think of ourselves as in little isolated bubbles unaffected by the natural world. Well, as you will read in this article, we are in danger of losing our sense of wonder about nature. We are still living in a Cartesian world, where we are situated as the users and usurpers of nature, not part of it and subject to its ebb and flow, as Dan aptly points out.

In Spanish, lizards are colloquially known as "dragons", so to borrow Dan's metaphor for ancient wisdom, I set out a while back to search for these elusive dragons, while rediscovering my repressed sense of wonder.

Just below our balcony there is a little enclosed area where we keep the hens and partridges.

Here, there is an old wooden door kept locked with a skeleton key. Upon this door, near the hinges there hide dragons. These dragons are small. perhaps about 4 inches long, but they dominate their world of insects and spiders.

You have to look closely and carefully to find them, else they slither away faster than you can react. In the summer months, at least. The dragons come out mostly in the summer, and are much more active and faster moving in the heat. Being cold-blooded they thrive upon the heat. They need it to survive. In the summer evenings they can be seen briskly crawling quickly up and down and side to side along the walls of buildings chasing smaller insects and finding food for their young. They stick to the walls using little minature suction cups and claws on their feet. They seem to defy gravity. From the perspective of these dragons, what, to us seems like a smooth stucco wall, is in fact filled with grooves and bumps and is easy to grip. They move stealthfully after their prey, but if you are patient and observent you can see them snatch a juicy fly out of mid-air and munch it up in a few seconds. In the winter, the dragons go into semi-hibernation, I would say. This is my observation. I'm not a biologist, so I can't say I read this in a book, but I know one thing... they are easy to catch in the winter. They are silient, but sluggish, preserving their energy until the spring when the bounty of life begins to multiply once again. This is the ebb and flow of the seasons. The ebb and flow of heat and light from the sun that provoke the ebb and flow of life.

Here in northern Spain, we are at about the latitude of New York City, the extreme southern tip of Canada (Pelee Island), Northern California, the Northern tip of Honshu, or Beijing. So, our seasons are quite pronounced. While we don't get much snow in the winter, that is more a function of the moderate Mediterranean climate, rather than the latitude. It can get quite chilly in the winter. But, the dragons survive. It's at this time, that a curious, child-like mind of wonder can reach out and gently pick up one of these beautiful creatures, being careful not to squeeze too hard. Although they are the masters of their domain, their world of insects and spiders, even a small child has the power to easily kill one without realizing it. These dragons are beautiful, but fragile, like nature itself.

Nature abounds wherever you look... you just have to look. Outside the old wooden door, I have found there are more dragons, swallow nests, bats, cats, fruits, vegetables, a microcosm of nature itself. Living. If you just open the door, there is nature, the whole world, waiting for you to explore it, waiting for you to wonder. It's more important to teach ourselves how to wonder than to learn simple, boring facts. This could very well be the problem with the whole western education system, fact after fact crammed into your brain, limited standardized testing without being taught how to learn, to wonder.