My Animal Totem Piece---Prelude to Announcing the Winner of the Challenge

[Cita]

Some of them chose me long ago, even as I recongized that shifts and changes would come, and so I examine the metaphors on a regular basis, find that the garden spider still weaves and spins for food and for love, exposing her creations to the dew and the sunlight, signing them with her own messy zigzag.

The bat still sleeps in the messy smother of community by day, flies and feeds, a misunderstood symbol of darkness, solitary and free in the night, and the beaver still builds patiently, doing the hard work, one hewn stick at a time, showing up at the dam every day, his work feeding him, his family, his community; just ask the muskrat swimming by.

And the hummer is still the most suprising nominee since I hate being tiny, but my respect for him has grown as I watch him throw the sun's rays back into the day, now transformed into fire, intriguingly fierce in all of his smallness, competative, territorial, dive bombing life in spite of his size.

Recently, though, two new totems appeared in my life, and I embrace the jellyfish as a necessary template for tranparency, resiliency, riding the waves and feasting on what she absorbs, being blessed with every ebb and flow of the tides.

I was going to add in the mythical winged dragon after a fire-breathing spell of PMS, but then I discovered the ugly mud bug that inhabits the primordial ooze, the smelly mud at the bottom of the water trough, the mud bug that molts and regrows his exoskeleton over and over, for up to five years, growing and hiding and cycling, until that perfect day when everything is right. 

On that day, he crawls up out of the ooze, crawls up into the sun, holds tight to the side of the trough or the fragile reed, splits himself open right down the center of his back, and emerges... emerges not, this time, as the same ol' mud dweller, but as a jewel-toned dragonfly--glorious in the light.

[Bill Floyd]

I love that the jellyfish made it in, but it sounds to me like the mud bug/dragonfly is most iridescently yours.

[Brittany]

We learn and become inspired by nature everyday. It has taught me how to cope. You have laid that out beautifully in 6 Cita.

[Jamie Hogan]

"...throws the suns rays back into the day..." is hereby appropriated by myself, to use at a time when I need to say something poetically brilliant.

[Gaylon W. Stamps]

No wonder I made no submission!  Cita... you da man!

[Teresa]

Love them all but the image of the mud bug to dragonfly is most profound.  I think you just won your own contest...;-)