You are sitting at the edge of a pond on a warm August afternoon, watching the light move across the water, and one lands near you. Just for a moment. Those wings catching the sun at an angle that makes them look like stained glass, that long iridescent body holding impossibly still. You barely breathe. And then it is gone, back over the water, and you feel inexplicably lucky to have been in exactly that spot at exactly that moment. What you probably did not know is that the creature that just visited you spent years underwater before it ever learned it could fly.
The Dragonfly
Dragonflies are one of the most ancient insects on Earth, unchanged in their essential design for roughly 300 million years, and nearly every culture that has ever encountered them has understood them as symbols of transformation and change. It is not hard to see why once you know their story.
A dragonfly can spend anywhere from six months to five years of its life entirely underwater, breathing through gills, hunting prey, and molting up to seventeen times as it grows. The nymph looks almost nothing like the adult it will become. It crawls along the bottom of ponds and quiet streams, compact and wingless and entirely at home in the dark water. And then one day, when the conditions are exactly right, it climbs up the stem of a plant, breaks through the surface into open air, and splits itself open. The adult dragonfly pulls itself out of its own larval skin, pumps fluid into its crumpling wings, and waits for them to harden. The whole process takes hours. And then it flies.
Adult dragonflies typically live for only a few weeks to a couple of months. Everything that came before, all those years of patience in the water, all that growing and molting and hunting in the dark, leads to this brief and extraordinary time in the air. No wonder so many people across so many centuries looked at a dragonfly and thought: change. Transformation. The courage to become something completely different from what you were.
The Piece
Her name is Mira, from the Latin word for wonder and reflection, which felt exactly right for a dragonfly who carries a mirror at her heart.
At the center of this pendant a circle of vintage mirror is set inside a decorative sterling silver frame, catching the light and sending it back to you the way the surface of a still pond does on a calm afternoon. Tall cattails rise on either side, their dark oxidized stalks framing Mira's mirror like sentinels at the water's edge. Iris leaves curve outward from between them, and at the base of it all, resting on layered lily pads beside an open lotus flower, Mira perches with her veined wings spread and her slender legs exactly where they should be. Her wings are etched with that delicate network of cells that makes a real dragonfly wing look like something someone drew by hand. Someone did, in this case.
The pendant hangs on an 18 inch sterling silver loop chain, the bail formed from twisted wire loops at the top.
The Craftsmanship
- Pendant: approximately 2.5 inches tall by 1.5 inches wide
- Material: sterling silver throughout, oxidized
- Detail: vintage mirror set in decorative sterling frame
- Chain: 18 inch sterling silver loop chain
- Edition: one of a kind
One of a Kind
There is only one Mira in the world. This mirror, these cattails, this particular dragonfly resting on these particular lily pads: they exist once. When Mira finds her person she will never be made again exactly like this.
A Note from Tamara
I made this piece because I wanted to hold the feeling of a pond in August in my hands. That specific quality of light on still water, the cattails, the sense that something extraordinary might land near you at any moment if you sit quietly enough. The mirror felt right because a dragonfly's world is always half sky and half reflection, and I named her Mira because she does both of those things at once. She wonders and she reflects. I hope whoever wears her feels that same pull to sit still at the water's edge sometimes. The dragonflies will find you.
Shipping
Your dragonfly pendant, Mira, is finished, packaged safely, and will be on her way to you within 3 to 5 business days.