Why RainbowSurfing? Dragonfly variations that interested me were all taken, and Rainbow Surfing just sort of popped into my mind.

Serendipitously, it works.

I've been thinking about dragonflies for over a year. In an Indian animal medicine book, I found out that dragonflies are messengers for those of us nurturing illusions that do us no good. The dragonfly was once Dragon and was fooled into giving up his power - so became dragonfly. I have a similar story. The lesson is that we have to confront our illusions about ourselves and others and take back our own power where we've been abused or fooled.

So I had this eureka moment when I looked up pics of rainbows and learned about Iris, the messenger for gods, goddesses, humans, and all other forms of life in old Greek mythology. Iris is a rainbow, represented as a winged woman in the picture I found. Of course, the rainbow reaches the earth from the heavens, and the old Greek mythology was that Iris therefore could bring messages back and forth between the gods and the people. Iris is winged like dragonfly, and the iridescent colors of the dragonfly recall the rainbow. Pictures of rainbows can be pretty corny, but I liked the one showing the water and the clouds - Iris's parents in the old stories.

And you Latin students may be saying, well Mercury/Hermes was the messenger, Dragonfly. Yes, that was the patriarchal rewriting of Ovid's old wisdom. Everyone powerful and heroic became male or separate from female origins (example, Minerva/Athena, who used to be born of a woman, suddenly was born from her father's skull as remedy for his headache, remained a virgin goddess rather than a fertility goddess). Mercury/Hermes came to replace Iris, but she is the messenger in stories by Ovid and Virgil, even in the Iliad, but gradually replaced as time passed with new writers rewriting the old stories so women wouldn't get any foolish ideas that they were important.

So what about surfing? Yeah, a little self-indulgent there, you might think. Actually, I don't know how to surf. It is one of my new year's resolutions. I can water-ski, but never had the guts to surf. Surfing is another link up to dragonfly - mediating air and water, a phenomenon seen throughout the life-cycle of the dragonfly (which is prolific in statistically significant measure in my home county versus elsewhere in the country).

What does rainbow surfing mean to you?