The dragonfly

On incremental change, unseen helpers, and growing wings

There’s a stained glass dragonfly that hangs in my office.

I bought it at a craft store in Maine the summer before I became a lower school head in New York City. I knew immediately it belonged in my office, suspended between me and the playground, catching the light.

Every time I look at it, it’s different. Sunset dapples the wings with pink. Night turns them purple.

To me, dragonflies represent spirits, crossing the thin veil between this world and the next.

I’ve been fortunate to grow up surrounded by people who were very much in touch with spirits. My aunt was a hospice counselor. I’ve spent my life learning about death and what happens after. The porous boundaries. The threshold spaces where we can communicate. I feel close to loved ones who died before I was born.

It gives me great peace to know it’s not all up to me. There are helpers in the world, seen and unseen.

To me, the dragonfly represents all of that. It inspired the logo for this newsletter.

There’s another reason I chose a dragonfly for Mothers in Leadership.

It flies.

I wrote about butterfly metamorphosis a few months ago—the chrysalis, the dissolving before the becoming.

That’s one model of growth. Dramatic. Devastating. Total.

But that’s not how dragonflies do it.

Dragonflies undergo incomplete metamorphosis. Incremental changes. Repeated shedding of their exoskeleton. Until one day, they wake up, and they have wings.

This is how I understand the work I do with mothers in leadership.

I believe we all can have wings.

We all have a unique magic and beauty we can bring to the world. We can have a positive impact. Help create a more peaceful world.

We're already growing our wings through the incremental work we are doing: the boundaries we're setting, the help we're accepting, the space we're learning to take up.

William Bridges describes transitions as having three parts: endings, the neutral zone, and new beginnings. For mothers in leadership, life can feel like one ending after another, one new beginning after another. And in between, there are these periods of the neutral zone—that difficult, uncomfortable place where we don’t know what’s on the other side.

We keep going anyway. We shed another layer. We wake up a little different.

What I love about dragonfly metamorphosis is how iterative it is. How gradual. How you can’t point to the exact moment the wings appeared, because they were forming all along.

That, to me, is what it’s like to grow as a mother in leadership.

After hanging in my school office for six years, now my dragonfly hangs in my home office, still catching sun. Still looking different every time I glance up.

Still reminding me: Incremental change. Helpers everywhere. Wings coming.

🕊️

SAM