baby princess dragonfly

Story by kidzlitcobhouse
Illustration by Owl Poo



Jagoda and her granddaughter Tha lived in a town graced by rivers and valleys. It was winter and the town was hiding its sleepy face under a sparkly sheet of snow and glimmering sunlight.

Jagoda devoted much of her time to knitting hats and shawls in the solarium of her little warm bungalow and telling stories.

When Jagoda knitted for Tha and other children in the community, she used wool of purple and turquoise hues. Tha loved watching purple and turquoise hues blend into each other.

Jagoda weaved her life into stories just the way she weaved wool into scarves. Tha could sit for hours all absorbed in this beauty of her grandmother’s storytelling.

Tha’s interest in grandma’s stories was so intense that at bedtime, she would shake Jagoda from falling asleep so that stories could be told over and over again. “Grandma, continue…telling the story.” Jagoda would make an effort, but her voice would fast become a trickle ending in silence.

Grandma told a lot of stories about community potlucks and gifts everyone gave to each other so selflessly, and how this giving with open hands made people’s hearts brim with gentle joy. Grandma’s stories flowed like rivers of radiance. The rivers of radiance flowed straight into Tha’s soul and poured out through her solar plexus like sunrays in the colours of a rainbow.

Seeing her granddaughter’s eyes flooded with light, Jagoda would be very happy and her stories would become even more vibrant and life-giving.
One day, Jagoda asked Tha if she would help her poster around in their community. She showed Tha the poster which read

URANIUM
Anything But Clean and Green
Talk and Panel Discussion
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
6:15 PM
Main Library Auditorium

From grandma’s stories, Tha learned that postering meant putting flyers up on community information boards. Tha knew that flyer usually tried to inform people in the community about some important event.

After listening to so many exciting stories about community organizing, Tha was eager to come along and finally experience what grandma was so passionately talking about.

Seeing this eagerness, Jagoda, with a loving smile on her face, almost breathed her gratefulness into the girl, “I am so proud of you, Tha, for wanting to come along. You’ll see, it’s so much fun when you freely give of yourself to your community. This giving fills your soul with love and you start feeling like having the wings of a bird. I really want you to find out this feeling for yourself. It may be hard in the beginning, but, hard, you must try.”

“Oh, grandma,” Tha said, “I will do my best. Through your stories, I have learned to love this work for our community. I know how much you care about it. Please take me with you. Let’s go.”

After bundling up, Jagoda and her granddaughter bounced down the street and on from one street to the next in a large circle. Their eyes like shiny beads peered from under their fluffy turquoise scarves and purple hats.

They made many stops, pulling the poster out of the bag and the scotch tape from the pocket. Many times they had to repeat this, always taking off their gloves to tape the poster on a billboard. They were lucky because the day was sunny and mild even though there was a foot of snow on the streets. Their hands didn’t freeze.

That winter, temperatures were very unstable. Often it was as warm as it would be in late spring with a lot of bright sunshine and summer blue skies. Then the temperatures would drop so low that the skin on one’s face would start to crack if unprotected. All this change in temperature happened suddenly and without warning. The weather was very unpredictable and went to extremes.

After pulling the poster so many times out of the grandma’s bag, Tha saw word “nuclear” over and over again. She started wondering about the meaning of nuclear energy.

“Grandma, where does nuclear come from?”

“It comes from uranium mines,” said Jagoda. “People dig uranium out of the soil. It looks like yellow cake. Then it is refined into fuel which is burned in nuclear plants for electricity.”

“Why does the poster say that nuclear is anything but clean?” Tha asked and then saw a shudder ripple through her grandma’s body.

“Uranium is very radioactive, Jagoda said with outlandishly serious face. “Tiny amounts released in our environment contaminate air, water and land and make everything living sick with irreversible and wasting diseases.”

“What does it mean irreversible?” “What kind of diseases?” Tha spurted questions one after the other.

“Irreversible means that it cannot be repaired, healed or cleaned. Simply, you cannot do anything about it once it is released…. Diseases like cancer, terrible birth defects.

Hearing this, Tha felt as if her legs disappeared from under her. Light-headed and almost fainting, she clasped Jagoda’s arms.

Jagoda unbuttoned her coat and pressed Tha against the heat of her body.

“My baby love,” Jagoda whispered in Tha’s hair under her hat, “if the uranium mining goes ahead, our beautiful river will become irreversibly contaminated with radioactive polonium and radon. We drink water from this river. We bathe and shower with it. We cook with it. We are alive and healthy because of this river. Your great grandmother and her mother – our ancestors – they all lived because this river sustained their lives. If the river is polluted irreversibly, it will be you my baby love who won’t have life here any more. ” And so Jagoda broke down in tears. Her entire soul spilled out in frozen pearls.

The horror of the meaning of this nuclear energy grandma was talking about shot deep in Tha’s bones. She was only a girl, but her whole life was in danger of being sacrificed to uranium mining operation.

Tha took off her gloves and touched tears on her grandmother’s face. Looking in her eyes, she whispered, “Grandma, what uranium mining are you talking about?” You are saying there is uranium mining close by?”

Jagoda wiped off her tears, and with deeply etched frowns showing on her forehead she said, “One-hour-drive from where we are, a mining corporation with the help of our government is forcing its way into land and properties of people who don’t want it.

There is a blockade organized by people who have to put their bodies on the line in order to protect themselves and their environment.”

“But grandma, that’s very far away. How can pollution from so far away come to our river?”

“My Tha,” grandma was shaking her head while looking so gently at her granddaughter.
“Rivers are connected, water moves, and so does air. Air and water know no barriers to their movement. Our environment is a closed system. What we do in our environment touches everything in it in some way. That is why we have to be so, so very careful when doing anything on our beautiful earth.”

Looking deep in Tha’s dark green eyes brimming with tears, Jagoda continued, “Earth is like you Tha. It is alive, my baby love, it breathes, it flows, it moves. It is full of love, beauty, power and spirit. Mining land to extract coal, oil, uranium, gold and other things is against the Natural Law, against the Law of Creator.”

Jagoda and Tha were freezing by now and they decided to talk about uranium mining at home.

Tha pressed a wet kiss on her grandma’s cheek and pulled herself out of the hot cavern inside Jagoda’s coat. The wet kiss on Jagoda’s cheek froze and she had to wipe the ice off her face which was turning bluish.

They walked fast and the warmth started to circulate through their frozen limbs. They started to feel better.

They postered a lot so far but there was one more billboard grandma did not want to miss. It was the billboard in front of the library where the event was scheduled to take place.

When they approached this billboard, Tha saw a baby dragonfly pressed against its surface. “Look, grandma,” she shouted, pointing at the dragonfly with her little finger.

Jagoda was dumbfounded. “Dragonfly in the middle of the winter!?” she whispered in disbelief, “and you my girl saw it!?”

By the time Jagoda got a napkin out of her pocket to pick it up, the baby dragonfly was gone. Tha shouted to Jagoda, “Look, it fell down on the street.” Jagoda bent over and picked it up as gently as she possibly could. Looking at the dragonfly, they saw that its wings were so delicate and tiny that even the slightest touch could disturb them.

After safely placing the dragonfly in a pocket inside her bag, Jagoda taped the last poster, and then they rushed home.

Once they arrived home, Tha was shaking with chills. It was the first time for her to spend almost two and a half hours walking on the streets in the middle of the winter. It was different from playing in the snow, but no less fun. She took a shower. The hot water flushed the chills from under her skin and vigorous rubbing with the towel brought her blood back to boiling. Somehow, she felt stronger after doing this work of postering in the community with her grandmother. Looking herself in the mirror, she couldn’t but notice a sense of pride splashing in her eyes. Her heart was full of excitement and she felt very happy. She instinctively knew that she couldn’t let this mining corporation destroy the river of her life.

The smell of smoldering leaves of dried Silver Sage sprinkled with Cedar, Sweetgrass and Tobacco, brought Tha to solarium. Grandma was burning the holy herbs and sending her thanks to Creator for the baby dragonfly they found.

It was a matter of a split second to see the dragonfly, and Jagoda and Tha were there in that split second out of the whole time in the universe to meet the dragonfly. It was also a matter of season. People never see dragonflies in the winter. Finding the dragonfly in the middle of the winter within a split second before it was blown away was near impossible.

This utter impossibility gave that moment a meaning of deep significance. Receiving powerful signs from Creator meant giving back. Jagoda knew this. It was a powerful sign Tha saw. Jagoda gave thanks for it.

The smoldering holy smoke of the Sage purified their bungalow and Tha breathed it deep in her lungs. It mixed with the smell of grandma’s hot chilli soup and camomile tea. Everything was so warming and calming.

As they were sitting around the table in the solarium, they could see the sun setting in the sky. The splash of golden and orange colours made the sky appear as if on fire. Against the backdrop of burning skies, Tha could see so many little sparrows flitting around the neighbour’s birdfeeder, helping themselves to seeds. She could hear the flapping of their tiny wings and the exuberance of their special bird talk.

Solarium was Tha’s favourite spot in the bungalow. In the winter days in the solarium, it was the sunrise and sunset which made Tha awestruck with beauty of no compare. In the summer, solarium was a perfect place for star gazers. If anyone was a stargazer, Tha was. She went to sleep covered with the blanket of star light and moon shine, and woke up to the startling beauty of the sunrise. She felt as a baby in the cradle of the whole universe. Oh, how she felt cared for by the multitude of its beautiful beings.

Sunrise would usually lead her to the river. Learning from the birds, she voiced herself by singing, but her song would taper off very quickly. The gentle caress of sunshine on the ripples of the river braids was breathtaking. Suffused in this overwhelming beauty, she would feel her soul aligned with the whole cosmos. Being together with the river, the sun, birds, skies and trees and feeling as one with them in breathtaking moments was Tha’s davening; Tha’s prayer.

After the strenuous postering session with grandma, and as day gave way to night, Tha started to feel very exhausted. She wanted to slump in the bed, but grandma didn’t allow such behaviour. There was a BBB – bath, braid, bed - routine to go through.

After a bublicious bath, Tha called Jagoda to help her comb her hair. As grandma combed Tha’s wet hair and braided it, a question came to her mind and she interrupted the silence.

“How is it possible to see a dragonfly in the middle of the winter? Why is it so warm in January?

Exasperated... Tha swung her head yanking the braid out of grandma’s hands, and her look stung Jagoda’s eyes. In a tone of voice not so much pleasant to her grandma’s ears, Tha spewed both flood and fire from her little mouth:

“Why would you ask that grandma? Haven’t we spent nights on end talking about global warming and how the greenhouse effect of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) blocks the sunrays from reflecting back into the universe? As a result, the heat from the sun gets trapped inside earth and this causes its warming. The warming of the atmosphere due to CO2 emissions leads to unstable temperatures, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes . When ice melts in tundra and the Arctic, the plants and organisms in once frozen soil start to decompose and as a result a huge amount of methane, which is more dangerous than CO2, is released into the atmosphere. When ice melts, there is less surface to reflect the sun rays, so the heat gets absorbed into the water. As oceans warm up, their surface waters lose plankton which used to absorb CO2 from the air. Once this happens, oceans lose their capacity to absorb CO2 so more of it remains in the air. Changing water temperature also affects the climate on the land causing droughts or floods. I drew so many pictures about global warming, I am so sick of it. Why ask something you know I know?, Tha finally drew to a close with tears spurting from her lit-up eyes.

Jagoda sat patiently and waited for Tha’s venting to stop. Then she asked another question.

“Wouldn’t nuclear plants save us from global warming? We both see on TV nuclear advertised as clean, clear and green.”

“Well,” Tha said, “our poster said that nuclear is anything but clean and green. Right?”

Tha knew she was in for a session of consciousness raising, so she calmed down and adjusted her antennas for listening. It was a drag to listen to grandma’s questions now that she wanted to go to sleep. But if she opened her ears and cooperated, the session would be over in no time. So this is what she did.

Grandma repeated, “Nuclear is anything but clean and green. Yes, that’s what the poster said. But how is it so?

Tha remained silent.

“If nuclear is “clean,” then what is dirty?” Jagoda pressed with her question.

“Well, I know what’s dirty,” said Tha. Burning coal, oil and gas is dirty. Turning coal into liquid fuel for vehicles is very dirty. People dig coal, oil and gas from the earth and then burn it for electricity, heating and vehicles. Burning coal, gas and oil is dirty because it releases huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. You said that to avoid a total environmental catastrophe, people everywhere in the world have to immediately stop burning coal, oil and gas, and in the same time make a serious effort to conserve energy use and if they have to produce it, to use wind, solar, geothermal and wastegas power instead.”

With a twinkle in her eye, Jagoda listened to her granddaughter. Tha grasped the complexity of the dangers of global warming.

“I am so proud of you baby love. You’re only twelve years old and you know all this. You know most people in this society have no clue or at least turn the blind eye. I think you’re ready for the speaking tour. You will have to help people understand the serious danger we’re in. The whole earth is choking, and the governments of many countries are expanding their energy use and going ahead with the new coal-fired plants while not shutting down the old ones. You have to know that they are doing this because they don’t care about your life and the life of so many children around the world. Without environment there is no life on earth, and without life on earth, there is no economy. This is the crux of understanding what global warming is all about and what we should be doing, I mean stopping burning all the fossil fuels. But it is the opposite that’s happening. You see, when people go to work, a chunk of their salary goes into taxes, and pension plans. Governments and corporations use this money to build new coal-fired plants, natural gas plants and nuclear plants. This is done against people’s will because people would rather have solar, wind, geothermal and wastegas power. It is a very complicated system we live in. But complicated as it might seem, we have to get to the bottom of it and also hurry up because there is not much time left. But coming back to my question, Tha tell me how is nuclear different from coal? Is it cleaner and greener as it is advertised on TV?”

” Well you said today,” Tha remembered, “that nuclear comes from uranium which is radioactive and deadly in that sense.”

“That’s right!” Jagoda encouraged Tha, “but does it have anything to do with coal, or we can say that it simply stands on its own?”

Tha was silent, and Jagoda let this silence fill the room for some time. Thinking and reflection always required time. This time, however, Tha would fall asleep if the silence went on for more than a minute. Seeing her granddaughter’s eyes disappearing in the shrouds of a dreamy world, Jagoda decided to let her go to sleep. Going to bed with a question was not a bad thing. Maybe answer would come to Tha in her dreams.

Jagoda kissed Tha, and caressed her hair which was dry by now and totally dishevelled. As Tha’s soul was carried to the land of her sweet dreams, Jagoda was looking at her granddaughter’s absent-looking face and gently whispered calling her baby princess dragonfly.

In the morning, after her davening in the magic embrace of the river, Tha returned home only to see flipchart papers taped to kitchen walls and cupboards. They portrayed pictures of huge machines digging in mines and coal-fired plants next to the mines. There were also huge trucks and ships and a lot of black end-of-pipe smoke.

Jagoda pretended as if the flipcharts were not around. She was pouring tea and the sunny-side-up eggs she got from the small chicken coop in their backyard, were waiting on the kitchen table.

“Let’s have some breakfast, Tha, you must be starving. The work of postering and learning is not easy and requires good nutrition. Yeah, as you see, the nuclear chain consisting of mining, milling, refining, transporting and burning uranium, doesn’t operate on thin air. It consumes extreme amounts of energy. This energy usually comes from coal-fired plants. So you see the connection between coal and uranium. They support each other. It is a vicious circle which repeats itself until a climate catastrophe breaks it.”

Looking so solemnly tense and serious, Jagoda pronounced her concluding sentence, “And only those stupid enough would let that happen.”

“So,” Tha exclaimed in her eureka moment, “nuclear is twice as dirty as fossil fuels. It not only runs on fossil fuels producing huge amounts of CO2 emissions, but it is irreversibly radioactive.”

Jagoda didn’t have to say more. She acknowledged her granddaughter’s words by nodding and a gentle, encouraging smile on her face.

“I love you my baby princess dragonfly,” she said to Tha.

Tha suddenly became very quiet. The effect of being called baby princess dragonfly was very humbling, but her excitement showed in her red cheeks, wide smile and shiny eyes. She knew that receiving a name from the world of nature was a great privilege, but to be called baby princess dragonfly was beyond her expectations.

“Tha, I think you’re ready to talk about your concerns about uranium mining and global warming to the public. Your life depends on stopping fossil fuel burning and uranium mining. I have a list of our city councilors and government politicians at federal and provincial levels with their contact information. I want you to call them and tell them about your concerns. You can complement your phone calls with your letter, which we can mail to each one of them. If you want, you can start right away, because in the afternoon I am making a banner which we need for our vigils, and I need your help.”

This was a jaw-dropping moment for Baby Princess Dragonfly. Seeing this, Jagoda said that “we have to take our concerns to the street because if we ourselves don’t take care of the problem, no one else will.”

At first, it felt intimidating to a twelve-year-old Tha to call government politicians and lobby with them against fossil fuel burning and uranium mining, but this feeling disappeared under the burning urgency of saving her own life and her own future. She wanted to live where her ancestors lived. If uranium mining went ahead, and if fossil fuel burning was not stopped, her life would be in deadly danger. She picked up the phone and the roll call started. Very eloquently and with passion, Tha was learning to hold politicians accountable.

The next day, Tha experienced community organizing on yet another level. Together with their first-door neighbours, Tha and Jagoda stood on a very busy public square holding their banner with the following message: Stop Coal Burning. Stop Uranium Mining. Now! They handed flyers with core information on impending nuclear mining in the area and global warming, and a list of politicians to contact. This was called a vigil. Tha and Jagoda organized daily vigils throughout the city where they lived and people started paying attention. Vigils and actions expanded, and people started getting to know the issues and what danger they were in if fossil fuel burning and uranium mining was not stopped immediately.

Baby Princess Dragonfly and other children became their leaders! They talked to people with such pleading passion that no one could stay unmoved or undetermined in following through with that which became the most important task of all - saving the life on earth.

In fact, the task of actively creating conditions for survival for everyone was the most important of all. It was a struggle to survive against all the odds. This hope of surviving grew strong in people’s hearts and this showed in their determined actions.

The sun rose in the eyes of masses of people who started staunchly demanding immediate phase-out of fossil fuel burning and uranium mining.
They loved the energy which came from their local sun and wind, and which they could produce, own and monitor in their own homes and in their own communities.

Seeing all this gave Baby Princess Dragonfly a feeling that she together with other children may survive to live on Planet Earth.